Halp NAS Help

OzSTEEZ

¡ɟɟo ʞɔnɟ ʇunɔ 'ᴉO
Nov 11, 2008
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So I'm looking at purchasing a NAS for the home. I don't really have any idea when it comes to home NAS solutions, but I do know a few things I would like:

Redundancy - Obviously 2 drives with some sort of raid setup.
2Tb Minimum - Anything more probably wont get used.

I am assuming all you IT buffs know much more than I do about these NAS setups and could point me towards the best bang for my buck.

Cheers fellas.
 
so far every 2tb drive my roommate and I have had had experience with has taken a massive shit :confused: maybe we angered the gods and man was simply not meant to have that much porn per platter :iono:
 
But the network is complicated as fuck!!! Do you remember him explaining it to you after drinking a bunch? :lol:

Nah, it's not that complicated. It's just the fact that he's pigeon-holed pieces of it all over your house that boggles the mind. :lol:
 
WHS

Either build your own, or buy a new or refurbed HP Mediasmart server.

This. And build your own, as its obviously cheaper. Windows Home Server doesn't need that beefy of a machine. It's likely you have good enough parts laying around.

edit: But the Mediasmart sure is pretty.
 
Windows Home Server huh?

hmmmmmm.. A guy at work used to rave about this thing.. I'll give it a look..

Is it possible for me to setup a network restore?
 
Does WHS do RAID or only JBOD?

I would recommend Drobo FS, personally. 5 drive capacity, you can mix and match whatever number or size of drive you want. If one does die (which is unlikely as there is a powerful fan on the enclosure and the drives go into standby when not in use saving power, and you can get slower speed drives because the performance hit is negligible) Drobo will tell you and you just take it out and put in a new one. Nothing else to do, no array remapping, no initialization, nothing. There are no carriers or cartridges to worry about, either. Gigabit backplane, and the embedded OS of the device lets you install custom apps on it, like an FTP service or torrent service if you would rather.

Or you could always build one from the ground up using freeNAS. If you do that please let me know how that goes because I was thinking about doing that myself.
 
You did not just recommend the worst model hard drive in the history of the planet as the hard drives he should use did you? This is the same IBM Desktar line that had an 85%+ fail rate.

This two rev later model has been flawless for us for a while now. We have 2 or 3 of these drives and nothing is wrong with them. They aren't the same design as IBM, just similar. New platter design, new mechanics, new software.
 
Redundancy like you described up there Dave, is an absolute must.

I was thinking something like two 1TB drives on RAID 1.

I have no preference over the software as I know next to nothing about NAS software..
 
I'll take your word on that, but not willing to gamble for myself. Espescially not for a storage unit.

In a redundant system like a drobo, it almost doesn't matter. Like I said, the drives will last longer than usual because they shut down to standby quicker and more often as well as been well cooled. Even if you have unreliable drives, they will still perform adequately. I guess you could spend $20 more or so and get a Samsung drive that will be just as good.
 
Windows Home Server huh?

hmmmmmm.. A guy at work used to rave about this thing.. I'll give it a look..

Is it possible for me to setup a network restore?

In addition to being a NAS, it will also backup your computers nightly and allow you to do a bare metal restore. :cool:

Does WHS do RAID or only JBOD?
Its JBOD with "granual mirroring". Basically, you can tell WHS to store all data in a particular share on more than one physical disk.
Netapp makes some nice stuff.

:lol: Yeah, look into NetApp.

edit: And yeah, the Deskstar no longer equals Deathstar