Please make home NAS recommendation.

M

Morazl

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 13, 2003
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Hello, currently I have a 750gb seagate drive filled with video and I have no backup for it. I would like to invest in a NAS for my gigabit home network with at the very least 1.5TB of storage, I would really like a RAID1 setup for redundancy. My maximum budget is 300$

Can someone make me some recommendations?

I'm not sure if I should go diskless and buy them on my own or what... I'm really fond to Seagate HDD's but the new 1.5TB drives seem to have some problems so I'm not too confident in those...
 
For that price range you're looking at 2-bay devices or a 4-bay eSATA enclosure but not network functionality....how about setting up a windows home server? $99 for the OS leaves $200 for hardware if you have an extra case, power supply, etc lying around
 
Does that $300 include the cost of drives or just the NAS itself?
 
If you are much of a DIYer... consider unRaid from lime-technology.com See my Fileserver in my sig for my unRaid build. I think my build was ~$400-ish excluding hard drives.

The three drive version is free. It boots from a flash drive running a variation of linux. The OS is managed from a browser on a Windows client. It provides protected storage using a single parity drive and allowing up to 15 data drives (only up to 2 data drives and 1 parity with the free version).

Its major drawback is that its write performance is weak as it is software raid.

Some of its major strengths is that it does not require a beefy cpu (I'm using a 1.6 celeron), uses a common file system that with a add-on can be read from a windows (so if your mobo craps out, you can still pull a drive to read the data - try that with a Drobo), is drive size flexible, so it is possible to run it with many different sized hard drives (at one time I had a 250, 320, 500, 750's and 1tb drives). It will work with any mix of sata or ide drives and it is fairly straightforward to add or replace a drive. It provides for an auto spinn down of drives when they have not been accessed over a specified hour interval, making it greener than most tradition raid arrays.

unRaid supports read/write shares, so you do not have to access drives individually (but can if you prefer).

You have to have two simultaneous hard drive failures to lose any data and even then, you only lose what was on those drives (with many traditional raid setups, two drives will lose the entire array.)

It is possible to experiment with it without buying any hardware assuming you have a bootable flash drive and a free hard drive (which is what I did at first). I disconnected my regular hard drives, downloaded unRaid and put it on the boot flash drive and in under 30 min had a home-grown NAS available on my network.

Before I committed to unRaid as my storage/file server, I did three practiced recoveries - no problems at all.

I have recovered a failed-disk (for real) with unRaid. The real trippy part was that I was able to access files on the failed drive and after replacing the failed drive, I was able to access those files while unRaid was still rebuilding it!

faq here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ
forums here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php
good get started read here: http://lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=46
downloads here: http://download.lime-technology.com/
wiki here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki
manual here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Manual

unRaid is a worthy alternative to Windows Home Server, especially if you like the flexibility it provides and prefer something more for a DIYer vs. an appliance.

I'm not associated with unRaid or lime-technology, just a happy user and customer.
 
I have a Netgear SC101T 2 bay enclosure. It's been good to me. It's not a strict NAS per se. It's actually a Storage Area Network and requires drivers on each machine that accesses it. Directron has it for under $200. Add another 750GB for under $100 and you're there.
 
Now that I think of it, I have quite a few extra 478 P4's lying around with a bunch of RAM too. Do you think it'd be worth it to find an enclosure, motherboard with gigabit and DDR1, and a PSU? + the cost of drives... and a card for 3 disk RAID-5 array?
 
Are you going to use that Seagate 750GB drive as part of the NAS or just keep it separate?

If yes, then yes it might be worth it to just get a new quality energy efficient PSU, gig NIC, and case plus a 1TB drive. You might even be able to fit in WHS with that $300 budget.

If no, then you might have to use a unRAID or FreeNAS or any other free file server and NAS OS:
Antec Earthwatts 500W PSU - $50
Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - $75
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - $115
---
Total: $275 plus tax and shipping

Use the $60 for a cheap case and gig NIC

EDIT: Wait you don't have a s478 mobo?
EDIT 2: Oh now you want a hardware controller? Don't bother with a $300 budget and no existing system.
 
honestly, i use either an nslu2 hacked with uNSLUg or a buffalo linstation pro (gigabit) hacked with Freelink. I'm pretty damn I'm not exactly sure why you want your nas to have RAID1 redundancy though...why not just use they extrenal drive as part of the NAS and let that bein in RIAD one. it cuts down yoru costs a good bit too.
 
Sorry. Ok... now i've decided what I want to do and my budget can be flexible with this idea.

I've got two 750GB seagate drives right now in my computer, same model, etc. I think I should just purchase another one and make a RAID 5 array, that way I only have to buy one drive and i'll have some space to play with.

Now I think i'm in the boat for a "cheap" RAID card for this since software or onboard raids are BAD. For the three of these drives, i'm guessing a 250w dell PSU wouldn't suffice, huh?

So I need:
PSU
Motherboard (478) supporting DDR1
RAID Card of some sort that works for home use
Smallest enclosure possible to stick on a shelf or something
Gigabit NIC if the 478 doesn't have onboard gigabit
One 750GB Seagate drive

That's it...?
 
Actually the cheapest new true hardware RAID card is about $300. For a used true hardware RAID card, that's $200. And those decent true hardware RAID card needs PCI-E which few socket 478 motherboard had. Also, FYI when you set up a RAID5 array, ALL data on those drives will be wiped clean. So you will need some place to store the data while the RAID 5 array is building. In addition, RAID is NOT backup. It's guarantees data uptime but it is not backup since the data can still be deleted, changed or infected by virus. A backup is stored elsewhere and not part of the system.

Also, it's rarely a good idea to install the OS on a RAID5 array because what if the OS or RAID array gets corrupted or infected? If kept separate, the OS on a different drive will not affect the RAID5 array if the OS drive needs to be reformatted or has been compromised.

How old is the Dell 250W PSU? How much wattage or amps does it have on the +12V rail?

I highly recommend taking a look at Windows Home Server. It's a great solution for home users. Some threads about it:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1360937
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1360834
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1262238&

In fact, you might want to take a look at this:
HP MediaSmart Server EX470 - $500
 
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