NAS or Raid Pc

[vtzifnab]

i need to add storage space to my home/soho network. initialy used a 320gb mirored raid. outgrew it. problems resulted from to many people on the network read/writing files to it as it was also used. have been looking to add a NAS but cheap and secure don't go together? am i better of just making a bigger raid and not using the computer it is on or buy one of the Buffallo Teraservers or an Infrant ReadyNAS (both avainable from newegg). anyone out there with realworld experience with these?

 

[unhappy_mage]

My suggestion would be to use a real PC; it's more expandable than, and about the same cost as, a NAS box like the Buffalo you mentioned. A pc for this can be cheaper than you'd think. My current file server is a dual p3@933 with 256mb of ecc, an enermax PSU, and 6 hard drives that ran about $300 without disks. It has two pci-X slots (64/66) so that I can have a modern (sata) controller and a good ethernet card. That's not at all a bad deal for a pc that performs about on par (in multi-threaded apps, anyways) with my main p4 2.4c box.

My $.02.

 

[c-boogie]

I have a readyNAS box and I really think that is the best option out there for small NAS decives. It has 3 roles (for me): a small file server for home (about 4 users at any one time streaming music, videos, and some light video production work), a remote storage location for my real job, and my personal ftp server - and it does all of them really well. I have 4 400gb drives in a RAID 5 and the little box sits in my basement serving up files happy as can be. It has a great web interface and email notifications. It has a gigabit NIC and has domain level security features (meaning you can give it AD credentials if you have a domain so that you can do user or group specific security). Pretty cool little box.

All in all, I've been really happy with it. Just FYI - I have a few other Windows server boxes here as well and the little ReadyNas is slightly slower on large file transfers (over 1gb). The box was $600 PLUS drives. It seems a little expensive but I think in the end it would come out the same as a cheap little windows file server (assuming you were to but a good hardware RAID card and a few misc parts).

 

[Dan_D]

While NAS's are cool and all. In my experience with them, they don't match the performance of a real computer.

 

[wake6830]

dude, look in the fs/ft thread and build yourself a file server.

if you bought some of my stuff last week, you could have had an athlon 2200+, corresponding mobo (built in 10/100) with nearly a gig of ram for like 100 bucks. add case, psu & drives and you're golden for a tiny amount of cash.

 

[TechLarry]

I was going to get the Terrastation until I found out the Raid-5 XOR was software based.

I built my own into my server using a 3Ware 9500S-8 and six Seagate 300GB Sata drives instead.

Total cost was just over $1600.

Keep in mind that 6 300GB drives doesn't equal 1.8TB of storage. The true storage capacity (279GB per drive), plus one drive for parity plus one drive for online hot-swap (optional) netted a 1.09TB array.

-Larry

i need to add storage space to my home/soho network. initialy used a 320gb mirored raid. outgrew it. problems resulted from to many people on the network read/writing files to it as it was also used. have been looking to add a NAS but cheap and secure don't go together? am i better of just making a bigger raid and not using the computer it is on or buy one of the Buffallo Teraservers or an Infrant ReadyNAS (both avainable from newegg). anyone out there with realworld experience with these?