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Need an inexpensive NAS solution

O

oldpablo

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
May 31, 2003
Messages
6,352
I don't know if there are any products that have everything I'm looking for, so I figured I'd see what you can all come up with. I'd rather not have to maintain a file server. Here's what I'd like to have:

giglabit connection
be able to attach more drives via USB to expand the storage
some form of RAID if possible

There have been some products that have been close, but they were either 10/100 or no USB expansion. I saw this one, but I don't need wireless and no RAID options:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=0&pid=377

Any ideas?
 
Good question. Most of what I can think of are a few rather expensive solutions.

A cheaper version, but still lacking raid is a Buffalo HD-HG series NAS
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155308
It has 2 USB, and gigabit, plus it comes with 1 drive in the enclosure. I don't think though you will see throughput up to that of a higher end NAS.

A device that has what you are looking for is the THECUS N2100P

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833201001
It holds 2 drives, has USB, and has gigabit connectivity.
 
Not sure what your price is but I have used the Buffalo Terrastation's and Linkstation's. Work pretty well....the terrastation should cover all your requirements depending on your price.
 
If you have an old box sitting around - something like an Athlon XP, an upper end P3, or a low end P4, get a gigabit ethernet card for it and some hard drives. Then install the linux distro of your choice on it, and set up a software raid5, ssh, and samba. Then throw the box in a closet and forget about it.
Only difficulty would be if you use PCI controller cards to add drives, your PCI bandwidth will be choked - gigabit ethernet is capable of saturating it. You can put together a P3 or P3 Xeon box for it cheap -- get the parts you dont already have lying around on ebay, overstock.com, and/or the FS/FT board. Just get a motherboard that has pci-x, and use a pci-x gigabit ethernet card, that way if you use pci controller cards to add drives, the ethernet card wouldnt rob the controllers of bandwidth.
 
RavenD said:
If you have an old box sitting around - something like an Athlon XP, an upper end P3, or a low end P4, get a gigabit ethernet card for it and some hard drives. Then install the linux distro of your choice on it, and set up a software raid5, ssh, and samba. Then throw the box in a closet and forget about it.
Click to expand...
I'm with RavenD. Set it up once and then forget about it. Plus, it's freakin' cheap. My A-XP box is folding and serving, and I haven't even looked at the thing in probably two months.

By the way - You're aware that USB is a major limitation with hard drives, right? Effective data transfers are around 10-20MB/s. Enough to play a compressed AVI, but it's horrid for any kind of large file transfers.
 
I'm really looking to just archive stuff, not do a media server. So far the Thecus N2100P looks nice. I really don't want to throw together an old box, I'm so tired of messing with extra machines, and I question all my spare parts stability. I'd much rather just do something simple and all-in-one. Thanks for the help guys.
 
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