NAS?

[Arthur_Dent]

Hello all,

Following a disk failure and the lamentable failure of my backup strategy I am thinking of investing in a NAS box on which to store regular backups of my Fedora17 home server and Fedora16 desktop PC.

I'm not big into music streaming and such like, but I might have a think about that out of curiousity.

The main requirements are that it is quiet (24/7 working), reliable (24/7 working) and able to be used effortlesly with Linux but also with a couple of Windows machines used by less enlightened members of the household.

This is a home setup and, with a fearsome wife who does not understand the attraction of shiny toys-for-boys and so the number one requirement is COST!

I am thinking about this one with a 2Tb drive. What do others think?

I would be very grateful for any helpful advice / suggestions...

Thanks

Mark

[Dutch_Master]

A single 2 TB drive isn't gonna solve your backup problems... Get 2 drives, of different manufacturers. Can't tell you anything about the device itself, as I'm using a RAID 5 setup on a home-brew file server instead

[roseway]

In general, NAS boxes are small Linux machines configured to interface with Windows machines by using CIFS. For Windows machines they're more or less plug & play. To access them from a Linux machine you need to manually configure a suitable fstab line using CIFS - not too difficult, but not entirely straightforward.

[Paradigm Shifter]

If you've got an old system lying around, turn that into a NAS box. FreeNAS is awesome, although if using ZFS is a bit RAM hungry... 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of HDD is recommended. I'd always recommend going RAID5 or RAID6 for a NAS box; which if using an 'off the shelf' NAS means one that can deal with 3 or 4 HDDs (obviously you can get ones that handle more, but price goes up exponentially). I'm using a Synology DS411j at the minute, which isn't bad but was fairly pricy.

If price the ultimate decider, that dual bay one you linked plus a pair of 2TB drives in RAID1 is probably the best option... unless you've got a collection of spares around and can build your own, of course.

[Arthur_Dent]

@ Dutch_Master - Thanks for that - useful advice...

To access them from a Linux machine you need to manually configure a suitable fstab line using CIFS - not too difficult, but not entirely straightforward.

Hmm... I had hoped that I could partition the drive(s) with at least some space as EXT4 and simply mount them as NFS - but I guess this means that I would have to be able to set up the NFS exports on the NAS? Or would CIFS be easier?

Another question if I may. Would both drives have to be the same size for RAID to work?

Thanks for the useful input chaps. Much appreciated...

[Paradigm Shifter]

Another question if I may. Would both drives have to be the same size for RAID to work?

No, but you'll only have the capacity of the smaller drive. So if you paired a 1TB with a 2TB in RAID1, you'd only have 1TB 'usable'.

[einonm]

I would wholeheartedly recommend a Synology NAS - they aren't the cheapest NAS out there, but the support and software you get is second to none IMHO. It does Linux/mac/windows/DLNA sharing and even allows you to set up a local iTunes server, if you're into that sort of thing.