Thread: NAS recommendation for Mac & PC household

I have a $80- NAS box I purchased about 8 years ago, works across the board on the MAcs (4 gens), windows (XP to 8) & linux. From MSY computers (Auburn Sydney but have online sales), they are cheaper now, support larger sizes and can store multiple drives.

I'll see how long this stays here since my last post about not being happy with something disappeared in an hour.

How geeky are you?

The reason I ask is I've been down this road. Twice. Episode one was about "convenience" at the time, episode two was entirely about control.

The first time I was using a Netgear Readynas. I've always had a good run from Netgear networking hardware, so I did my research and at the time the Readynas line was well written up. In many cases it still is, but only by people wanting a plug-and-play solution. Mine was in RAID 1 configuration with two 1Tb drives. To cut a long story short I had a terrible experience with it because of the way it's designed. They use an unusual ext3 file system and while they have ROM with core operating system on-board, they unfold the greater OS onto "new" drives installed in the machine before making them available to an array. Why is this a problem? I had one of the Seagate 7200.11 firmware failures a couple of years back and the drive "bricked". It was still mechanically operational but completely offline as a drive. The Readynas responded by deciding that the other redundant drive was not satisfactory for some reason (even though it was sync'd properly) considered it a "new" drive and began to erase the data! Because it has no accessible interface beyond blinking lights during startup (once online you have a browser based interface) the only reason I twigged was that it suddenly went offline and the blinking lights told me that a drive was dead while it the fan was going flat out. I'd tested this thing before hand to see what happens when a drive is pulled and it just kept on trucking. This time it was furiously going about doing something with the other drive. I considered my options for a few seconds and pulled the power cord after pressing the shutdown button did nothing. I managed to recover most of the data on that drive but only using a third party drive recovery package called RStudio that could read the ext3 file system. Sure enough, the drive was partly erased.

For what it was supposed to offer, that device was appallingly poor in its design. Critically, the drives cannot be inserted and into anything other than another Readynas and read without major downtime. I had one other system implosion when there was a hardware error with the NAS and it attempted to do the same thing. That one was RMA'd without my disks. Sure enough when I checked with RStudio it had started trashing a drive.
As soon as you suspect something is wrong, the last thing you want to do is entrust a drive to a machine that has its own agenda and works in seclusion!

Understanding the shortcoming of anything that has the OS residing on a data drive, I got geeky and built a test NAS using an old Pentium 4 PC box and an open source solution called Freenas. In short it has been brilliant. Setup time is longer, but it is super stable and highly configurable. Most importantly the OS lives on a CD, config lives on a USB stick, and it does absolutely NOTHING unless it is told clearly to do something. It supports most of the various RAID array configurations and networks very nicely with Macs and PCs. Having satisfied myself that it did what it was supposed to over a lengthy period I bought a dedicated HP N40L Proliant Microserver box to run Freenas. It has 4 non hot-swappable cradles and a small footprint in the office. I can take the drives and insert them into nearly any PC box, boot Freenas from the CD and work with the drives.

Cost for the HP N40L is well under $300 and you then choose your drives to suit requirements. You'll end up with a robust 1Tb RAID 1 array for less than $500. If you don't want RAID 1 then you'll end up with 2Tb of RAID 0 (also known as JBOD - just a bunch of drives) for the same price.

There's no free lunch with any of the solutions available, but I will never touch a Mickey Mouse NAS device again. Synology products are much better - all they build are NAS devices - but I like having total control over what happens to my data.

QNAP's are the best we use. There are some real dogs out there.

Thanks for the replies. I'm learning a lot about options that are out there. Its very tempting to start looking at features way beyond what I was originally looking for which was wireless backup and storage, e.g. personal cloud. I have to keep forcing myself to compare it to a WD passport 3gb usb 3 external drive for $120.

Three attractive options are:

1. Synology DS112j for $165 (review here Synology Diskstation DS112j NAS server review! | System-log.com ) - probably more than adequate for up to 5 years.
2. Synology DS112 for $217 - faster cpu and usb 3 seem to be the advantages;
3 QNAP TS-119P II for $237 - fastest cpu and more ports (review here QNAP TurboNAS TS-119P II NAS Server)

Each of the above fitted with a WD 2tb Red NAS HDD for $149.

I would certainly recomend the QNAP NAS, i've had the 209 pro2 at home for about 3 years, hasnt missed a beat. Can be used for a itunes server, ftp server, web server, and ofcourse storage, MAC and windows clients no worries, runs raid1. Can also run DHCP if needed. All in all great little unit.

I have a Linksys Cisco NMH500 MediaHub connected to my router. It used to work with Win XP but I can't get it to work properly with Win 7. My PC running Win 7 can never find it, my XP machines can. I've never tried connecting my wife's Macbook to it.

One of the issues with RAID (as mentioned in the third post) is that there's software (as discussed) and hardware. Software as mentioned is installed into each drive and if you have a O/S failure you'll need exactly the same drive, with hardware revisions and it's software plus the RAID software installed into exactly the same index.

Hardware requires a dedicated slot in a machine to run off (as discussed later in post 3) and you can swap out drives a lot easier but still need to be very similar if not exactly the same (depending on manufacturer) .

I had a rack filled with assorted drives (makes, sizes etc) and had a small P2 running PCI expansion card to run extra RAID cards. The primary cards were run off software (so the total capacity from each of the 3 sub cards was seen as single drive in JBOD) and each card was run in RAID 4 so there was the ability to recreate from bit level parity.

Then big drives got cheap.

I've been using a Buffalo Linkstation Quad for the past year, with 4x 2TB hdd in RAID5. For the price, it performs really well!
Buffalo LinkStation Quad NAS server | ht.com.au