NAS suggestions

[bobthebob1234]

My windows laptop is moaning that is has no room left to play, and with the sudden realisation that I don't actually do any backups for my work, I have decided it is time to get me a nas.

Any suggestions for a good one?
Preferably:

• Small (living in uni accommodation at the moment, space is a premium
• Cheap
• Penguin friendly
• low power / auto turn off(on)
• raid 1
• gigabit network not that important as don't have a gigabit switch!
• Empty or either 2 1tb or 2 2tb drives

dependant on how nice santa is this year / if i get a job I will either be putting two 1tb or two 2tb drives in it


Also side question; I have been backing up movies (yes I do own the actual dvds, bit torrent is blocked at uni!) onto my mythtv setup, however that only have 250gb hdd in it so is filling up quickly. Would a nas be a suitable place to place the files then mount it on the myth box? Would the play back be ok on 100mb network?


Thanks

[nelz]

100Mb is more than enough for playing movies that have probably been encoded at 1-2Mb.

[bobthebob1234]

i've not been encoding them (to my knowledge). I have just used OGMrip to make .mkv files (about the same size as the dvd) cos otherwise in like half the movies the audio is out of sync with whatever I use

[nelz]

That's still only around a 6Mb/s bit rate, well under what 100Mb ethernet can handle (I use MythTV with powerline ethernet and it copes fine).

[bobthebob1234]

awesome, thanks

[nordle]

Gave up with mkv's as they seem to require some rediculous processing power to keep audio in sync.

Encode into crappy avi or MP4 (using harddup=1 for mencoder)

Have not had audio sync issues for 18mths since doing that.

[bobthebob1234]

I tryied doing them into avi, and worked for like half but there are some that just plain refuse to work. What ever i try

[drws]

I've recently bought a
LG NAS N2R1D
which basically runs linux (2.6.22)
it supports two disk as either raid0, raid1 or two independent disks but you can then setup per-folder mirroring.

The services it runs are
DLNA, TimeMachine Server, ITunes Server, SMB/AFP/FTP/WebDav shares, WWW with MySQL server (not sure what www software) and iSCSI (for the DVD/BluRay drive only).

You can plug your printer in as well. Havn't tried this but wouldn't be surprised to find it was CUPS.

It also has transmission (BT client) installed should you want to do any torrenting.

There is a gigabit nic with usb ports and e-sata ports. Although it doesn't seem to expose attached usb/e-sata attached drives via the network. (It offers a backup service for usb devices)

They come with DVD or BluRay burners, which you can access from your PC or burn data directly from the NAS to a disc.

Its got local user management if you want to share folders to other people.

There are versions that ship with disks in but I got the empty one and added my own 2Tb disks later. (Don't get Western Digital 'Green' disks)

http://www.lg.com/uk/it-products/networ ... -N2R1D.jsp

[bobthebob1234]

sweet looks quite nice. thanks

[hecatae]

seen on hotukdeals

HP ProLiant MicroServer @ IT247.com £212.46 + £100 Cashback from HP - http://bit.ly/i11iHc

[bobthebob1234]

possibly out of my price range but a nice little server.

[Brian Hunter]

Hey Bob, I'm sniffing out NAS solutions myself so I was wondering if Santa brought you anything and what you may have settled on?

If anyone has any other up-to-date suggestions they would be welcome too.

[bobthebob1234]

I got the lg nas in the end and stuck two 1tb drives in it, then set up raid 1.

Unfortunately it is now apparently discontinued

But I would recommend it if you can find one. Only thing that bugs me is no ssh access, but in a way that is probably a good thing as it stops me breaking it!

I would say that if you do use 1tb or larger drives you really want to be using raid 1 (or raid 5, but that needs more drives) cos when one drive fails, that is a lot of data lost!

[Brian Hunter]

What were your reasons for going to this one?

I'm trying to get as much info as I can before I buy, I'd like to get something as, like you mentioned, penguin friendly as possible.

[bobthebob1234]

Reasons:

• Cheap
• Works with penguins
• Allowed me to put what ever drives I wanted in
• Supported raid 1
• USB ports for printer (and it works to )
• Low power (sleep mode, etc)
• Gigibit ethernet for when I get gigabit switch to fling massive files around my network
• Added bonus of dvd drive

CIFS/SMB communication will work with linux and winblows (assuming you have samba client installed on linux). I actually have a share on my nas mounted on my myth tv box via samba.

I could have gone for a plug server thing a me bob and installed everything myself, but I just wanted something I could turn on, it work without any fuss and just be there