How do you guys host your storage?

[reverend]

I've just been thinking about getting a small SAN / NAS setup at home so that I can keep copies of all my stuff together - how are you guys hosting yours?

Options wise there do seem to be quite a lot of small NAS appliances around now, or the other option is just get a case which takes a shitload of drives and run a small server hosting them all on something like say Windows 2008 R2 or Linux.

This would make a nice little beast with room for 16 3.5" drives:

http://www.xcase.co.uk/Chenbro-RM-41...-rm414b-rp.htm

When you price it all up storage gets expensive pretty quickly!

[casio]

get a cheap old netbook and a couple of big drives and install freenas, if youve an old pc laying around you could build one from that without spending alot

ive got a couple of wd mybook world and they are literally as quick as the speed of smell, my freenas box on the other hand is great, if you're unsure and you have the hardware try windows home server, i built a box for a mate with WHS on it and its a piece of cake to use, freenas isnt hard though m8 and im not in any hurry to change over

EDIT
I forgot there is a device called a pogo plug that side steps all of it, you just plug in a couple of big fat drives via usb and its done, the pogo plug is about £60 and a 1tb drive is around the £50 meaning you'd have a 1tb 'nas' for about £110 that you can add to whenever you want to. im sure you can find the pogo plug cheaper but they flog them in currys

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/r/pogoplug/0_0_0/

[Wompastompa]

hp mediasmart server all the way

[wtaylor]

I have a stand alone NAS with 2x2TB drives and RAID'ed, can put another 2 drives if needed, works great for streaming films/music around the house

[theodotcom]

I have windows home server running at home, really easy to use, the console you can access from any computer set up with it so you dont even need a monitor, keyboard or mouse attached once set up.
You dont need a powerful pc to run WHS either.

[crashtestmac]

The options at the moments seem to be

FreeNAS
Windows Home Server
QNAP (NAS)
Synology (NAS)
Some cheap one made by netgear for about £50 for the enclosure with a free 500gb drive from ebuyer at the moment)
Drobo (NAS great but big bucks.)

Most of it is cost,

I have a QNAP 209 which is great but you cannot copy to it and watch at the same time or FF or REW HD stuff but there is a newer more powerful version out now.

I am tempted to try WHS but i have all MACs at home and do not want to go "dirty" again..!

[tombott]

FreeNAS, why pay for a server OS when all you want to do it have a network share?

[emu]

hi
i have a little atom server which i have 2tb of storage attached to it
its currently running windows 7 and i remote desktop into it from a number of devices
i use it mainly for downloading nzbs , would i be better of binning 7 and switching to a different os?

[reverend]

Thanks guys, I actually use FreeNAS as an iSCSI initiator so that I can do clustering in a box with VMs etc - it's nice software and does exactly what it says on the tin

A server does sound like the best sort of bet for the amount of storage I'd be looking at - ie more than 10TB I'm thinking so far?

I've got access to MS software legitimately so it wouldn't cost me anything to run any of their stuff - just wondering actually there would be some pretty cool stuff that could be done with streaming etc from R2 to anywhere like one of those boxes that you can stream Sky off - can't think of the name off the top of my head but they look like big Yorkie bars!

[reverend]

hi
i have a little atom server which i have 2tb of storage attached to it
its currently running windows 7 and i remote desktop into it from a number of devices
i use it mainly for downloading nzbs , would i be better of binning 7 and switching to a different os?

What do you use for downloading NZBs mate? Sabnzbd is quality and I think I read that's even built into some NAS appliances now!

[reverend]

If you guys are interested then you get pick up 1TB WD Essentials drives from Tesco currently for £44.97

http://www.digital-forums.com/showth...34#post3354034

[emu]

What do you use for downloading NZBs mate? Sabnzbd is quality and I think I read that's even built into some NAS appliances now!

yeah i switched over from newsleecher to sabnzbd though havent worked out how to access sabnzbd from the web at work yet

[reverend]

yeah i switched over from newsleecher to sabnzbd though havent worked out how to access sabnzbd from the web at work yet

Should just be a case of opening the relevant ports on your firewall mate, forwarding that port to your machine running sabnzbd and setting up your router to register the IP with something like dyndns.org if it can do that?

[Spennyboy]

QNAP TS 509 here.

Lovely bit of kit.

[pheonixsingh]

own DIY server here, with an intel LE-1620, w/ 10tb of storage. Using Flexraid for parity (similar to Unraid), stores all my movies,tv shows etc, also does torrents and auto collecting of metadata for all media. Lastly also using Orb to stream tv shows to my iphone and laptop when not at home.

[Geko]

I use a Qnap too....

But this is cheap - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/225067

[Over Carl]

Cos of the credit crunch I recently built something similar for work rather than buy a dell - sorry can't easily find the case model no, but I've linked to one:

Supermicro Case (with heavy duty 865w psu*) : £282
Rack Mount Kit PT26L-B : £38.00
Supermicro X8SIE Board: £160
i3-530 : £89.00
2 x 2Gb DDR3 ECC : £68ea
Dell PERC 6i : £146
3 x 5.25 - 4 x 3.5 Adaptor /Fan : £21
4 x hotswap cables for above : £6.40ea
Optional Cooling Shroud (MCP-310-74301-0N) : £7.75
Optional Fans x 2 (Fan-0104L4) : £25.00ea
8 x Hitachi A7K2000 (2Tb) : £212.00ea

Total of £955.35 for the computer, then £1696 for the drives, then also used 2 old ones for the os, had to feed a sata lead outside the case to a drive to install, and I still wanna get the battery backup unit for the perc. However, the drives are rated for a damn long life and are made to work in a raid, but I did get one doa! Looking at your chenbro case, I wish I picked that instead!

* When I was ordering I bought a coolermaster psu but found it to be incompatible - case has slightly non standard psu mountings. Anyway, long story but I managed to short the supermicro psu once while it was running, but the pc was still running sweet!

Also another os to throw in the mix is openfiler - ages ago I was wanting to do this on a much smaller scale - abandoned project, but can't rememeber why, but there was a definite reason I picked openfiler over freenas - I think it may have been ad compatibility though which probably won't bother you at home.

[reverend]

Just thought I'd update this as I never got around to doing it!

Finally ordered a HP Microserver - they're £219 + VAT but there is a deal on this month where you get £100 cashback from HP!

It's got four drive bays, they're not hot swappable though but I'm just going to fill it with Samsung 2TB drives and see how it goes.

I'll be playing with Windows 2008 R2 software RAID, along with some of the Linux appliances too so will report back what the performance is like when it's all rocking and rolling.

I'll be playing about with iSCSI too so I'm hoping it will be possible to saturate the gigabit ethernet port so I may have to stick in another card so I can try it with a teamed / aggregated network connection

[reverend]

This thing is looking good so far!

Had a knackered HD204UI from Scan so took that back and I've been playing around with it now.

Got 4x2TB in a software RAID5 in Storage Server 2008 R2 and it's decent so far, have got single instance storage support on the big volume and created some iSCSI targets and it's easily saturating the gigabit network when I'm connecting via ESX.

I'm just looking into sticking another NIC into it so I can use teaming / link aggregation to double up the bandwidth to 2Gb to see how it performs then - I'm guessing the software RAID may become the bottleneck but saying that this little Neo processor isn't struggling at all - it's using less than 50% CPU when the Gb link is saturated and most of that is the iSCSI target software and not Windows working out the parity!

[blacksheep]

I'd check you're read/write speeds to the disks to see if it's worth adding an extra nic as you're probably getting towards the max write with gigabit.