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Anyone here use NAS (Network Accessible Storage) devices?

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MonMotha:
Linux has very usable NTFS support these days.  It's not fast, but it's pretty good (I dunno what the status of ACLs are - I just have it map everything to be owned by one user with fixed UNIX style permissions).  So, if you can find a good "NAS Software" solution that is based on relatively modern (past few years) Linux and is flexible enough to let you actually use said NTFS support, then you should be good.

In the end, many commercial SOHO NAS systems are just ARM systems running Samba on Linux with a cheesy little web GUI.  They just only support very minimal, fixed configurations.

lilshawn:
maybe i'll splurge and pick up a couple of 2tb drives and just run freenas. (also i'm lazy) i booted up the board with freenas on usb stick last night and it seems to work okay. plays well with the rest of the network. i'll have to download the CD version and install it to the usb flash.

Maybe i'l just pick up a couple of 2tb drives instead of reusing old hardware. probably better in the long run since these drives probably have a couple thousand hours on them.

lilshawn:
ta da! ...well almost.

I set up freenas and tested it out a few days ago. since then, i burned the CD and installed freenas to the usb flash disk. it has an option to import an NTFS filesystem disk. I don't know if it works or not, but the option is there if someone is wondering.

i ordered a Coolermaster Elite 120 microATX case off newegg to house my disks and microATX board for 49.99+ shipping. It even comes with a couple of fans pre-installed to cool the mobo and the drives. It's a fair size as it accepts a standard ATX power supply, which in my opinion is much better than the smaller form factor power supplies. it also has room for 3 disks which will probably be more than enough. If it comes down to not being enough room for disks down the road, i'll pick up something else. I suppose i could have gone all fancy and bought a rackmount chassis with slots for 10 drives...but then i have to buy a rack, and on and on and on...

I opted to (for the time being) throw 2 old 500gb drives in there and set it up as some kind of JBOD as a test. after a bit of messing around (and a little freenas forum search) i set up the disks (stripe array) easily (I had to select multiple disks in the volume selection screen) and created a share for it on my windows network.

I'm currently dumping 700gb of video on it and will test it out over the next while and see how it goes.

Since I had most of the parts already, and freenas was well, free... the total spent on this endeavor was the board, which i got for cheap cheap off a buddy and the cost of the box, which I probably could have done without...but hey, might as well make it look nice. if this continues to work out i'll splurge for 3 new disks for it and set up a proper raid for data safety.

but, thumbs up so far for freenas.  :cheers:

nas porn photo below  ;D

lordnacho:
My only complaint is the constant emails.  It's now in my morning routine to check if there's an issue.  Would be nice if in the subject it said there's a problem, then i could do some sort of mail filter on it.

Someone complained about throughput speeds, but for me it's fine.  Streaming 1080p movies to xbmc in the living room works without any hiccups.

I originally hoped to set this thing up and work remotely off it, like My Documents would be running off freenas.  I set up symbolic links but Windows pretty much hated it, random blue screens.  So now I'm just using a file comparison to manually copy stuff over.  Haven't gotten around to tinkering with rsync.

Other thoughts, I set it up as raidz2 and replacing a drive with smart errors was painless.

kahlid74:
A quick note for those of you building NAS/SANs for your home.  Be very careful when buying disks.  Regular disks are not made to run in raid environments and have a lowered MBT due to the extreme conditions a NAS/SAN operate under.  It's why a WD Green 1TB drive is 2-3 times lower than an equivalent "Raid" certified disk.

High level what does this mean?  If you bought off the shelf regular disks for your NAS/SAN you better make sure you BACKUP your data fairly regularly.  Those disks will fail faster than normal (inside a PC being normal where the disks are allowed to go to sleep)

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