(Contra-?)recommendations on consumer-grade NAS?

[David Mack]

I purchased a Buffalo Terastore for around $900 a while back but I
didn't read the details quite carefully enough. I assumed that NAS
implied NFS. Nope. Luckily, Frys cheerfully refunded my money.

Considering the plunge in disk prices, just as well. A few months
later I built a terabyte RAID5 array (including a cold spare disk) for
under $400 on a commodity PC running CentOS4.6. With Samba, I can use
this setup with either my Unix or Windows systems. Then disk prices
went down some more and I now back up not only the RAID array but a
collection of other storage areas on assorted Unix systems onto a 1TB
SATA disk in a separate machine.

If you want an appliance type NAS system that does NFS, make sure that
they advertise that feature.

Dave

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 9:14 AM, David Wolfskill <david at catwhisker.org> wrote:
> While I expect that if I really wanted to go through the hassle, I could
> build a machine & load it up with (e.g.) FreeNAS, it would be rather a
> chore -- and should the slightest thing be perceived ass being not quite
> right, I'd need to deal wwith it directly.
>
> Since one of the consumers of the storage would likely be my spouse,
> and she'd want to access said storage from the machines she uses --
> which include those of the Microsoft persuasion -- I'd need to try to
> figure out how to tell if a machine running Microsoft stuff is working
> or not.  And I reallly don't even want to think about that.
>
> So I'm thinnking that a consumer-grade, off-thhe-shelf "small" NAS might
> be a good way to go.
>
> Any suggestions or recommendations on vendors or products to choose --
> or avoid?
>
> I expect (& assume(!)) that they generally have some approach for
> allowing Microsoft-based things to use their storage.  But I'd also want
> to access said storage from more normal machines (e.g., running
> FreeBSD).
>
> At the moment, the main NFS server at home is a SPARCstation 5/170
> running Solaris 2.6; while it does the job, the 10Mb/s NIC is a tad
> limiting.
>
> And I'm possessed of the belief that these consumer-grade NAS boxen can
> be configured to allow for mirrored, hot-swaappable drives, which would
> increase peace of mind a bit.
>
> Comments?
>
> Thanks!  I'll summarize if there's interest & something worth
> summarizing.
>
> Peace,
> david
> --
> David H. Wolfskill                              david at catwhisker.org
> Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.
>
> See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
>