• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

NAS Software Recomendation

Lutiana

Lutiana

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Mar 26, 2009
Messages
3,302
Location
Dublin, CA USA
Hey guys.

I want to turn one of my not-so-old machines into a NAS on my network. I have a RAID 5 card with 4 1tb drives (3tb of space) and I was wondering if anyone out there has any recommendations on what I should use as the OS.

Hardware wise I have a few options, a few Athlon 1ghz machines, an intel server machine (500Mhz P3, single proc) and some others in the 2-3ghz range.

I will mostly store video on it and stream that to my media center PC that is hooked up to my TV, but I will also use it to store archived ISOs and various other software downloads and archives.

I was reading about RAIDZ, so I was wondering if anyone had real experience with it as well.

Thanks in advance.
 
Whilst I havn't played with this myself I think I might look at FreeNAS as it seems to be targetted where you want.

http://www.freenas.org/

On the other hand if you are windows through and through and have never used Unix/Linux you might want to buy a new box with Windows Home Server... (yes toungue is in cheek)
 
I think it just depends what OS you're used to and efficient at for your requirements. Linux/*BSD can do samba to emulate windows file shares pretty well but you are of course sitting there trying to use 3rd party drivers to do what Windows would do natively. On the other had you'll end up needing to use Windows 2000 or higher to get that large of a partition shared out (and actually I don't recall which OS supports partitions greater than 2TB unless of course you just partition it out). From there that's just your file server, whatever software you need to run is the next question.

Either OS probably have good enough apps though for sharing files and offering them up in DLNA or whatever format you're looking for.
 
Just throw your favorite distro of Linux on there. You don't mention what your client OS's are, but I'm assuming Windows. Samba is easy to set up and works great, you can map the fileserver as a drive and play video over the network that way.

Using Linux as the client is even easier, you can set up NFS on the server and just mount the exported volume to a convenient place on your client filesystem. I have my server set up so I can mount the share on the various machines I use, and work with the contained files as if they were on the local disk. Network speed doesn't seem to affect much, I can play HD video over the 100mbit network without lag - it even works over the wireless to my laptop. I've even done silly things like burning a CD from an ISO stored on the fileserver - it works fine.

Linux supports NFS at the kernel level, and Samba, while separate, is easy to install. I've got this one large fileshare (a RAID volume) that's available by both NFS (for all my *nix machines), and Samba (in case someone brings over a Windows laptop).

Speed of the server itself, especially for home use, isn't too crical, but you'd probably want a fair amount of RAM (at least 512mb). The PIII should handle the load, provided it works with your RAID controller. But, you might want to go with the 1ghz Athlon.

-Ian
 
Solaris' RAIDZ is great. I plan on using it with OpenBSD or FreeBSD when I rebuild my home fileserver. It was recommended to me by a friend who'd written up several papers/articles on the matter. I'll see if I can dig them up for you.
 
Right now my 3tb array is running on a Windows 2008 Server box. I wanted to turn it into more of a appliance type NAS that would allow me to share out the data to both linux and windows machines. I was running Windows Home Server for a bit, but I did not particularly like it.

I may try freeNas when I get a chance.
 
Rick Ethridge said:
I'm using a Pentium III motherboard with 512 Meg in a Gateway full-tower case. I'm awaiting the money to buy a SATA II PCI card for it.
Click to expand...

Be carefull when building SAN and NAS boxes with small amounts of RAM. One reason you get good performance on SAN and NAS is because the box can provide a large secondary cache. If you skimp on RAM you loose that advantage. Howver for general home use, and vintage computing this shouldn't be an issue.
 
g4ugm said:
Be carefull when building SAN and NAS boxes with small amounts of RAM. One reason you get good performance on SAN and NAS is because the box can provide a large secondary cache. If you skimp on RAM you loose that advantage. Howver for general home use, and vintage computing this shouldn't be an issue.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is why I think I'll end up with a more modern machine. My goal is 1gb+ on the RAM.
 
You might want to check out OpenFiler as well. I'm using Scientific Linux 6 though, as I like the flexibility, and I'm willing to do without the specialized interface. I do install Webmin on all my machines though.

I picked up a nice dual quad core SuperMicro machine on eBay (similar price, same case & motherboard as this auction, except mine had no rails (~$60-80) but did have quad core procs). After losing too many GBs of data, I decided to go all out with redundant everything with UPSs, PSs, raid 6, extra backups and everything.
I'm also leaning towards nearline SAS drives, as they are full duplex and have additional error checking and handling than SATA.

Also, if you feel adventurous, there are plenty of 2Gb & 4Gb FibreChannel arrays/enclosures being retired. (Like this 4Gb one.)

I went (a wee bit) crazy and bought a 42U rack and put it in the garage. I have 7 machines on the rack right now, with 2x 2250watt (3KVa) UPSs. I managed to pickup a 24 port DDR Infiniband switch for $250 and I'm planning to get my hands into clustering :p

I had to put a 10GbE card in my XServe since no one is making Infiniband drivers for OS X anylonger. I have one machine switching/routing everything from the house's 48 port GbE to the Infiniband and 10GbE, and my 10Mb DSL & 30Mb cable modem. I want to have one network for everything from Z80s & 6502s to my Phenom IIs, Xeons, Alphas & UltraSparcs :D

All my more recent machines have IPv6 setup and running, and eventually I want to configure an IPv4/IPv6 mapping for my older machines.

My co-workers think I need help... but everyone has 120+ computers at home, right? :D
__
Trevor
 
Lord Moz said:
My co-workers think I need help... but everyone has 120+ computers at home, right? :D
Click to expand...

No, you are in fact nuts, but in a very very cool way 8)

OpenFiler is one I am considering, though I do not need to buy any hardware (12Tb does sound nice though).

I am running a XenServer on a low end Intel server (16gb of RAM, Quad Core Xeon CPU), it has a virtual Server 2008 on it and I intend to add a virtual Linux mail/web server to it as well. Hence the need for a stand alone SAN. I want it to be independant to my intel server incase I decide to wipe it out and do something else with it.
 
I'm using ubuntu linux server with remote login via "putty", and "samba" to talk to the windows machines. It has good points like being able to set up a daily backup & also to do stuff like run "get iplayer" at night to record the BBC stuff I might want to watch or listen to directly into the appropriate media directories. Setting it up however, was a bit of a painful introduction to linux, and it bit me on the bum when it gradually ground to a halt because one of the programs I was running each night was waiting for a typed response it never got, so built up a few instances. apart from that it works brilliantly on an old celeron.
I have yet to set up an emailing answer-phone - could be fun!
 
I used an Ubuntu server as a file server, but SAMBA had some issues with my Vista machines, and streaming video never worked right. So I am hesitant to go that route.

I may end up using Server 2008 actually. Anyone got a socket 939 Opteron lying around they want to donate to this project?
 
lutiana said:
I was reading about RAIDZ, so I was wondering if anyone had real experience with it as well.
Click to expand...

Yes, I have. I have been running a FreeBSD fileserver with ZFS for over a year now. When I started, I had many years of experience with FreeBSD, but no experience with ZFS. I found zfs easy to learn, and easy to work with. And it is solid! As you can read, my hardware hasn't been rock solid all the time, and also my ZFS configuration has not always been optimal, bot things has caused reboots. ZFS just continues on.
 
I've been playing around with FreeNas and really liked it.
Even has a redundant system partition and runs from USB stick.

I'd use it if not my server had to run a windows application to control my ISDN telephone switch (Siemens Gigaset).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top