Why do use a NAS? Related questions

xx0xx said:
Edit: rambled a bunch


tl;dr- doing nothing is sounding increasingly like the solution for me, but I do like to play around with linux boxes and whatnot. if i find some solution that blows my mind i'll post it, lol

i dont think my use case necessitates buying a NAS... but maybe at the very least, installing a NAS-style OS on a cheap box and playing around with it
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You don't need a dedicated PC as a NAS (network attached storage), you could do it cheaply and simply by plugging in an external USB drive into your router since most modern routers support USB hard drives. Your router is on 24/7 and would use the CPU/RAM in the router itself to map and deliver the files over your network. It would work much in the same way as a FreeNAS or unRaid server if the intent is only a centralized location for files.

The next step up would be an external HD with built in NAS capability. This would plug into your network and would be a simple low power device like a Western Digital MyCloud. The nice thing about this is you could run applications in addition to just sharing data, like running a Plex server or automated backups.

Arguably the next step up would be a multi-bay dedicated NAS solution like a Synology or QNAP device. They use similar PC hardware components (Atom/i3/i5/i7/Ryzen) on a dedicated custom NAS software, with available plug-ins that allow you do more.

Lastly would be custom implementations using off the shelf parts and software to do the same purpose, but with the added flexibility and omplication of building it yourself.

We can leave SAN's out of this discussion.
 
Since I use Ubiquiti stuff (ER-X), USB on router is out of the question.

If I do it at all, it will probably be custom / self-built because I've got the parts already, so the cost would be time/complexity instead of dollars, and it would be SSD-based which is nice. Maybe something like OpenMediaVault (or just straight-up Linux with the right software/modules installed)

Though I admit, an external HD with NAS capability built-in had not occurred to me as a middle-ground... and actually sounds pretty cool (aside from it sounding painful to backup/mirror it locally).
 
Don't forget about stuff like the Raspberry Pi. The 4b supports faster USB speeds as well as ethernet speeds, and should make a decent fileserver.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Don't forget about stuff like the Raspberry Pi. The 4b supports faster USB speeds as well as ethernet speeds, and should make a decent fileserver.
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I guess decent is a relative term :). I've been looking at upgrading my stupid 1gb/s network because it's my bottleneck for file transfers, but it's honestly just not worth the cost at this point in time, I can deal with only being able to transfer at 120MB/s for the time being. My sustained HDD read speed is 1GB/s so I'm only able to get just over 1/10th of my HDD read rate through my network. I am thinking a RPi isn't going to be able to saturate the USB and 1gb/s at the same time (does it still share resource for NIC and USB, I think they stopped after the RPi 3 at some point and went dedicated). And locally on my server I can still hit 1GB/s read while doing some operations so that'd be a lot to give up to go USB. Funny enough, I do have a 6TB external plugged into my server just for slow transfers and backups :). And since the MB on my server only supports SATA 2, my mechanical speeds (obviously not random seeks) are much higher than my SSD speeds. For things that require a lot of random I/O the SSD works great though. And the Hardware RAID card having build in 256MB cache doesn't hurt either.
 
Yeah, it's come down. I was looking into infiniband initially, just haven't really needed it just wanted to play. My internet sucks so bad, I'm lucky to average over 100KB/s.... So it's not as if I move files around that often whew I can't wait a little while. But hey, I'm not against it if the price is right. Problem is only 3 of my desktops are hard wired anyways, and I have one switch by my server that it and my son plug into, then another in my living room which is my internet modem. If I go to 10GB I would have to buy 2 switches, install cards in each and pull new cables most likely. One day, lol.
 
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