How many of you use NAS?

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Coldblackice

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How many (home users) use NAS? What's your NAS system/setup?

I'm in need of some more storage space, but with 5 drives already packed into my desktop, I'm wondering if I should be making the jump to a nice, fatty NAS. I'm curious how many of you use them, what model/type, and if you don't mind mentioning, what it cost.

I'm not too keen to build a dedicated machine solely to NAS, but at the same time, I'm a bit aghast to see "home"-use all-in-one NAS rigs going for $500+. Seems awful hefty, given that it seems to be the equivalent of a Rasperry Pi keeping an eye on a couple hard drives. But I wager I'm missing some key information on expensive features in this regard.



EDIT:

Good grief, I can't understand why pre-built NAS setups cost so much?! (...and without drives!)

I mean, if you can get a 3TB external for <$80, isn't a NAS essentially just "stacking" another drive on top of that like you could do with RAM modules, and then slapping a NIC and a bit of Linux into it?

Sheesh, if you're gonna be spending $500+ on a NAS rig, you might as well throw a video card into it and make it an all-around system for general use. Otherwise, it seems to be the equivalent of buying a $15,000 car from a dealership merely for its radio.

What's the hype about them? Why not just share dedicated drives from your desktop over the network and dedicate a NIC or two to them?
 
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I have two personally, and many at work. I build them all in general. A raspberry pi would have very limited function, though power efficient.

If you have any parts on the shelf, even a pentium III can act as a NAS, assuming you can get SATA ports to it.

There are lots of cheapo motherboards/cpu combo's that work as well.

I priced out something the other day in this post for $350 which gets you to 8 ports / bays to start with (though sans power supply). Cutting the 4-in-3 and adding this guy keeps you below $375
 
I use a custom built one. 6 drives setup in Z2 via ZFS running FreeNAS.

Here is the part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1qsmu

If I knew what I know now back then... I would've gone with an ECC setup and likely would've gotten a xeon cpu etc.

I have 7.1 TB of usable space.

It is used as a sabnzbd, plex, couchpotato, sickbeard setup. I also store backups of phone, router, laptop and main computer.
 
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NAS'es aren't for everyone, most people just fill up their main PC with as many drives as they can fit before starting to think about a NAS.

If you want a plug and play solution you can get a QNAP or Synology for $200-1200 depending on what features you want. What you are paying for is primarily their easy to use and powerful software.

You can homebrew also, a simple setup would be $60 case, $80 MB, $115 Proc, $80 RAM, $140 PSU, $90 m1015 HBA, and however many drives you want, you could fit maybe 6-7 in a medium sized case.

Drives are definitely the most expensive part of the equation, 4TB drives are $150 each.

For software, FreeNAS is easy to use and runs on a USB stick, if you want more powerful you can go with some Variant of Solaris, or if you want something different yet simple to use and then Linux



Most people in this forum are rocking hardcore 10+ drive NAS'es costing $1000s of dollars.

Personally I have a Norco 4220 with 20 - 3TB drives and a backup system of 14 mixed drives making 28 raw TB.
 
I have too many but I love them all:

Synology 2413+ - 12x3TB
Synology DS4113j - 4x2TB
Qnap 639 - 6x2TB
Thecus N4100 Pro - 4x2TB
ReadyNas 4x1TB
 
My current NAS cost me ~$300-350 + drives - Supermicro Atom motherboard, Seasonic PSU and an old Silverstone case I had spare.

I'm in the process of building a replacement because I need more storage and processing power though:
Supermicro X10-SL7-F motherboard
Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3 CPU
4 x 8GB Kingston Unbuffered ECC RAM
IBM M1015 SAS HBAs
Supermicro Gold or Platinum PSU (still deciding on that)
Norco RPC-4220 chassis
Then add drives as I need/can afford them

A quick guess in my head says around $1400 before the hard drives.

If you only use one computer or otherwise don't need it to be accessible from various devices without having to power up your desktop a NAS probably wouldn't make much sense though.
 
I went on the cheap side as I already had the PSU and a case I could use so all I need was MB, CPU, and RAM. I chose one of the AMD Fusion APUs and slapped 8gb of ram into it. It supports 6 SATA6 ports and I run FreeNAS from a thumb drive. I'm not quite one of the true hardcore users as mine is really just my media server and since I haven't gotten into Blu-ray yet I don't need tremendous space.
 
staticlag said:
NAS'es aren't for everyone, most people just fill up their main PC with as many drives as they can fit before starting to think about a NAS.

If you want a plug and play solution you can get a QNAP or Synology for $200-1200 depending on what features you want. What you are paying for is primarily their easy to use and powerful software.

You can homebrew also, a simple setup would be $60 case, $80 MB, $115 Proc, $80 RAM, $140 PSU, $90 m1015 HBA, and however many drives you want, you could fit maybe 6-7 in a medium sized case.

Drives are definitely the most expensive part of the equation, 4TB drives are $150 each.

For software, FreeNAS is easy to use and runs on a USB stick, if you want more powerful you can go with some Variant of Solaris, or if you want something different yet simple to use and then Linux



Most people in this forum are rocking hardcore 10+ drive NAS'es costing $1000s of dollars.

Personally I have a Norco 4220 with 20 - 3TB drives and a backup system of 14 mixed drives making 28 raw TB.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the info everyone.

But sheesh -- what's all the hype over them (in general; not speaking of [H])? Why not just share your desktop's drives over the network, and maybe even dedicate a NIC/SATA card to them for speed?

And if it's because it's a matter of needing more beyond that point -- it sure seems like a hefty price to pay for a mere option of extending storage, drives not included (speaking of pre-built NAS). For those prices (pre-built), why wouldn't you just throw a video card into it and make it an all-around second rig?

Given the little I know, it seems like an awful waste of money for some smart storage expandability -- like buying a brand new car just so you can have a radio to use in your garage.
 
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Several things to consider:

1) the ready made NAS'es are extremely low power, they might use 13-20w.
2) ready made NAS'es interface directly with most IP security cameras, making them plug and play for home security recording and monitoring via the internet without another PC
3) ready made NAS can accept more drives via USB 3.0 and esata so limited expandability is an option
4) they are typically small and quiet


I wouldn't think of it as paying for a car to get the stereo.

It's more like going to a nice steakhouse. Sure prime meat is like $10-20 lb raw at a store, but order a 12oz ribeye and you are looking at $35 a la carte.

Sure you can spend $12 and buy the steak yourself and cook it to be equally as excellent as a nice restaurant.


Or a bar, where if you want bottle service you are looking at paying $90 minimum for a crappy bottle of smirnoff.


If you have the computer skills to make and troubleshoot your own NAS then certainly it makes little sense to buy one. But the same could be said for anything. I could make my own clothes, or do my own plumbing, or electricity, or fix my own car. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, do I just want to sit and eat the steak? Or do I want to spend 3 hours sourcing the meat and cooking it?
 
I have a QNAP TS-859 PRO,

But I hate it. It's slow, write usually peaks at 50-60MB/s with RAID 6. On the other hand If you get a cheap desktop computer with a raid card, the bottleneck instantly becomes the GB LAN. The only advantages of a dedicated NAS is the lower power consumption, but it will take 10 years to make up for it's price just based on that. And the out of the box features like mediaserver, ftp, www server, etc.
 
Another homebuilt "NAS" here. I call it "fileserver" as that's what it started out as. Running linux with two RAID-Z arrays via Zfs on Linux.

It still primarily does NAS duties but it's got enough memory (8gig, running my former desktop board now) to do plenty of other things. (webserver, minecraft server, VMs once in a great while)
 
Synology DS212j, running 2x750gb drives with a 1TB drive attached by USB for backups.

I haven't actually bought new drives for this thing yet. When I bought it, I didn't have enough money for drive so I put a pair of 160gb drives in it just to get it up and running. Then I was given a pair of 750gb drives for free, and that is holding me over for the time being.
 
I mainly use a seperate system for a nas/iscsi host so that I can powercycle my system, doing testing and development without taking everything offline.

It is nice to have that very stable system hosting your files, and not interrupting it with random things you do on your main system.
 
Always available

Low power consumption

FTP, Web Pub, ip camera server and whatever other feature they decide to throw in.
 
I use a Synology DS1812+ NAS. Easy to setup and reliability.

One of the best feature is ability to view photo, play music and video from android and apple product.

8 x 2 TB HD
 
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My personal docs get backed up to a virtualized linux box that runs on my esxi server. Those docs plus the server backups get backed up to a pogoplug that has a usb drive attached. Not the fastest thing in the world, but gets the job done. Finishing up a new n54l with zfs (omni-os), that will be the primary backup. More space, speed, protection etc.
 
I currently run a WAMP and mail server together with a mdadm RAID NAS.

As soon as Asrock releases a new 12 sata port motherboard, I'm building a new NAS/SAN with omnios and nappit. Can't wait to get ZFS at my home as well. I'm already using it at work(all in one esxi box) and just love it!

Matej
 
yea I have a Netgear ReadyNAS duo v2. Gigabit lan? Don't make me laugh. 20MB/s MAX.... x-raid..jesus fuck. Recently though you have the option of RAID 1,Slow GUI, and whatnot..don't waste money on that shit.
 
NAS/ESX all in one 9 seagate 3TB drives in raid Z2 Config, One hot spare, 32GB of ram (16 for NAS).
 
Good grief, I can't understand why pre-built NAS setups cost so much?! (...and without drives!)

I mean, if you can get a 3TB external for <$80, isn't a NAS essentially just "stacking" another drive on top of that like you could do with RAM modules, and then slapping a NIC and a bit of Linux into it?

Sheesh, if you're gonna be spending $500+ on a NAS rig, you might as well throw a video card into it and make it an all-around system for general use. Otherwise, it seems to be the equivalent of buying a $15,000 car from a dealership merely for its radio.

What's the hype about them? Why not just share dedicated drives from your desktop over the network and dedicate a NIC or two to them?
Click to expand...

Pre-built NAS's are more than just the hardware. The good ones have nice, user friendly interfaces and good after sales support. On the high end, they are really just specalized PC's (E3-12xx/ECC ram) that are dedicated to the task of being a NAS.

I can't believe how people will balk at $500+ for a NAS appliance device when they will easily spend close to that if not more on the latest video card(s) to get a few extra FPS out of a game.

For a long time I had my drives in my main desktop and shared them with my wife's computer and the HTPC. That worked fine, speeds were good. Then I had to reboot while my wife was watching a movie. That went over like a ton of bricks. It was even worse when I wanted to re-format my system, all the shares were down for a few hours while I did that.

Having a dedicated NAS made those problems go away.

My main machine was also much quieter not running 8 drives plus extra fans.
 
I have the same question why people are these days using NAS.
I don't need security camera (how many percent of you need it?)
I don't need a web server or alike (how many percent of you need it?)
When I needed of some more storage space for my media server, I built my own small desktop (just like nas) that is more powerfull than my Synology I bought (and I had thrown it away). NAS is less power consumption and quiet? Yes in some cases, but for 1080p video streaming it's totally crap.
 
I built my own NAS using workstation-grade components. All said and done, it should cost around a thousand dollars for 18TB (raw) storage that can saturate a gigabit link. Over half of that is the drives. Quieter than most off-the-shelf NAS units, more upgradable, faster, and cheaper. The downside is that it draws a little more electricity from the wall, and a lot of the machine's horsepower goes to waste.
 
Elpee said:
I have the same question why people are these days using NAS.
I don't need security camera (how many percent of you need it?)
I don't need a web server or alike (how many percent of you need it?)
When I needed of some more storage space for my media server, I built my own small desktop (just like nas) that is more powerfull than my Synology I bought (and I had thrown it away). NAS is less power consumption and quiet? Yes in some cases, but for 1080p video streaming it's totally crap.
Click to expand...

Just because you don't find a feature useful doesn't mean it isn't.

Did you have a low end (e.g. x12j) Synology? I could stream multiple 1080p streams from my 1812+ without issue. Transcoding with plex is a different animal all together.

BYO is almost always going to be a more economical route assuming you can support it yourself. I would set my parents up with a Synology/Qnap long before I set up a FreeNas box.

The DS1812+ draws about 50W from the wall in use, an average IB/SB i3 pc will draw 75W+ at idle. If your in an expensive power state that can add up.

25W difference 24/7/365 is about 220kWh and Tier 4 rates that I am always in (Southern California Edison) is 31c per kWh. That is $68 more a year.
 
Elpee said:
NAS is less power consumption and quiet? Yes in some cases, but for 1080p video streaming it's totally crap.
Click to expand...

Sure....:rolleyes:

TType85 said:
The DS1812+ draws about 50W from the wall in use, an average IB/SB i3 pc will draw 75W+ at idle. If your in an expensive power state that can add up.
Click to expand...

I call BS on this one too. First off the Synology website shows 71.5W during access. And can you show me ONE IB/SB i3 processor that idles at 75W+?
 
i kinda have the same question as OP but then i think, it's a big market and many people are buying it. so there must be some reason(s) - although may not ever be enough reason(s) for me to buy them.

so ya, OOB usable, less maintenance, extras features, peace of mind, etc are all some of those reasons.

i personally uses ESXi+Solaris for NAS on a E5-1560, 64GB RAM, Norco RPC-4224, 10x3TB+SSDs box. It serves the NAS purpose well and can do much more, which i actually utilize (email server, web server, domain controller, general heavyweight computation, game server, uninterrupted downloading, etc). my CPU and memory usage are almost always 100% and 90%+, respectively.
 
twistacatz said:
Sure....:rolleyes:



I call BS on this one too. First off the Synology website shows 71.5W during access. And can you show me ONE IB/SB i3 processor that idles at 75W+?
Click to expand...

http://niallbest.com/review-of-synology-ds1812-in-real-life/

Look under Day-To-Day

I’m running the APC Back UPS RS Pro 900 and it reports a modest 45w-50w under load, only 18w when the disks spin down giving a huge two and a half hours of runtime (only device)
Click to expand...

i3 SYSTEM albeit with a graphics card, can be lower with onboard graphics..
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/07/01/intel-core-i3-2100-review/7
 
TType85 said:
http://niallbest.com/review-of-synology-ds1812-in-real-life/

Look under Day-To-Day



i3 SYSTEM albeit with a graphics card, can be lower with onboard graphics..
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/07/01/intel-core-i3-2100-review/7
Click to expand...


You should look under where the reviewer says he's only using four disks on the Synology review.

HardOCP has a review of the video card used in the i3 review you posted above. It idles at 31W.

I'm sorry bro but you were way off.
 
I built my own, it's not yet put online but it's ready to go. Need to do some DC/UPS power upgrades before. Supermicro 24 bay case with xeon based internals. Cost me close to 3 grand which is crazy, but it's better than paying 500 bucks+ for a prebuilt NAS that only has 4 bays and probably is very proprietary. Mine runs on Linux and uses mdadm which is fairly standard. ZFS is another good route to go.



There's also 4 fibre channel IBM enclosures that are connected to it, the drives show up individually so they can be part of mdadm arrays too. Those enclosures use lot of power though and I don't have enough DC backup capacity even after the upgrades so I only power those on to run an occasional full site backup job as an extra backup on top of existing solution. To consider the power they use and how small the drives are it's just not worth leaving it running even if I did have enough UPS capacity.
 
This is really about what works best for you, I think we should try and avoid 'mine is better then your' arguments, we aren't going to agree and I think we've all stated our opinions. For those, like me, who like prebuilt NAS's, its mostly about convenience, for those who want to build their own, its about flexibility and being able to use whatever parts or OS they want and they don't want to be locked into a Synology or Qnap OS.For those who want to build their own, convenience is important, in the end, they just like building stuff and picking the parts and putting it together, I get that. Expandability is certainly something DIY solutions have, sure I can upgrade the 12 drives in my Synology NAS, and I can expand it by adding another 12 bay external chassis, but the expandability is unique to my model, not all NAS's can do that, so, as many have pointed out the name brand NAS's have limitations, sure, but I would guess most people who buy them, do the research and know what they are buying and hope they don't outgrow them.
 
TType85 said:
I can't believe how people will balk at $500+ for a NAS appliance device when they will easily spend close to that if not more on the latest video card(s) to get a few extra FPS out of a game.

For a long time I had my drives in my main desktop and shared them with my wife's computer and the HTPC. That worked fine, speeds were good. Then I had to reboot while my wife was watching a movie. That went over like a ton of bricks. It was even worse when I wanted to re-format my system, all the shares were down for a few hours while I did that.

Having a dedicated NAS made those problems go away.

My main machine was also much quieter not running 8 drives plus extra fans.
Click to expand...

Regarding your video card comparison -- that's an extreme example at the tippity top of the spectrum. You can cut that $500 in half and still have significantly more performance than without a dedicated card. I'd wager people balk at this because even a $250 dedicated card gives you worlds more performance over stock/onboard GPUs.

NAS, on the other hand, seems to essentially do only what a NAS-less machine can already do at "stock" and better. I can pack my desktop full of drives, RAID them, share them, web-server off them, remotely webcam footage to them, stream 1080p, backup devices, etc. So a NAS doesn't really seem to be extending any abilities or performance beyond what a base machine can do besides "detachment" (in general, on average). Sure, it would take a bit of legwork to set up, but even a nice, pretty NAS' GUI is going to take some legwork to set up and get running right.

Now, I hear repeated mention of this special "service"/support that comes with a nice NAS, seemingly akin to an American Express Concierge perk -- so perhaps that's a bigger deal for some than I appreciate. But if NAS are so well-built and "easy", I would think that extraneous service or support wouldn't really be necessary, or much of a factor. *shrug*. I guess this just means I underestimate the market for such.

The convenience of having a NAS separate and detached from your system would be a nice, but how often are you reformatting or rebooting while someone's watching a movie?

I don't say that sardonically -- obviously, it's worth it to you (and others), and that's great. I'm just still not seeing the justified magic of it. Or rather, seeing enough magic to warrant the ~$400-500 entry level, pre-built. I'm by no means one who cheaps out on computer parts or new tech, but even still, I'd expect to pay $100-150 for a mid-range 4-bay Synology or equivalent (driveless).

I still just can't help but see it as the equivalent of a polished Raspberry Pi "2.0" (so to speak) with a couple external drives plugged into it. But I'm still trying! :)

(I'm honestly trying to convince myself to traverse the path of NAS, and not just argue)


bao__zhe said:
i kinda have the same question as OP but then i think, it's a big market and many people are buying it. so there must be some reason(s) - although may not ever be enough reason(s) for me to buy them.

so ya, OOB usable, less maintenance, extras features, peace of mind, etc are all some of those reasons.
Click to expand...

Well, I guess if I look at it through the lens of Apple products, it makes a bit more sense :)

But even with that, it still seems grossly overpriced given the tech involved (re: pre-built).
 
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Even the cheapest Synology from 5 years ago is using a Pentium 4 and gigabit ethernet.

The raspberry pi is only 100 Mbps which means only 13 MB/s transfers on a good day to a single client. And the 10/100 Ethernet port shares it's bandwidth with the USB ports.

Not to mention it doesn't have a real time clock, which is important for some file serving protocols.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-howto/32053-make-your-own-raspberry-pi-nas?showall=&start=1

Like I said, a $40 raspberry Pi is absolutely nothing like a premade NAS. It's like saying a TI-86 calculator is equivalent to an i3.
 
Coldblackice said:
...
EDIT:

Good grief, I can't understand why pre-built NAS setups cost so much?! (...and without drives!)

I mean, if you can get a 3TB external for <$80, isn't a NAS essentially just "stacking" another drive on top of that like you could do with RAM modules, and then slapping a NIC and a bit of Linux into it?

Sheesh, if you're gonna be spending $500+ on a NAS rig, you might as well throw a video card into it and make it an all-around system for general use. Otherwise, it seems to be the equivalent of buying a $15,000 car from a dealership merely for its radio.

What's the hype about them? Why not just share dedicated drives from your desktop over the network and dedicate a NIC or two to them?
Click to expand...
This is why many users choose to build their own NAS using either old PC parts or cheap parts. You can get a lot more out of a PC based NAS including better expandability.
 
Coldblackice,

I totally understand your perspective and I get why you have questions. To be honest a lot of people share your perspective. If you wanted to load HD's into your computer, raid them with Windows and call it a day I don't think anyone would knock you. The conveniences and reasons why people prefer NAS's are definitely not always necessary and the route your suggesting is definitely not without pitfalls. If all you plan to do is share media files to your TV or other devices you might have the right solution. Anything beyond that your more or less turning your computer into a server.

It's already been brought up but something you strongly need to consider is power consumption. Do you know what your current system idle power consumption is? If you have a beefy CPU/GPU you might be paying MORE money over (lets say) three years in energy cost then purchasing a more power efficient NAS. That point alone would push me towards a NAS.

In my home we use Apple computers. We have an iMac and two MBP so we don't really have the option to load a stack of HD's into our computers as an alternative.

A lot of of users such as myself are using shared storage for more then just streaming movies. Shutting down my NAS requires me to shut down a handful of virtual machines that run directly from the NAS which is a PITA.

The last reason you need to consider is what kind of data are you trying to preserve. Myself I have a fairly large collection of pictures that I've been taking for over 15 years. I would die if I lost them. For that reason I have chosen to use ZFS as file system of choice for data storage. Do I want to turn my main machine into a Solaris box for every day usage, of course not.

Again a NAS is not for everyone but I think you need to consider more of the pros and cons.
 
I've been playing around with my new Thecus N2520 this weekend. The reason I bought this was it includes HDMI and Digital audio out plus XBMC. In theory you could use this as a media center without the need for a full blown computer.

In practice, it's a little rough around the edges. The version of XMBC that I DL'ed from the package center has some serious issues. Outputting to a 720p screen in 720p mode, it only fills about a quarter of the screen and that quarter is the upper left quarter. None of the meager setting have any effect on thes but setting the output to 1080p fixes this as the display downscales the input without issues. But there a couple of serious issues that I have yet to overcome.

1. Playing back AVI's I get two diagonal green lines that won't go away no matter what. Playback of .mkv files (both 720p and 1080p) is perfect

2. I have yet to get the audio working but I'm still working on this so I'll reserve judgement

In spite of the spartan web interface (compared to Synology), it appears to have all the functions and featured a NAS should have. But a lot of things got screwed up in the translation so it takes some getting used to.

If I can get the issues with XBMC ironed out, this box would be beyond awesome. With 2 4TB drives installed, it holds my entire media library with room to spare.
 
I have a simple NAS built from an HP Micro Server (Dual Core AMD 1.3GHZ chip, 4GB Ram, and 4x1TB HDDs and a 16GB SSD for my MAS OS)

I only really use it for media. I use ZFS based on NexentaStor Community edition. Getting pretty full, but I will just add an SAS card and use an external bay to add another pool when I need to. This little thing can serve up 100MB/s on large file copies.
 
Vengance_01 said:
I have a simple NAS built from an HP Micro Server (Dual Core AMD 1.3GHZ chip, 4GB Ram, and 4x1TB HDDs and a 16GB SSD for my MAS OS)

I only really use it for media. I use ZFS based on NexentaStor Community edition. Getting pretty full, but I will just add an SAS card and use an external bay to add another pool when I need to. This little thing can serve up 100MB/s on large file copies.
Click to expand...

I think you just hit the nail on the head.

Someone needs to make say a 6, or an 8 bay NAS, with option for an expander with ECC CPU, motherboard and RAM, with ZFS for the DIY community that doesn't want to meddle with "unfamiliar CLI".

Could make a killing off that, offering what ZFS has to offer on top of support, and a pretty interface.

I am looking for a NAS, but I am constantly put off by how hard it is to find certain componenents, and of course the ZFS "OS", openindiana or whatever I choose would be entirely new. But then the idea of spending all that money on a BNIB Thecus etc, wouldn't sit right, as it doesn't offer anything over what I have now, with regards to data corruption.

I will look more at this Microserver :)
 
staticlag said:
Even the cheapest Synology from 5 years ago is using a Pentium 4 and gigabit ethernet.

The raspberry pi is only 100 Mbps which means only 13 MB/s transfers on a good day to a single client. And the 10/100 Ethernet port shares it's bandwidth with the USB ports.

Not to mention it doesn't have a real time clock, which is important for some file serving protocols.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-howto/32053-make-your-own-raspberry-pi-nas?showall=&start=1

Like I said, a $40 raspberry Pi is absolutely nothing like a premade NAS. It's like saying a TI-86 calculator is equivalent to an i3.
Click to expand...

My Raspberry Pi comment was meant more as a rough "equivalent", so to speak, rather than an actual Pi (hence the quoted RPi "2.0"). As an aside, however, I wasn't aware that a Pi would have such slower transfer speeds, nor that its ethernet bandwidth is shared with USB. Interesting.

So what in particular would cause the speed difference between a Pi and a dedicated machine? Like, besides RAID'ing, which system component(s) in particular would boost a Pi's ~13MB transfer to a dedicated's ~100MB transfer?

(I'm not asking in terms of "Well, what do I need to add to a Pi to bridge the gap?", but just for general reference)



spectrumbx said:
This is why many users choose to build their own NAS using either old PC parts or cheap parts. You can get a lot more out of a PC based NAS including better expandability.
Click to expand...

Gotcha. Makes sense. I guess I've sort of idealized pre-built NAS as (mostly) portable little "cubes", for utmost ease and portability, whereas I imagine home-built ones as full-on desktop towers. Perhaps I should start asking around for home-built NAS case suggestions.



twistacatz said:
Coldblackice,

I totally understand your perspective and I get why you have questions. To be honest a lot of people share your perspective. If you wanted to load HD's into your computer, raid them with Windows and call it a day I don't think anyone would knock you. The conveniences and reasons why people prefer NAS's are definitely not always necessary and the route your suggesting is definitely not without pitfalls. If all you plan to do is share media files to your TV or other devices you might have the right solution. Anything beyond that your more or less turning your computer into a server.

It's already been brought up but something you strongly need to consider is power consumption. Do you know what your current system idle power consumption is? If you have a beefy CPU/GPU you might be paying MORE money over (lets say) three years in energy cost then purchasing a more power efficient NAS. That point alone would push me towards a NAS.

In my home we use Apple computers. We have an iMac and two MBP so we don't really have the option to load a stack of HD's into our computers as an alternative.

A lot of of users such as myself are using shared storage for more then just streaming movies. Shutting down my NAS requires me to shut down a handful of virtual machines that run directly from the NAS which is a PITA.

The last reason you need to consider is what kind of data are you trying to preserve. Myself I have a fairly large collection of pictures that I've been taking for over 15 years. I would die if I lost them. For that reason I have chosen to use ZFS as file system of choice for data storage. Do I want to turn my main machine into a Solaris box for every day usage, of course not.

Again a NAS is not for everyone but I think you need to consider more of the pros and cons.
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Thanks, that makes it a bit clearer. Given your post, I should probably first ask more about what others specifically use their NAS for, rather than what they use for a NAS.

Interesting note about the power savings. I think my current system idles around 250-300 watts. I do have a fairly beefy GPU (overclocked 7950), and a highly overclocked, power inefficient CPU (i7 930 @ 4.2GHz).

I think what I like most about the idea of a NAS is a "pretty" little cube that doesn't take up much space, and gives easy access to hot-swappable drive bays. I suppose I've assumed that type of casing/construction would only be found with pre-built NAS -- but maybe this is a mistaken assumption.

Any recommendations on smallish cases? I loathe thinking about having another "tower" laying around, adding to the technological clutter, and merely for data storage - -like a massive, oversized external hard drive.
 
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