Which NAS software?

[Rick Sanchez]

Hi,

As the title says; which NAS software should I switch to? I've had enough of FreeNAS.

Uses:
Backup images of main PC; incremental
Shared storage
Downloading
Media Streaming
Up-dating Media Center with downloaded content e.g. TV

Home automation (may use raspberry pi)




Thanks

[beerman]

WHS ticks all those boxes.

[Rick Sanchez]

What about redundancy? So if a drive fails etc, like the ZFS system?

[evilsatan]

Server 2008 r2 is good but thats a server OS so has a lot of features.

[Over Carl]

Apparently the only major reason to use whs was the drive extender feature which firstly they removed and secondly I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

I was also going to suggest 2008 R2.

Another interesting alternative is Windows Storage Server. I haven't got round to using this myself but it's supposed to be perfect for the job - afaik it's basically 2008 R2 with extra stuff tacked on so for example it can automatically perform file de-duplication (meaning 10 identical copies of a 1Gb file will only actually take up 1Gb of storage space) or it can be an iSCSI target which is handy for people looking to run VM's. It's only meant to be sold to hardware manufacturers the idea being that high end nas drives will actually be running this as their os.

RAID wise, the only things I would consider would be a hardware battery backed caching raid controller (best imho), linux/dmraid (note 1) or linux/zfs (note 2).

Note 1: From what I've read, throughputs are decent and (rare) problems can normally be fixed if you have the expertise. Also if your raid controller or pc dies you can build another linux box in anything then easily mount your raid and go. Downside is that access uses extra cpu cycles for the XOR calculations I would hope to offload to a hardware RAID card.

Note 2: Haven't done much reading on this but ZFS seems to be the bollox when it comes to modern RAID.

Something I've mentioned on DF before is the value of a battery backed caching raid controller. Fake raid/on board raid is just plain shite. Terrible write speeds for raid 5/6 which is what I would use if I were you, and much higher likelihood of problems/data loss. Also the battery helps - if the OS has told the card to write a bit of data, if the card has cache enabled but no battery and the power to the box is pulled, the os will think the data has been written but it just vanished. The battery keeps the cache contents to be written when the box next comes up. Write caching is not recommended at all without battery, and cards run very slow without write cache.

I used to be a fan of the Dell PERC 5i which can be found dirt cheap on ebay but I have found no matter your setup, the card is a bottleneck and can only do 300 Megabytes/s write in raid 5 and it can't do raid 6 so I want to get a PERC6i some time (although gigabit ethernet can only do 125megabytes/second). If you do look at PERC's, the rack server version that comes on a funny tray will fit but then you will need to source a back plate to avoid the card falling out one day. Also some people need to mask one SM-BUS pin, this is very well documented on the net.

[beerman]

Apparently the only major reason to use whs was the drive extender feature which firstly they removed and secondly I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

I was also going to suggest 2008 R2.

WHS 2011 is based on server 2008 R2 but gives the extra features you'd want in a home environment. It's also a lot cheaper if you haven't got access to a 2008 R2 license key.