Going for a cheap NAS
- Published March 5th, 2008 in Tech Comment
I’m in the market looking for acquiring a cheap yet powerful NAS.
The first option is maintaining your own machine (choose your *nix flavor) with an array of disks in RAID1 and SMB/CIFS. Yeah, cool, but it has a couple of disadvantages: 1) it wastes more energy because it will probably be running on a more powerful CPU; 2) maintenance is not as straightforward as pushing a reset button; 3) it probably won’t allow hot-swap as most NAS devices allow; 4) you’ll waste much more time.
If I were to go to a custom-tailored NAS I’d definitely choose FreeNAS, which is a stripped down version of FreeBSD with a very cute web interface for configuring everything. It’s stupidly easy to configure (you don’t even notice it’s running over FreeBSD), lightweight and powerful. But it still suffers from problems previously referred, namely 1) and 3).
In the end, I just want something that you plug, configure an IP and that’s it. Considering these requirements of tantamount importance, I’ve looked up and I got the following contenders:
1) HP mv2120
2) Dlink DNS-323
3) LaCie 2big Network
All of them run on Linux and provide about the same functionalities. Except for Dlink, all of them have a 1Gbps network card, work over CIFS and allow RAID1. They all work over a web interface and have at least one extra USB 2.0 connection that could be used to plug another external hard drive.
The HP model is hot sexy but it hasn’t been released yet (expected March 2008) and these kind of business products from HP are usually hard to get for non-resellers like me.
Dlink lacks the 1Gbps port but, except for that, nothing note-worthy.
LaCie seems like the winning contender. It already comes with the two hard drivers which is a major plus, sparing you from having to purchase separate disks. It’s nice, sleek and not that expensive. €480 for the 1TB version, which already includes 2x 500GB SATA-II hard drives. Another major plus (along with HP’s mv2120) is that it includes a really nice backup utility that might be useful for Windows machines, unaware of the power of rsync.
I’m probably going for LaCie 2big Network 1TB (which is actually 500GB on RAID1).
A friend of mine has that LaCie on his office as a “office backup” connected to the router via eth.
If you wanna know something I can ask. ;-)
Hmm… I heard the DNS-323 uses some non-standard protocol and can only be accessed by Windows. Also, Lacie is just pure evil, look somewhere else. :D
How about these? (expensive, but oh so cool)
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/12/infrant-releases-the-readynas-nv/
http://www.nordichardware.com/news,6484.html
http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=11&pid=28
D-Link DNS-323 Special Features:
# SATA Drive Support
# Internet Access via FTP
# UPnP AV for Storing and Streaming Media Files
# 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Port
# USB Print Server Port
# Built-In Fan Included
what part did you miss on the gigabit port?
Carlos,
That’s precisely the purpose of the NAS :-) Cool!
Gustavo,
I was reading a review not that old (Oct 2007) and they gave that as the major complaint against DNS-323. They probably fixed it in the latest version. Nice.
Bruno,
I think that’s not accurate. According to the site the Dlink uses pretty standard protocols. What’s only accessible on Windows is the software for locating the device, but since you know the IP address you can access it manually and change according to your network.
As for LaCie, why is it evil? Never had a single problem with them.
Regarding the links you provided, problem being that they’re pretty hard to get in Portugal.
Também tive o mesmo “problema” que tu ainda há pouco tempo. Quis comprar uma máquina para NAS (e não só) e acabei por optar por montar uma máquina num barebone (dual core 2ghz, sata 2 750gb e 2gb ram) ficou por 300 euros acho eu.
A grande vantagem é que agora ponho lá os serviços que quero! Não me chegavam shares por samba já que necessito UPNP para fazer streaming para a PS3!
Hugz,
Luís