Tech: NAS Drives

Subject: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 07:18 AM

I tried doing a filter on this to see if there were any other threads but it pulled back everything NASty! Can we put spaces in our searches? Anyway, back to the point...

My Raidon SL-3620 2 SATA bay NAS has died on me. Thye reckon it was probably a duff firmware download and, without returning it for repair, it seems pretty terminal. No-one will accept it for return because it is out of warranty:-(

So, I have decided to get another. I have 2 x 1Tb SATA disks so I just want a 2 or 4 drive bay with a RAID controller and a 1Gb ethernet connection. It needs to support all the usual protocols and it would be nice, though not essential, to have a BitTorrent client.

Anyone got any recommendations. NetGear looks good at the moment.

Cheers

DeG

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 10:29 AM

No-one yet? This is not like the 'cat!

D.

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: gnomad
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 11:38 AM

Plenty of possibilities here and these folks often have such things also. If you like Amazon (I know some people see them as the arm of Satan) they have numerous possibilities.

I have no experience of buying NAS stuff, but kept the references from earlier investigations into maybe going that way. During my reading I am pretty sure that Netgear had good press with one proviso: that the internal software was all proprietary, working like raid, but not compatible. I don't really recall the details, but do remember that I was slightly shy of getting tied to that product. I expect you will find what I was reading if you do a bit of searching on line.

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Bernard
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 03:05 PM

I'd recommend staying away from NetGear, to be honest... very quirky. I've some SC101 units, and find them reliable enough... but if a drive fails you've literally got to start from scratch... a broken mirror won't rebuild, and the drives don't hot swap. They use a weird file system called 'Z-San' which isn't compatible with... anything!

Try the LG-N2R1D (from Scan in Horwich) - it includes a CDRom and USB, and the SATA HDDs are hot swappable... come and look at mine first, if you prefer.

There are two SATA bays, each will take up to 1Tb, and there are a few RAID choices.

There is another version with Blu-Ray instead of DVD, slightly more expensive.

Excellent build quality, and FTP access is also possible, though I haven't bothered yet.

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 03:10 PM

Hi, Dave - you can filter for nas d or NAS D, but this appears to be the only thread on NAS Drives. And I have to admit I don't know what a NAS Drive is.

-Joe, acronymically challenged-

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Bernard
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 03:36 PM

Network Attached Storage, Joe... an external hard drive array that connects via your network instead of via USB (but some will do both).

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Mar 10 - 05:29 PM

Oh, OK, then I knew what the article was, just not the acronym. I swore off acronyms when I left the U.S. Army....

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Bernard
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 07:35 AM

Been trying to give them up myself!! LOL!
(Oops, there's another!)

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 12:48 PM

Just got an Edimax NS2502 - Seems to do all I want and more besides - It also acts as a media and iTunes server:-) The setup was a doddle. I am just formating it in Raid 0 - Don't need resiliance as I am only going to use it for backups of other PCs on the network. I will start to use it as a Torrent and Media server bu everyone will nee dto know if it is just on the NAS drive it could be vunerable.

Thanks for the advice and I will keep you posted.

In the meanwhile I can say steer clear of Raidon or anyone else's badged SL3620. Pain in the bum to use and if it goes pear shaped there is no-one to support it in the UK:-(

Cheers

DeG

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 02:38 PM

I wasn't really considering buying one, but I read some reviews at the place where I buy a fair number of my computer parts these days, NewEgg.com. Lots of customer reviews and you can search them.

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 06 Mar 10 - 06:41 PM

Actualy - may leave it as 2 disks. Still out for consideration...

D.

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Bernard
Date: 07 Mar 10 - 06:39 AM

That's about the only good thing about the Netgear SC101 - you can set them up so that it appears as if you've just the one drive with the combined capacity of all the drives, so if you've three SC101s with a motly collection of six different sized drives, you can use them as one big drive... can't say I fancy it, though!

I've got five of them, each with a pair of matched drives set as mirrors. It gives me some redundancy, and I've not really had much bother with them... except when I thought a pair of drives were suspect, changed them only to have the replacements appear to fail a little later. The SC101 was sill under warranty, so Netgear very kindly sent me a replacement on the understanding that I'd send the faulty one back, which is very unusual these days. Problem solved!

The real pain, though, is the daft file system they use. If an SC101 fails there's no way of reading the drives unless you have a spare unit... which is why I ended up with five of them!

Even sillier, each phyisical drive has its own IP address, and each partition also has its own IP address... so the five units I have use up 20 IP addresses to function! If each phyisical drive had two partitions, that would need 30 IP addresses!

At least the LG device uses NTFS!

Just a thought... an old PC can be set up using FreeNAS, which is a LINUX-based application. You set the PC to boot from a USB fob during set-up, and then you're able to set up as many hard drives as the motherboard can support as a NAS array. I've been threatening to give it a go, but never seem to find the time!

Subject: RE: Tech: NAS Drives
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 07 Mar 10 - 07:05 AM

n old PC can be set up using FreeNAS, which is a LINUX-based application

If you are using a PC as a NAS server why not just install Linux anyway? Set up NFS or SAMBA shares and Bob's yer aunty! I did not want to use a PC though anyway coz a nice little NAS drive sits on the hall table near the router with no monitor, keyboard or mouse:-)

Thanks ayway.

Cheers

Dave