Would you buy this N.A.S.?

Thorin · April 23, 2007, 04:35:06 PM

I'm looking at getting the VANTEC NexStar LX Network Attached Storage device and putting a Seagate 500GB Barracuda drive in it. Anything anyone can tell me that I should watch out for?

Lazybones · April 23, 2007, 07:08:21 PM

Appears to only support one internal drive.. I would NOT setup any form of large storage system without at least a Two drive RAID 1 mirroring system.
Single drive failure is just too common.

Mr. Analog · April 23, 2007, 08:02:08 PM

Well I have this enclosure and while it's not something I would store important data to I do find it quite handy for all my music and missed TV backups that I frequently rip or download.

PRO:

Doesn't get very hot
USB 2.0 & Ethernet options
Standard IDE and SATA options available
Can function as an FTP server
Easy to set up and administer

CON

On board O/S can get overloaded with too many simultaneous connections and will crash
Bright blue LEDs
Default IP is hard coded so if you already run DHCP at home you'll want to change it so that it grabs its IP address from the DHCP server
Does not have any printer server hardware (would have been nice, oh well)
As discussed above, there is no redundancy

Thorin · April 23, 2007, 08:54:33 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on April 23, 2007, 07:08:21 PM
Appears to only support one internal drive.. I would NOT setup any form of large storage system without at least a Two drive RAID 1 mirroring system.

Hmm... Any suggestions on how to get a cheap-ass RAID1 system set up? Yes, I'm trying to do this cheaply. You can make fun of me at D&D...

Thorin · April 23, 2007, 08:59:11 PM

Oh, and the whole point is to use it as a network storage device, so I don't want something that I have to plug into one of my existing computers...

Thorin · April 23, 2007, 09:05:06 PM

I just learned that RAID 1+0 is better than RAID 0+1.

Thorin · April 23, 2007, 09:20:10 PM

I wonder if I could convince my wife to let me buy a D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure? It does RAID 1 (mirroring), and as a bonus has a USB plug for a printer so that I can unhook that from the regular computer. Hmm... What kind of SATA drives to get? Maxtor? Seagate? Western Digital?

Lazybones · April 23, 2007, 09:36:29 PM

Quote from: Thorin on April 23, 2007, 09:20:10 PM
I wonder if I could convince my wife to let me buy a D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure? It does RAID 1 (mirroring), and as a bonus has a USB plug for a printer so that I can unhook that from the regular computer. Hmm... What kind of SATA drives to get? Maxtor? Seagate? Western Digital?

1. Remember you need to purchase 2 drives at once, but you only get the space of one drive. However your risk of data loss is very low.
2. Seagate MUCH longer standard warranty unless it changed, should be 4-5 years over 1yr for the other brands.

Lazybones · April 23, 2007, 09:44:58 PM

You could always pickup a used workstation at an office auction and dump two drives in it.

Thorin · April 23, 2007, 11:28:28 PM

Would the used workstations support RAIDing? Another big point is I want something small that I can tuck away in a corner and that's as quiet as possible. One of the complaints about our current computers is that they're bloody loud when on, and they're big and bulky and get in the way.

Lazybones · April 23, 2007, 11:32:13 PM

Once you have a full blown PC it is easy to do software RAID with Windows OR Linux, but if if small and quite is what you want get that D-Link unit.

Tom · April 24, 2007, 12:43:19 AM

Yeah, if you just want simple, quiet, and small, grab something like that DLink unit.

If you want flexibility and expandibility, go with a cheap PC with uber quiet fans, and software raid. I just managed to scrape together hardware for my "spare" 2600+ XP chip, and I now have 3 320GB seagates in there in Raid5, for a total of 597GB of usable space. Eventually I'll put more in it, I should beable to add another 8 drives to it for over 2.8TB of total space (GiB/1024, not GB/1000). Though I'll probably put one or two of them in as hot spares.

Adams · April 24, 2007, 08:43:19 AM

I have a single drive NAS... It also has a eSATA port on the back to allow me to RAID1 the thing.

This is the new model but its pretty much the same.
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3032741&CatId=2671

This is the 2 drive model.
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3032749&CatId=2671

They come out with new firmware... which is a version of PicoLinux so you can hack it to do anything you want it to. I am currently running just my network from it. I has a lot of network horse power but not so much cpu horse power.

Anyways just figured you might want to know.

Lazybones · April 24, 2007, 08:57:28 AM

There is nothing really wrong with the single drive unit, however I my self have been the victim of large scale data loss at home now twice! Once in my workstation that was RAID 0 for performance a few years ago, and then last year on my network file server which was just using spanning.

I have gone full hardware RAID 5 now, but a simple two drive RAID 1 is just as good if you use large drives. Really depends how bad data loss is to you. In both my cases the data lost was more for entertainment than it was important, it was still a loss however.

Cova · April 24, 2007, 10:58:14 AM

If you have a place to hide the box out of the way - I'd go with the old workstation + linux + software raid method. If it's doing nothing but running software raid and serving files on the network, you can get away with systems as old as around 500Mhz. If you really wanna tweak the linux for size/performance you could get away with 100Mhz probably (eg. hack something on there like the PicoLinux from that other NAS).

Also lots of free distributions designed just for this type of thing. Try googling for FreeNAS or OpenFiler.