NAS advice?

[Randy Rathbun]

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 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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