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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>--Patrick<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:19 AM, G.Pitman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gpitman@gmail.com">gpitman@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi,<br>I am shopping for a small NAS appliance and would like some recommendations.<br>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. <br>
Ideally I would like to find something that would hold four 1 TB drives and not be software raid.<br><br>This would be attached to a linux server and be used mostly for email svn repo backup.<br clear="all"><br>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.<br>
<br>Thanks, in advance,<br>
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