I have messed with a lot of NAS devices. In the end I still build them myself because I have never been happy with most of them. My actual storage machine is a full on Linux box with a Quad core CPU and a healthy amount of RAM.
The new synology stuff looks promising. A good friend of mine has a DS1511+ (http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS1511+/index.php) but it was not a budget device. Without disks it was in the $800 range. We are looking to evaluate one for the office and so far it looks promising. The next incarnation of my storage server might be based around one of these if I don't build it from scratch. The only other storage "appliance" I have been happy with is the Scale Computing storage cluster that we have at the office. The downside is that the price tag is way out of reach for the home user (5 digits and up). I still own a DNS-323 but it is pretty much only a music server as well as storing an additional copy of my local backups. A number of family and friends have this as well. What I do like about it is that end users do not need to put an OS on it. I also really like that if the device itself dies, I can recover the data from one of these with pretty much any Linux box. Sometimes simple is the better option. I would stay far far away from ZFS if you care about the data you are storing. Best of luck to you if your data is on ZFS *when* something bad happens (because it will, eventually). I would also stay away from a BSD based NAS DIY distro like FreeNAS. I realize that this might spark a flame war so all I will say is that I have my reasons based on direct personal experiences. This is my opinion, take it or leave it. Speaking of bad things happening, it is a good idea to actually test your implementation before relying on it. Do dumb things like pulling drives or power cables out while in the middle of a write and see what happens. I have lost track of the number of failed devices that I have seen over the past couple of years where I was asked to recover data after something failed. I have a pretty low opinion of most of the consumer network storage products, including the Drobo (I am not a fan of Drobo, though I hear that the firmware has gotten better in the past year). These little things do die regularly, especially the consumer oriented devices. One final point, have a backup strategy as owning one of these does not count, no matter how many disks it has (3-2-1 is the ideal starting point, it means have 3 copies, on two different media, with at least 1 copy offsite). Hth, On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Dale Scott <dalesc...@shaw.ca> wrote: >> > Seagate GoFlex Home Network Storage System. I know Gustin has >> > mentioned some stuff about the D-link in the past, but I wondered what >> > others thought about the various options or any ideas. >> > > > FWIW, I've been very pleased with my 1TB Iomega "Home Media Network Hard > Drive" (what a mouthful!). I haven't configured remote access (it seems it > might be locked to one Dynamic DNS service provider, and possibly with a fee > after the 1st year), but network printing, UPnP with XBox360 and PS3, > torrent client, and general file sharing on a Windows-client network, it's > all worked with very little effort (also supports Apple AFP and Time > Machine, and can be an iTunes server, although I have no experience with > this). > > If I wanted RAID, I'd look first at this little guy's big brothers based on > my experiences with this one. > > Dale > > > > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > clug-talk@clug.ca > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying > _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list clug-talk@clug.ca http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
