[wplug] NAS Appliance recommendations

[Andrew Fisk]

Have to throw in my experience with drobo tech support -- brand new unit
with one DOA hard drive -- all purchased from drobo -- the response from
the admittedly live and script-less tech was "contact Western Digital".
While I am sure that the failed drive was WD problem, I am not sure that
was dazzling customer service.

Andy


On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 11:54 -0400, Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> So, there are lots of very nerdy solutions to the problem.  You can
> build your own Linux box and install software raid on it -- it will
> give you pretty good performance and reliability from this solution,
> at the expense of your own time to keep it running.  I've done this in
> the past and it's worked pretty well, but when a problem pops up,
> you'll have to sink some time fixing it.  The same can be said of Sun
> and ZFS.  Short of a hardware RAID card, this is going to be your best
> performance.  There are even many situations when this will smoke a
> hardware RAID, particularly if your machine is lightly loaded.
> 
> There are various other machines out there, NetApp has some nice
> little boxes that work as an independent solution.  They typically
> cost a couple of hundred bucks and provide true NAS functionality.
> The software is generally okay on these.  Performance will be limited
> by network speeds.
> 
> Another solution you may want to check out is Unraid.  It's an OS you
> put onto a USB key that provides all the tools to manage a system as a
> NAS.  If you're using a machine as just a file server, this is
> probably preferable to the first option and is probably worth the $69
> so you don't have to screw around with stuff.
> 
> I've tried most of these solutions, and they all suck in one way or
> another.  In fact, any solution you get is going to suck in some way,
> so don't think there is a magic bullet here.  In my case I looked at
> how much my time was worth vs problems with systems and chose to buy a
> drobo.  I bought mine last year when they were rather expensive, about
> $450.  Right now you can pick up a 2nd gen drobo from NewEgg for $300
> after rebate.
> 
> Briefly, a drobo is a 4 drive USB/Firewire attached storage array that
> works on Windows (NTFS), Mac (HFS+), or Linux.  It provides Raid-5
> like rendundancy (or Raid6 like if you splurge $1200 for the 8 drive
> DroboPro that also features iSCSI).  Setup for a Drobo is trivial.
> Unpack, pop in two drives of any size, and format it.  From then on
> out, you're free to pop in drives to expand as necessary.  The
> filesystem will automatically expand (although unless you tell it
> otherwise it will be broken into 2TB volumes).  A set of blue lights
> at the bottom give you a gauge of how much space is used on the
> device.  When you need to add a new drive a light will show which
> drive bay to drop a new drive into or replace with a bigger drive.
> When a drive dies, a red list pops up next to the drive that is dead.
> Throw that drive away, plug in a new drive, and you're in business.
> The best thing is that the drives don't need to be the same size.
> This is great when you're replacing a drive that's a couple of years
> old and you can't rationalize paying $60 for the same model 320GB
> drive when you can pick up a 1TB drive for $80.
> 
> The great thing is that the raid management operations are entirely
> seamless.  Folks who have seen my drobo have probably seen me start
> streaming an HDTV program off the drobo, then pull a hard drive and
> have it never miss a beat.  Drop the hard drive back in, it replicates
> data and you'll never notice it.  It's as close to 0 administration
> you can get, and for me that was worth it.
> 
> Of course, Drobos ain't all bunnies and roses.  First, if you want to
> make them a NAS, you need to spend $190 for the droboshare, or just
> plug them into a linux machine.  Secondly, they can be rather slow.
> On USB I get about 25MB/s writes and 35MB/s reads.  On Firewire 800 I
> get about 45MB/s writes and 50MB/s reads.  Not horrible, but it's
> nothing like an internal drive.
> 
> Their hardware can sometimes be a little flaky, but their customer
> service is AMAZING. Real people who speak English and don't work off a
> script.  Wow. My first unit had a bad fan, so they cross shipped me a
> new one.  That unit started to develop hiccups during writes (it would
> stop writing for a few seconds every now and then).  A quick phone
> call and they cross shipped me a new unit.  Wonderful support.
> 
> I can't recommend the Drobo enough to folks and if you're just using
> it for a local backup it's a great solution.  However, remember that
> RAID != Backup.  You may want to look into an offsite solution for
> true backup.  For example, I use JungleDisk for automatic backups of
> important stuff.  Of course, I'm not backing up terrabytes of data,
> but it's only about $5/mo for the 30GB of data I've got backed up
> remotely. 
> 
> --Patrick
> 
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:19 AM, G.Pitman <gpitman at gmail.com> wrote:
>         Hi,
>         I am shopping for a small NAS appliance and would like some
>         recommendations.
>         This is for a small business that does not want to spend much
>         money but would be interested in something a little better
>         than a two disk usb attached enclosure running raid 1. 
>         Ideally I would like to find something that would hold four 1
>         TB drives and not be software raid.
>         
>         This would be attached to a linux server and be used mostly
>         for email svn repo backup.
>         
>         The more I read reviews about these devices the more they
>         scare me. If anyone knows of a trustworthy device I would like
>         to know.
>         
>         Thanks, in advance,
>         
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> 
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