SATA NAS | The Coffeehouse

the-laughing-man

I have been thinking for a while now that I'm gonna need to upgrade my hard drive to a TB. I have a thing where I have to buy at least double the size I had before to reassure myself I wont fill it any time soon.

So I was thinking of getting myself a NAS, buying myself a TB and slapping it into a NAS.

Of course you then hit the problem, what happens when it's full? Well it'd mean plugging it into my PC and getting a new one or... well it's a fair bit of messing so I reached the conclusion a 2 Bay NAS means if I fill 1TB... which will take me till we have 1.5 or 2TB drive sizes. Then I can get a 2TB, and by the time the 2TB is full we'll probably have 4TB, so I can then copy the data from the 1TB to the 4TB and have a 2TB and 4TB in the bay (making sense so far?)

I've been reading up and a few things have worried me so far, the Netgear SC-101 seemed like a winner until I found out it uses a proprietary file system which means you can't move drives out of it to transfer data which is annoying to say the least. So far none of them so far apart from the Thecus N299 (which is apparently awful on transfer times) mention being able to be used on wireless.

So I have a few questions you may be able to answer for me, Niners!

1) As it stand I imagine you could plug the RJ45 of the NAS into one of the outputs on a wireless router and map it as a network drive?
(I know the speed will be an issue but with Wireless N not far away that should become less of a problem)

2) Do any of you know if proprietary file systems are wide spread in NAS?

3) Do any of you have a NAS device you may want to recommend to me?

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They should work fine over wireless, provided your wireless network is configured correctly (e.g. not set up to isolate the wireless network from the wired or anything like that). Speed will be slower (as you know), but there shouldn't be any issues, as the NAS is just another device attached to the network, just like a wired computer would be.

the-laughing-man

yeah that's what I figured it'd be but as I've never actually tested this idea I didn't want to buy one then find out something different as none of them actually mention it!

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop
Seven of Niner! Resistance is Futile!

with 1TB samsung spinpoint f1 drives reaching 120mb/s read speed (fastest hard drives on the market) are you sure you want to use a slow NAS?

Isshou

I'd like to point out that in a NAS (basic ones at least) you're drives will be stitched together to form one partition usually in a JBOD or RAID array. Such that removal of a single drive would be worthless to be reused for data as it doesn't contain all the data, you would have to remove all the drives, connect them up to another controller that can handle JBOD/RAID setups, then get the configuration right.

This is even completely before file system, after all you couldn't use partial file systems no matter what type they were. NAS provide the filesystem itself, and manages connections to it so as to allow multiple clients efficiently.

I would recommend if you're looking towards expandability go with a 4 bay NAS not a 2 bay NAS. Most NAS would likely default to a JBOD array, which would allow for adding a drive (but not easily just replacing one).

I don't have any recommendations on which to get.

If you're still concerned about the filesystem, you may want to instead invest in a SAN or a fileserver.

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

My solution was to build up a seperate system and use it as a file server. So far it's up to 7 drives, 4 of which are 1TB's and 2 are 500GB's. Several months ago I upgraded it to a rackmount.

My predicament is that one of the drives is 30GB from full, and I sort drives by media type. I can replace the 500's with 1TB's, but then I have two wasted perfectly-good 500's.

So now I have to buy a new case with more bays.

the-laughing-man

I knew I came to you guys for a reason, thaks for the input, I'll give it some thought as to what to do next

lothan

Based on the information on the Netgear site, the SC-101 is just a two-drive array that's either mirrored or striped or something to look like one drive. In other words, upgrading to larger drives may require performing a full backup, replacing the drives, and then restoring the backup.

This is also pretty much a limitation of most NAS/RAID arrays so you might keep this in mind... the configuration is cast in stone and it's not easy to change without backing up the data, reconfiguring, then restoring the data.

The advantage to the ReadyNAS NV+ is that it comes with X-RAID in which the RAID array is automatically configured. Insert one drive and it's a simple NAS without RAID features. Insert a second drive and it mirrors the first drive to the second. Insert a third or fourth drive and it stripes the first two or three drives with parity on the last drive. Upgrade all the drives (one at a time of course) and it automatically expands the array.

The disadvantage is that it can take an hour or more to reconfigure the RAID array. Take the case in which you have four 500GB drives in RAID-5 configuration. To increase storage capacity with 750GB or 1TB drives, you have to replace one drive, wait a few hours for the array to rebuild the data on the new drive, replace the second drive, wait a few hours, ... and finally on the last drive it rebuilds the array with the expanded the capacity. As implied, it can take a couple of days to swap all four drives just to increase capacity.

I have mixed emotions regarding the ReadyNAS NV+, though. I purchased mine from Infrant and found Infrant support among the best available. When Netgear acquired Infrant, pretty much everything went downhill. Netgear support is awful and I could never get them to honor the warranty when the power supply in my ReadyNAS NV died (fairly common problem unfortunately).

As others appropriately mention, NAS devices aren't typically speed demons either. They're handy as external storage systems that are accessible to everyone on the network, but don't expect to necessarily stream 1080p HD movies from a NAS. I use my ReadyNAS primarily as file storage, backup image storage, and to stream MP3s to my Playstation 3. I use the RAID array in my desktop computer for pretty much everything else.

fknight

Having used a Netgear SC-101, I would strongly discourage anyone from purchasing it.

It uses a sort of "ATA over UDP" block level protocol called "Zetera" which is proprietary and requires specialized drivers installed. Most solution providers building and branding NAS systems that require block level network access use something a bit more known and standardized like "iSCSI." The "Zetera" system appears to fall under the same category as third party presidential candidates and I don't see any real storage vendor taking this protocol seriously. The Zetera drivers crash randomly and can make the file system (also proprietary) unreadable.
The TCP/IP stack on the SC-101 device is unreliable. The (more than two) devices we tested would randomly reset the IP stack, and one of the weirdest things they did was their TCP/IP stack half-way crashed and restarted and grabbed additional IP addresses from our DHCP server (while keeping the ones assigned), causing all kinds of weird connectivity issues with the device.
Because the drivers are so flaky, Explorer becomes unresponsive, and disk management can simply hang when opening.
On two separate Windows Server 2003 machines, every single share on the machine (including SYSVOL as well as my local file shares) would become unshared whenever the "Zetera" drivers crashed.

We tested these SC-101 devices for small scale Disk 2 Disk backup and we had absolutely nothing but problems with them, to the point of being near destructive.

Please try to avoid this device.