NAS advice?

[Justin Dugger]

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 at 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
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