Best NAS solution for home network?

Question

I would like to put together a redundant NAS solution for my home network. With the 400gb drives going for $99 it looks like a no-brainer.

The Netgear SC101 looks like a nice solution, but it only has a two drive capacity. At 400gb x 2 this would only give me 400gb capacity on a mirrored configuration. The SC101 is $79 at frys, so the whole solution would be $280. The only downside is that I would probably run out of capacity in the near future as I already have around 300gb of data.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive solution similar to the SC101 that allows for 3-4 drives?

The other thing I could do is use a an older P4 machine I have and add 4 PATA drives to run a linux NAS type box. I've been a unix user for over 10 years, though not as much as I used to, so configuring, etc. isn't a problem. Does anyone know if the software raid in linux is reliable? The only downside to this would be the size of the device, ease of administration, etc.

Answer 1

I've been down this path a couple of times.

And I keep finding there are 3 types of solutions.

There are cheapo, limited-functionality, lousy-performance, cheeseball-software solutions like the Netgear SC101 (check out the reviews if you don't believe me). I tried something similar a couple of years ago, and it couldn't even reliably support one MP3 stream.

There are decent, moderately priced pre-packaged solutions, like the Infrant ReadyNas NV+ (about $600 plus drives).

And then there is the most flexible, best performance solution, like what you're describing (and what I did, since I had an old P3 machine around, perfectly adequate for a Linux-based file server). Yes, Linux software RAID works great, and yes it's a pain in the butt to initially set up (mostly Samba), but then it's no big deal over time.

Now if you're using a P4 machine, and you're going to be leaving the machine on all the time, don't ignore the cost of electricity. That P4 system would probably use $100 in electricity more than the ReadyNAS per year. You're also going to wind up throwing some extra dollars into that machine, at minimum a RAID controller. And of course it's louder because of all that power and heat. I wound up spending an extra $100 on noise-quieting supplies.

For you, I'd recommend the SATA-based ReadyNAS NV+. Your solution cost will be around $1000 for 1.2TB (3+1), which should last a while. ;-)

Answer 2

Going with FreeNAS is a great solution, but only if you have a low-noise, energy efficient PC. These days, that's not hard to find. There are lots of choices. One other thing to keep in mind, though, is that you still need to backup your NAS off-site somewhere if you truly want to protect your data.

Another solution is a cheap, single drive NAS like this and connect an external USB Drive to it.

Answer 3

Take your old machine (or even one older than that)
Add FreeNas and as many drives as you like.

http://hardware.newsforge.com/hardware/06/05/19/1349206.shtml?tid=69

You can download it for free http://freenas.org
only needs 32 megs of memory, you can even set it up on a memory card if you want.

its a great review for FreeNas I set one up on an old PIII 600 and it works great.