I agree with Justin on his point about the firmware. The stuff I have seen so far has stunk.
The first device I picked up a while ago would work fine - if only one user was doing one thing on it. Throw another task at it, and it would lock up. There was a firmware upgrade for the thing, but that would allow two tasks. What was the point?
The next device I picked up started off just as bad. As soon as some bit torrent traffic started up, the device would freeze. A few weeks later this was fixed in firmware. Once I threw a fourth computer at it, the device again froze.
I've pretty much had it with these devices!
I did come up with a solution though - Mac mini with usb drives hanging off it. Have yet to kill that thing. Plus, it is low power, which to me is a biggie. It's also dang quiet.
In other words, get a real computer doing the job. These "NAS" devices devices might be okay for your mom, but if you want to be productive spend a few extra bucks and put up a real computer. Even one of the
On Apr 21, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Justin Dugger wrote:
This a question I put before askMeFi in January [1]. After parsing the recommendations, I picked up a DNS 323 [2] a few months ago to meet my own requirements.
A NAS is usually sold as a turnkey product. Default firmwares have a specific set of features and that's it. If you're lucky they'll fix performance bugs or add a bittorrent feature late in the game. But don't expect the default firmware to let admin a NAS like a normal box. This stuff is built for large markets with disposable incomes. I would make sure whatever you buy says it supports USB UPS monitoring and shutdown before pulling the trigger. And make sure it supports UPNP if you want that.
Alternatively, Debian does build on ARM, and there's at least one Debian Developer [3] working on generalizing support for these devices. Last I heard, they're working on improving throughput for these devices. You'd be able to put in all the normal UNIX tools, and run normal USB devices Debian supports. Very few manufacturers encourage this, so the set of hardware that runs Debian perfectly is constrained in many ways. The closest to your requirements I've seen seems to be the QNAP TS-409 [4]. Expecting real time transcoding out of a 500Mhz ARM with no DSP is still crazy, though.
I think WiFi connectivity is going to be killer here -- are you expecting a NAS with wifi built in, or just planning on plugging into a WiFi bridge?
Justin Dugger
[1] http://ask.metafilter.com/112653/Reccomend-an-NSLU2-alternative [2] http://wiki.dns323.info/ [3] http://www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/ [4] http://www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/qnap/ts-409/
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 5:04 AM, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
I'm now the proud adopted father of a 60GB Playstation 3, a native DLNA-compliant UPNP player. I've had an N800 in the house for a while too, so it'd be nice to be able to start utilizing those capabilities. My current desktop dual-boots and stores most of the files that I make available over my home intranet on a pair of removable hard drives.
I'm torn, however, between buying a hardware NAS (Can any of them really handle transcoding a decent variety of codecs?) or building a Solaris/BSD box.
The NAS I'd stuff with three or four newly purchased hard drives, preferably purchased separately. If I were to build a Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexanta/FreeBSD/whatever box, I'd be running a JBOD ZFS array with the two pre-existing drives (gutted from the removable chassies) and two new ones that are each twice the size of the older ones. If I were to go down homebrew road, we'd be talking about an Atom, a Nano, or some other reasonably low-power processor and motherboard - As long as I get enough performance to saturate an 802.11g connection, I'll be fine. More interested in being able to stretch out its life on a UPS.
The added flexibility and the massive cost savings (largely from the JBOD capabilities) of the going the homebrew way seem nice, but does anyone have any words of wisdom about problems that I might run into trying to run a decent transcoding UPNP server on an OS with a mature ZFS implementation (ie, presumably not Linux just yet - I'm not running a four disk array under FUSE), or point out any other concerns that might push me towards an off-the-shelf NAS?
A few other concerns that might influence what I ought to do: 1: My house is concrete and brick throughout, with basically no way to run CAT6 without punching holes in the floor. As such, the wifi connection is most likely to be the interface that all this stuff runs off of. 2: The current drives I'm using are about a year and a half old. If you think I'm better off getting all new drives, that's fine - I can sell my old ones easily enough here. 3: I'll definitely have the new NAS behind a UPS, regardless, but Kathmandu is "down" to 12 hours of rolling blackouts from last month's high of 16 hours/day, and I'm not about to burn enough of your tax dollars in my generator to keep the house powered up 24/7. Unattended shutdown or, at the very least, the ability to safely recover from an abrubt shutdown is an absolute necessity.
Thanks, Sean Crago Kathmandu _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
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