I've run out of space on all the drives I have in various computers on my network, so I need to buy some kind of storage solution to expand space. I would like it to be some kind of RAID, not just a JBOD so I don't lose data.

I have my HTPC on the network, I basically just want to feed DVD and HD files from a storage device to my HTPC. I don't need to stream many different files all at once.

I don't understand what kind of speed I need, I'm looking at the Infrant and the Buffalo stuff on newegg, but I don't really know what it is that I need and what is overkill. It seems like the Buffalos are maybe noted for being slow, but as I said I'm not looking to move a huge amount of data around, just streaming one HD or DVD program at a time basically.

What's my best value options?

I'm asking a similar question ... did come across the USR8700 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822134001) ... wonder how good it is ...

I just spent a few months researching for large storage solutions and purchased the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ last month. I've seen nearly 100% positive responses from all owners. It's $600 w/o disks or $1000 with 2x500GB. They have an active user forum with Infrant employee participation, and a very stable firmware, but with active development and feature additions. I highly recommend this product if you truly need network storage. But, the one thing I don't like about it is that it can't be direct attached when needed/wanted.

If you can use direct attached storage, I'm sure you can find something cheaper, but of course w/o all the features. Maybe something like the 2 drive AMS Venus DS3R for $150 ... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16817332006

Chad R.

.... I would like it to be some kind of RAID, not just a JBOD so I don't lose data ....


A point that has been raised countless times, but deserves a quick mention:

RAID is not *necessarily* backup. If you accidentally delete/overwrite a file, it is gone - the RAID functionality will not help you. RAID helps protect against disk failure but does nothing to offset the impact of human error.

On the other hand, JBOD *can be* backup if you make periodic (not immediate as in RAID) backups. For example, I keep three generations of backups, one per week, so as long as I discover the error within a month, I am fine. Given that my movies and music do not change dramatically each day, losing a week's worth of changes is a non-issue (btw, I backup some key files every six hours).

The primary value of RAID is data availability (i.e. drive fails, you can still use your system while it rebuilds) not data backup. This is why RAID is absolutely right for a corporate environment. You can't have your users sit around for a day waiting for the IT guy to reload the system. My family, on the other hand, can easily forgo movies (or, gasp!, play a DVD) for an evening if such a disaster occurs for me.

For me personally, the best solution is JBOD where my backup software automatically does the above and informs me when files change so I can be alerted to some sort of file corruption or screwup on my part. For example, "Bill, I am backing up five new movies, but DOOM has changed." Of course, that wouldn't be a bad thing. :)

There are a bunch of threads about this point, just search for "raid backup" (without quotes) and you should trip across them.


Bill

A point that has been raised countless times, but deserves a quick mention:

RAID is not *necessarily* backup. If you accidentally delete/overwrite a file, it is gone - the RAID functionality will not help you. RAID helps protect against disk failure but does nothing to offset the impact of human error.

On the other hand, JBOD *can be* backup if you make periodic (not immediate as in RAID) backups. For example, I keep three generations of backups, one per week, so as long as I discover the error within a month, I am fine. Given that my movies and music do not change dramatically each day, losing a week's worth of changes is a non-issue (btw, I backup some key files every six hours).

The primary value of RAID is data availability (i.e. drive fails, you can still use your system while it rebuilds) not data backup. This is why RAID is absolutely right for a corporate environment. You can't have your users sit around for a day waiting for the IT guy to reload the system. My family, on the other hand, can easily forgo movies (or, gasp!, play a DVD) for an evening if such a disaster occurs for me.

For me personally, the best solution is JBOD where my backup software automatically does the above and informs me when files change so I can be alerted to some sort of file corruption or screwup on my part. For example, "Bill, I am backing up five new movies, but DOOM has changed." Of course, that wouldn't be a bad thing. :)

There are a bunch of threads about this point, just search for "raid backup" (without quotes) and you should trip across them.


Bill


The snapshot capability of the ReadyNAS and some others is a great way to avoid deleting files accidently. ReadyNas also features a network recycle bin so in for most practical purposes a ready nas provides RAID and adequate backup....

Sean

The snapshot capability of the ReadyNAS and some others is a great way to avoid deleting files accidently. ReadyNas also features a network recycle bin so in for most practical purposes a ready nas provides RAID and adequate backup....

Sean

Agreed and I appreciate you not turning this into a religious war (as a few of the previous threads became). That is why I carefully phrased my statements. I just don't want people to think "RAID=backup" without carefully considering their requirements and the specific features of the device they are looking to purchase.


Bill

Bill..

What software do you use for backup? Do you use the backup built into windows (if you are on a windows box) or do you use a third party software to back up your data?

R~

RAID is not *necessarily* backup. If you accidentally delete/overwrite a file, it is gone - the RAID functionality will not help you. RAID helps protect against disk failure but does nothing to offset the impact of human error.

That's a good point, but overwriting a file is not something that concerns me. Disk failure does concern me. Right now I have I think about a TB in just drives, and while it's not THAT big a deal if one fails, it would be annoying and something I'd like to avoid, which is why RAID is worth it. My array of drives now is also smaller sized drives <250gb, so not that big a deal if one fails. If I have much larger drives and one fails, it's a little bit more annoying. Really the only files that are going to be on the server/NAS are just plain movie files, very static. Most of the drives I have now haven't had any data changed on them in a long time. So it seems to me that Raid is probably the more effective and efficient way to just have some simple piece of mind (and also not have to do backups manually all the time, though maybe there are automatic ways to do this that I'm not aware of).

I just spent a few months researching for large storage solutions and purchased the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ last month. I've seen nearly 100% positive responses from all owners. It's $600 w/o disks or $1000 with 2x500GB. They have an active user forum with Infrant employee participation, and a very stable firmware, but with active development and feature additions. I highly recommend this product if you truly need network storage. But, the one thing I don't like about it is that it can't be direct attached when needed/wanted.

If you can use direct attached storage, I'm sure you can find something cheaper, but of course w/o all the features. Maybe something like the 2 drive AMS Venus DS3R for $150 ... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16817332006

Chad R.

What I don't really understand is why it's so expensvie for just the case and software, really.

For instance this Buffalo NAS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306
Has 1TB of capacity, and is $499.

Here is another buffalo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822165011
That also has 1TB and it's $699.

And the diskless infrants:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822329006
and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822329023

Are at $499 and $615, respectively, without any drives at all.

I don't understand the price differences between each respective product, and also between the two brands. I was looking at the Infrant stuff before, but it seems like to get similar kind of storage space as the Buffalos, that I'd have to spend at least several hundred dollars more to buy the drives I need, and I don't really understand why that price discrepancy is so large.

Honestly, I followed the Buffalo Technology product line for more than a year and was almost 95% convinced that's what I would get when I was ready to do it. I don't have time to go through a detailed comparison right now, but will say a couple of things.

Buffalo has 5 network storage products (i think was 4 until recently). The two links you provide are the lower two... "TeraStation" and "TeraStation Home". Based on "feature-set" alone, one of these may be perfectly suited for your needs. Here's Buffalo's product comparison chart... http://www.buffalotech.com/comparison-charts/network-storage/terastation/

I assume the 1.0TB models are not just "max potential capacity", but actually comes with 4x250GB drives. 4 drives is the maximum it can hold, and I can't remember if their products have the ability to upgrade existing disks. If not, that should be of concern.

As I stated, one of those may be perfectly suited for you, but.... as always, you get what you pay for. From a feature set, the TeraStation Pro is more comparable. Id also say you should put a value on: stability, speed, customer support, firmware fixes/additions, community support, etc...

If you want, tonight I can spend a little more time doing some technical comparisons and point out pros/cons: i.e. ide vs sata, hot-swappable, X-RAID, security/authentication options, nfs/samba/ftp/http/https, etc...

I know several people on these forums have an Infrant ReadyNAS product. Maybe they will chime in with some of their reasons.

Chad R.

Bill..

What software do you use for backup? Do you use the backup built into windows (if you are on a windows box) or do you use a third party software to back up your data?

R~

I do the weekly backups manually - not a big deal since I wisely structure my directories, though it would be nice for it to be automated. I may tap the Windows solution for that.

The "every six hour" backup is done with a freebie app called "back2zip", though I don't actually zip anything.


Bill

If you want, tonight I can spend a little more time doing some technical comparisons and point out pros/cons: i.e. ide vs sata, hot-swappable, X-RAID, security/authentication options, nfs/samba/ftp/http/https, etc...

I know several people on these forums have an Infrant ReadyNAS product. Maybe they will chime in with some of their reasons.

Thanks a lot for your input. I've read lots of good reviews for the Infrant stuff, and that's what I was looking at, but decyphering some of the specs on newegg is a bit difficult. In addition, many of the reveiws on the net can be helpful, but may be steering me towards more expensive products that have capabilities that I don't really need to take advantage of. For instance, I can appreciate the added speed of a faster NAS device, of SATA drives etc, but like I say I'm really only going to be streaming one thing at a time, so a lot of the added speed capbilities are probably unecessary. Among the drives I have in my system now I have a mixture of SATA and IDE drives among a couple machines, and a couple external USB drives, and all are totally fine in doing what I need to do which is just watching the movies files on the drives.

I don't mind spending more for a quality product that is more robust, may last longer, has more robust software that's easier to setup, but it seems to me any will work fine at least for my fairly basic tasks. Things like hot-swappable drives aren't really necessary, I figure if I have a drive failure, I'd just turn the thing off and order a replacement drive and replace it when it arrives and let the array rebuild. Maintaining completely operable server 24/7 is not at all a requirement, so hotswapping is cool, but one of those things that seems unecessary.

One thing that I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for would be good support should the device fail, a good warranty. But it seems to me that many of the featuresets that are out there I won't be taking advantage of. But please correct me if I'm wrong. What I really don't want to end up with is a NAS that is good enough for now, but when I start streaming say 1080p files or something, it starts running out of steam and isn't fast enough, but the way I see it, even streaming that stuff realtime is quite easy to do. I don't forsee a need for streaming many files simultaneously, for instance, though. Of course on the other hand, I don't want to be spending hundreds of dollars more for capabilities that go to waste, when I could easily have spent less for the exact same performance and data space that fulfills my needs.

Hi,

I see that you have a HTPC, and not just a "simple" streamer.

Find out how you want to access your data, NFS, Samba etc. as well as where and how you will connect it (thru a switch etc)

Personally I have a ReadyNas, and I like it very much. It serves my purposed quite well. A few of my friends also have invested in a ReadyNas, and they also like it very much.

Another friend just bough the Dlink 323(?), and I had a look at it yesterday. From the little time i played around with it, it did the job good.
Although it is only a 2 drive (raid-0 and -1 or JBOD) it might be a solution.
The size of the thing was also good, i.e. small...

Good luck hunting one down for your needs.

M.

well i got a readynas nv+ and i am very happy with it. they have a very active forum for questions and more imprtantly answers. have a look there as there is a lot of info.

also it is incredibly small, i was expecting something larger..it is like a medium sized toaster (think the size of 4 disks and an extra couple of inches or so...and it is quiet, but i am not overly bothered as it will eventually be in a back room that is increasingly looking like a 1940's IBM computer room with wiring traps the viet cong would have been happy with... :)

Hi,

I see that you have a HTPC, and not just a "simple" streamer.

Find out how you want to access your data, NFS, Samba etc. as well as where and how you will connect it (thru a switch etc)

Personally I have a ReadyNas, and I like it very much. It serves my purposed quite well. A few of my friends also have invested in a ReadyNas, and they also like it very much.

Another friend just bough the Dlink 323(?), and I had a look at it yesterday. From the little time i played around with it, it did the job good.
Although it is only a 2 drive (raid-0 and -1 or JBOD) it might be a solution.
The size of the thing was also good, i.e. small...

Good luck hunting one down for your needs.

M.

In terms of connecting, I assume I would just connect it to the network. I have a router that everything's connected to, it works fine. I don't know what you mean in terms of accessing the data, I am not familiar with those terms. I was assuming I could just connect the NAS to the router via 10/100 ethernet cable and do whatever setup was necessary for the NAS and that it would be seen on the network as a device and I could access it to move files there and access those files much as I do know with drives/PCs across the network. Am I correct in these assumptions?

Software Raid
I just ordered 3 500Gig WD drives and a non-Raid SATA card from New Egg to create a windows XP software RAID array. Primary reasons for choosing this solution are cost, robustness, and no proprietary cards, boxes, etc. Speed I hope will not be an issue since I only plan on watching one movie at a time on XBMC.
I plan on using the Tomshardware RAID howto to create the RAID and it will be housed in a Antec full tower. Hopefully the power supply will be able to power 3 raid drives, DVDr drive and my OS drive. I also hope that noise and heat will not be a factor.
Let me know if there are any big disadvantage to this solution other than features that I am not planning on using such as web server, ftp, http access, user managament, quota, etc.

Regards

I'll throw in a vote for the Infrant units. I've been happy with mine. Other than some jumbo frame slowdowns (gigabit) I've been generally pleased with the performance. Yes it is pricey, but the support is good, and the software is good.

In terms of connecting, I assume I would just connect it to the network. I have a router that everything's connected to, it works fine. I don't know what you mean in terms of accessing the data, I am not familiar with those terms. I was assuming I could just connect the NAS to the router via 10/100 ethernet cable and do whatever setup was necessary for the NAS and that it would be seen on the network as a device and I could access it to move files there and access those files much as I do know with drives/PCs across the network. Am I correct in these assumptions?

Hehe... sorry for the bad wording...
I was thinking of which "protocols" you will use to access the NAS. Will you use NFS or Samba or something else.
Some NAS has support for something, some for something else.
I recon Samba is good enough for streaming HD to a HTPC. At least it works fine in my Gb Lan environment (2PCs, 1laptop and a Tvix). If you do not have a Gb Lan I would suggest you look into it, and maybe look at a router that support jumboframes (that is if the NAS you select supports it).

Hope that clarified something... (still haven't had enough coffee yet so...)

Btw... one of my friends are using a NV towards his HTPC, and I can't say I have heard him complain yet...

Has anyone tried the Addonics minitower drive enclosure.

http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/mst4.asp

I know its not a NAS but it would solve the original problem posed and its a whole lot cheaper. I was thinking about buying one but I don't know how good they are. Any input?

The NAS stuff is all overpriced IMO. I would just get a nice big case, a few smaller (say 6x250gb) and run freenas on an older p2-400 or something. Works just fine. I do it with a SCSI array of 12 drives (6x36 and 6x18). PLenty o storage. :)

That Addonics unit looks really nice. I might have to pickup one to try with 4 extra 400gb drives I have. I use the Buffalo Linkstation Pro units for my NAS. I have 2 500gb units and 1 have 2 500gb external usb drives attached and the other has 1 500gb usb drive. These units are very fast compared to other ethernet type storage devices I have tried and the USB attached drives access just as fast as the main unit. This was a major problem I had with a Simpleshare device. The usb drive on that was about 4 times slower than the main unit. Simpletech tech supports backed that up. It would be great if I could put the Addonics device with 4 400gb drives on the last USB port of the Linkstation. I also notice on the Addonics site that you can just buy the 4 IDE to USB card as a separate item and use your own case. Nothing special about the addonics case. I really like the Infrant device, but I just cannot bring myself to spend that kind of money for a unit that I still have to buy drives for. You can buy 2 of the Linkstaition Pro 500gb and still have a few bucks left over. That is if you don't need the RAID protection.

I agree with goobenet. I had an old PC lying around, filled it with four 320GB drives and run NASLite. Its not a free OS but its pretty cheap and runs well.

So let me get this straight...

(BTW, I'm a total newb to building a server)

I could take a PIII 733mHz I have around the house, add a couple of large IDE Drives, install a server OS like the ones mentioned (freeNAS, NASlite, etc.), plug in a CAT cable from the NIC to my router and voila! I have an NAS?

Would it work as well as say, the Buffalo Linkstation products?

How would it work with any of the Media Players mentioned on the forum here?

(Right now I don't have any players, but I want to build a system that will eventually feed the whole house)

Jay B.

Also, what's the downside to the Buffalo Linkstation Pro? (Not the Terastation). It's available with a HDD for less than $200. No RAID, etc, but quiet, low-power NAS, right? Is it going to work with a TIVX 5000 or the forthcoming Netgear EVA8000?

Windows Xp Software Raid Build Complete
Guys, I just completed the build of my software raid box. I had an old celeron 333 with about 400MB of Ram that I added a 4 port SATA card, 3 500GB drives and installed windows xp. I used the Tomshardware hack to enable RAID 5, created a SMB share and now I am off and running with a fully functional RAID box for my XBMC.
Performance so far has been great but note that software raid is CPU intensive and my celeron CPU is barely doing the job. I think the box will probably only support one process of writing 4 gigs of data to the raid while I streaming another to the xbox with out seeing any impacts to video performance. I need to do some more testing.
What I have done so far is to copy 8 gigs of data to the raid array while it was regenerating. That process consumed about 80 to 90% of the cpu and only 100MB of RAM.

I still really don't have a good answer to what I should buy? The Bufallo stuff is so much cheaper than the ReadyNas, but I don't want to buy the wrong thing.

So let me get this straight...

(BTW, I'm a total newb to building a server)

I could take a PIII 733mHz I have around the house, add a couple of large IDE Drives, install a server OS like the ones mentioned (freeNAS, NASlite, etc.), plug in a CAT cable from the NIC to my router and voila! I have an NAS?

Would it work as well as say, the Buffalo Linkstation products?

How would it work with any of the Media Players mentioned on the forum here?

(Right now I don't have any players, but I want to build a system that will eventually feed the whole house)

Jay B.


In a word, YUP. :) Works pretty slick actually. FreeNAS is FreeBSD based so it'll run anything freebsd can. Friend of mine had a few of those older promise IDE cards and has 11 120gb drives running and 1 CDRW (he somehow figured out how to burn accross the network to the CDRW, nifty!).

Not to mention those IDE cards are dirt cheap now, and you can pick up a bulk lot of 120/160gb drives now for about 50 bucks a pop, if you find the right ebay auction. :)

As far as media players, um, i don't know. I don't use them. I'm not sure if it can register itself as a uPnP device. I would assume you need some uPnP client anyways, so just map the drive on the windows machine to the uPnP client when it searches for media.

I've never used NASLite, but FreeNAS is very similar to the linkstation in the fact that it's all web-based, and even better, can grow to meet your future needs, just buy more disks, upgrade the RAM, etc.

I use NASLite+. It was pretty easy to install. The biggest hurdle was convincing the bios to boot off of the CD ROM. The system that's running is fairly modest (a old Pentium II I think with maybe 128Meg of memory). It's fairly limited in that it can handle only 1 to 4 IDE devices and no raid setups available. Right now I have 2x 400G Seagate drives in the thing.

http://www.serverelements.com/naslite-plus.php

But yes, other than the cost of the drives, it essentially only cost me the price of the software (under $30 I think). The computer was one that I had kicking around in the bottom of a closet.

-Steve

Alright, let me clarify my question. I'm going to do one of two things, either convert an existing computer, which is still going to cost some $$$ to buy drives, etc. or purchase something like a Linkstation Live, that will not only be an NAS, but also has media and print server included, and I could chain an existing 500G USB drive to it.

Which would be more reliable and less hassle overall?

:) Thanks to all for their replies and input - AVS Rocks!

I ultimately purchased the ReadyNAS+. The single biggest deciding factor was XRaid. I like the idea that I can grow the system by replacing drives with larger drives.

I also chose the ReadyNAS+ because based on what I had been reading, hot swapping the drives was not nearly as easy.

I do like some of the media streaming capabilities and the FTP server, these were a lower prioritity requirement for me.

Of course, the systems may have changed since my purchase. I do not purchase items based on "futures". The mandatory list of functionality must be present at the time of purchase.

I had the same question a few months back. I went with a Terastation and LOVE IT. I use it only to stream DVDs and HD files and it works in spades. Is CHEAP $900 shipped for 2TB, or 1.5TB in RAID. Its great. When one fills up i buy another. Its great and very functional

I would recommend the Thecus N5200B.

It has 5 bays rather than the usual 4, and faster hardware. Intel Celeron instead of an XScale processor.

The performance is very nice.

I would recommend the Thecus N5200B.

It has 5 bays rather than the usual 4, and faster hardware. Intel Celeron instead of an XScale processor.

The performance is very nice.

The problem is we're back into the ReadyNAS price range again. $600+ without drives. Although I do like that it has 5 bays. That's something the Infrant's should have for what they charge.

Yeah, it's close to the ReadyNAS price, but the extra bay, and the Celeron instead of XScale processor make up for that to some extent. If you look for a review of the N5200 at Tom's Hardware you will see that the Thecus box blows the performance of ReadyNAS away. Admittedly at that point in time it had some firmware issues, but I'm seeing several forums indicating that support is ramping up somewhat to fix these issues.

I have a N5200B with 5 500GB drives on the way to me right now. I will try to remember to follow up and let you guys know how it works out for me.

Yeah, it's close to the ReadyNAS price, but the extra bay, and the Celeron instead of XScale processor make up for that to some extent. If you look for a review of the N5200 at Tom's Hardware you will see that the Thecus box blows the performance of ReadyNAS away. Admittedly at that point in time it had some firmware issues, but I'm seeing several forums indicating that support is ramping up somewhat to fix these issues.

I have a N5200B with 5 500GB drives on the way to me right now. I will try to remember to follow up and let you guys know how it works out for me.

I guess I was looking at the comparison to the Terrastaion mentioned above. I know these upscale units are better than the terrastation spec wise but is there anything that the terrastation isn't providing for it's users with a lot lower cost. For the same price as these empty boxes you can get a fully populated terrastation.

I'm actually having the same dilemma. I can't decide between Freenas, Naslite, Terrastations, or a Readynas. I'm probably going to need 3TB+

If you are comfortable with piecing together your own NAS server, I would suggest you take a look at the unRaid server by lime-technology.com

Despite its name, it is a RAID array, but one where the disks do not all have to be the same size. It uses a modified version of RAID4 but without striping data across drives. Each drive has its own filesystem. It can recover from a single drive failure. If you are so unlucky as to have two drives fail at the same time the files on the other drives are NOT lost. This is not the case with any other raid array with the data striped across drives. With those, if you lose two drives, you lose ALL your data.

I've been running an unRaid server as my media server for over a year now. About the only limitation of unRaid is that the parity drive must be as big or bigger than any other drive.

I've got a 500G parity drive, two 500G data drives, two 350G data drives, and two 250G data drives in a coolermaster stacker case. In fact, I just added one of the 500Gig drives this morning (Frys.com had a 500Gig Seagate drive on sale a few days ago for 139.00 with free shipping. Nice to be able to incrementally grow the array when a sale is spotted.) With that combination of drives I have 2.5 terabytes of storage.

The current array is limited to 11 data drives and one parity drive. The individual data drives are formatted with a standard reiserfs, so at worst case, in the event of a motherboard meltdown, you can move them to any other Lunix distribution without losing any of your data.

One nice feature of the unRaid array is that the drives spin down when not accessed (configurable 1 - 4 hour delay, or never) This minimizes heat and power consumption. They automatically spin up when accessed.

Only downside to the current version of unRaid is it has nearly no security built in.
(Anybody can telnet to the server and log in and do anything to the files on it) The next version of unRaid, expected shortly, will migrate it from version 2.4 of Linux to version 2.6. The following version is supposed to address the security issues.

unRaid runs from a bootable USB flash drive. You can download a free version that will handle 3 drives (one parity and two data) and give it a try on your own USB flash drive. Other than being limited to the number of drives, the free version works exactly like the version you purchase. It is not a time limited or trial version.

Paid versions handle either 6 drives, (parity + 5 data drives) or 12 drives (parity + 11 data drives) From what I understand, the next release will up that to 14 drives (parity + 13 drives)

With 750Gig drives, the free version could net you 1.5 Terabytes of storage.
With 1000Gig drives due out soon... 2 Terabytes. Enough for many mid sized collections.

The 14 drive version would grow to a max of 13 Terabytes of storage. At approx 5 gig per DVD image, that would be 2600 DVDs. (way way more than I own)

The drives can be PATA or SATA or any combination. There are some limitations on supported SATA controller cards and network cards, but many are supported.

Home page:
http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/

Support Forum Page:
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

Joe L.
I have nothing to do with lime-technology other than being a customer. I've created and shared several scripts to help manage it on their forum.

I also looked into unraid. Sorry I didn't list it. There were a few issues I had. One you already mentioned was the security. Since I have kids I don't know that I trust them not to delete something. Second the support seems to come and go. Third is that the mounting points seemed to be an issue. I really want to be able to deal with single volumes. Unless I misunderstood it doesn't work that way. Also it doesn't appear that files span across drives as they fill up. This would seem to be a problem since we are talking about large video files. Maybe I've misunderstood some of these points and would appreciate any comments to the contrary.

J.L. are you using a raid controller or is this all software? How many video streams can you have going at once?

Where can I find prices for the unRaid stuff?

Where can I find prices for the unRaid stuff?


unraid (http://www.lime-technology.com/)

I also looked into unraid. Sorry I didn't list it. There were a few issues I had. One you already mentioned was the security. Since I have kids I don't know that I trust them not to delete something. Second the support seems to come and go. Third is that the mounting points seemed to be an issue. I really want to be able to deal with single volumes. Unless I misunderstood it doesn't work that way. Also it doesn't appear that files span across drives as they fill up. This would seem to be a problem since we are talking about large video files. Maybe I've misunderstood some of these points and would appreciate any comments to the contrary.
The current release allows you to set the shares to read-only. It has changed some from the original release. At that time it shared disk1, disk2, disk3, etc...
you can still do that, or they can be hidden on the network, or visible and read only.
The "User Shares" feature is where every top level folder on the disks becomes share with their contents merged.

Each of my drives has a set of directories at the root of its filesystem.
I use "Movies", "TV", "Mp3", and "data"

I can put my media on any of the drives in any "Movies" directory or subdirectory.
When viewed via the samba share, I see a single "Movies" folder with all my movies in it. What Tom has done is create a read-only "ramdisk" with links to all the media and folders on the other drives. (The links are created by pressing a "scan" button on his interface.)

This all makes the server a lot easier on my wife. She just navigates to "Movies" and picks what she wants to play. She sees all the movies on all the drives in a single place.

Yes, you still have to deal with writing to individual disks. He says that dynamic allocation of space and a writable "user share" will be implemented soon. (It might even be in a release expected any day now. he is in the final testing phase of a port from version 2.4 of Linux to version 2.6 to support current hardware.)

So... is it perfect for you? Who knows.? Tom's support was lacking several points earlier last year. the user-community formed its own support group and web-site at that time. It is idle now, no longer needed. Tom is active now and has been for a while. His unRaid support forum is fairly active and other than hardware compatibility issues, unRaid basically works. (Only true bug I know of right now is the server time advances by a few hours when the server is re-booted. When I re-booted this morning to add the new drive my system had been up 56 days. (since when I last added a drive) I don't worry about the timestamp on the files, so I did not even bother to set it back to the current time.

The unRaid server is currently based on Slackware 2.4 and the GPL source code for the unRaid driver module comes with the product. Tom does not share the non-GPL source code for the management utility that provides the web-based front end. As I said, he has ported to Slackware Linux 2.6.18 and a new release should occur soon using 2.6.19.2.

All this in mind... it is another choice for a RAID based NAS that is FAR easier to expand than any other I am aware of as long as you can deal with very limited security at this time. Hopefully, that will change soon.

Tom's laundry list of features is here:
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=266.0

Tom's description of the migration to Linux 2.6
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=475.msg3122#msg3122

I can guess his estimate of 2 weeks to test was too short, as it is now 4 weeks... so... any day now....

Joe L.

JL what hardware are you runnig? He has those nice coolermaster setups but they are a little pricey and he hasn't had them available for months.

I went back and looked at the recent posts and the user shares is definetly an improvment. Are you using a media streamer or HTPC. If HTPC what frontend are you using?

J.L. are you using a raid controller or is this all software? How many video streams can you have going at once?It does not use any special raid controller. It uses standard IDE and SATA controllers. The RAID is all in software.
I don't usually have more than one video stream going at a time so I'm not a good person to ask. Others have reported it fine with two or three videos beinng served at the same time. A lot has to do with the bit-rate being served. Most of the bottleneck is on the PCI bus, so a motherboard with split busses is best. (His originally specified Intel motherboard worked that way. The network card was on a separate bus from the disk controllers)

Writing used to take priority over reading in older versions. Everything was fine until you wrote to a drive... then reading performance suffered.

That recently changed (reading has priority now) and read performance improved dramatically, even when writing to disks.

Joe L.

JL what hardware are you runnig? He has those nice coolermaster setups but they are a little pricey and he hasn't had them available for months.

I went back and looked at the recent posts and the user shares is definetly an improvment. Are you using a media streamer or HTPC. If HTPC what frontend are you using?I priced the component parts of the coolermaster cases and drive trays when I was considering my purchase. Yes, I do have one of those nice cases with all the drive trays. I have the Intel board exactly as he describes it on his hardware page.

Tom's price for the fully assembled server was very reasonable (I would rather spend my time with my family and it would have taken the better part of a Saturday to assemble everything) The individual drive trays add lot to the cost and assembly time, but they are really nice when expanding the array. Yes, I probably could have spent hours searching vendor sites for best prices on components, and more time assembling it, instead, I paid him for his time assembling the server.

I think Tom's current business model is to not try to compete with newegg, mwave, frys, etc on hardware. He simply can't and make any money. He has to buy from them and then charge some for his time to assemble everything. His markup on the hardware itself was minimal. The current business focus is to supply software and let you install it on your own hardware.

I currently use two Mediagate MG-35 media players, one in my den, and the other in my bedroom for day-to-day playing of movies. They have the ability to browse network shares. They both feed 720p over component to the HDTVs in the den and bedroom.

I also have an HTPC in my basement theater, but do not use a front end on it to get to the media collection. I simply use demon tools to mount the ISO image if I want to play something from the server. Most times in the theater I play the physical DVD. I've been thinking of adding a front-end. Do you use one on your HTPC?

Joe L.

I guess I was looking at the comparison to the Terrastaion mentioned above. I know these upscale units are better than the terrastation spec wise but is there anything that the terrastation isn't providing for it's users with a lot lower cost. For the same price as these empty boxes you can get a fully populated terrastation.

I'm actually having the same dilemma. I can't decide between Freenas, Naslite, Terrastations, or a Readynas. I'm probably going to need 3GB+

Well, if you look for that review (I apologize but this forum isn't letting me link it, apparently because I haven't posted enough) you will see that the performance is about 3x higher than a Terastation...especially the cheap early 1TB models (that you can now find for $500 fully populated with 250Gb drives).

It also supports snapshotting, where your NAS takes a "point-in-time" image of your storage, and if you delete anything inadvertently, it can be recovered from these snapshots.

In addition to the standard flavors of RAID (0, 1, 5, 10) Thecus has added RAID 6, which allows for two parity drives, allowing you to lose two drives without losing any data. Admittedly, this decreases your capacity to 3/5 the raw space of your array, but it is nice to have the option.

I assume by "I'm probably going to need 3GB+" you actually meant 3TB+. 3+ is only going to be achievable intelligently by a using 5+ drive unit, a capacity very few devices sport so far. Yes, you can get 3TB with 4x750Gb, but you will have zero data redundancy.

I guess, for me, speed and redundancy are paramount. The Thecus unit seems to have the best features in these areas, and that's why I chose it.

Building your own NAS is certainly an option for someone with the know-how. While I am proficient at that sort of thing, I chose not to because these all-in-one units will consume less power, be more straightforward to operate, and (hopefully) will also be quieter than a build-your-own solution. One of these days when I redo my home network this will be less of an issue, but for now a 24x7 storage server running in my office needs to be fairly quiet.

The commercial NAS solutions are good offerings currently, provided you don't really intend on adding many more disks. This is the only drawback to the preconfigured systems. It's more of a pain to swap out 4x250gb in a premade box than to roll your own, IMO. This is where i think FreeNAS shines. And as far as configuration is concerned, how much more stupidly simple than a web browser configuration do you want? :P

Now, break it down. When you start getting into the need for 3+TB of disk, the commercial offerings are definately a competitor vs rolling your own. A good 3ware 8-port SATA RAID controller on the low side runs about 700 bucks. The infrant readynas systems at that point look pretty damn good. Add disks and go. But, from what i'm seeing of the readynas solutions are these:

The high-end box is a 1U solution. Means loud in my eyes. (disks get hot in small areas)
Growth is nearly non-existant
compatibility issues with some drives (notably the hitachi's, who are slated to roll 1TB disks in june)
And here's the biggy. PARTS! Find me a power supply for this thing in 2 years when it fails due to some unknown reason. ATX is here to stay for a while yet, and very affordable. Or the controller corrupts, now you have a useless brick. And when it's EOL'd you'll pay through the nose sending back to factory to have it fixed.

On the upside though, they have a (limited) warranty, a phone number, and a pretty comprehensive manual.

The thing i don't really get here though is why anyone would need 3+TB of disk? I can understand having your media all in one place but there is a thing called MTBF. And don't give me that RAID will save you, because if you buy all your drives at the same time, turn them on at the same time, chances are they're all going to FAIL at or around the same time. (Old datacenter rule, buy your RAID volumes in stages, to ensure disk uptime) I see RAID setups and NAS setups as not permanent storage. If you want permanent storage that was designed that way, you're looking to buy something from Clariion, EMC, NetApp, Winchester, Etc. These are SANs vs. NAS. They use 40 disks to get to 3TB (well, older ones did, new ones use 40 disks to get close to 12TB), not 4. Ever wonder why? You're looking for something at the enterprise level, not consumer. None of the off-the-shelf stuff can simply give you that reliability. They simply do not make the drives to last more than 5 years anymore. I would say this is fair warning for any and all who look to this sort of thing. All it'll take is a good lightning strike and everything is gone. Also i've noticed that none of the current offerings offer any type of serial output to a UPS. This is a huge factor to me. (Even FreeNAS has to be hacked for this support, and it's running an open OS!)

Just know that these things, even FreeNAS, NASLite, etc, are not good for long-term storage (long term defined more than 3-5 years).

The commercial NAS solutions are good offerings currently, provided
growth is nearly non-existant.
<snip>
compatibility issues with some drives (notably the hitachi's, who are slated to roll 1TB disks in june)
And here's the biggy. PARTS! Find me a power supply for aa commercial NAS box in 2 years when it fails due to some unknown reason. ATX is here to stay.

The thing i don't really get here though is why anyone would need 3+TB of disk? I can understand having your media all in one place but there is a thing called MTBF. And don't give me that RAID will save you, because if you buy all your drives at the same time, turn them on at the same time, chances are they're all going to FAIL at or around the same time. (Old datacenter rule, buy your RAID volumes in stages, to ensure disk uptime) I see RAID setups and NAS setups as not permanent storage. If you want permanent storage that was designed that way, you're looking to buy something from Clariion, EMC, NetApp, Winchester, Etc. These are SANs vs. NAS. They use 40 disks to get to 3TB (well, older ones did, new ones use 40 disks to get close to 12TB), not 4. Ever wonder why? You're looking for something at the enterprise level, not consumer. None of the off-the-shelf stuff can simply give you that reliability. They simply do not make the drives to last more than 5 years anymore. I would say this is fair warning for any and all who look to this sort of thing. All it'll take is a good lightning strike and everything is gone. Also i've noticed that none of the current offerings offer any type of serial output to a UPS. This is a huge factor to me. (Even FreeNAS has to be hacked for this support, and it's running an open OS!)

Just know that these things, even FreeNAS, NASLite, etc, are not good for long-term storage (long term defined more than 3-5 years).
You described several reasons why the lime-technology.com unRAID product is a good choice in a home environment.

First... you can use just about any drives you currently have or incrementally buy.
They do not have to be all the same size or brand. This is very likely to eliminate any reliability issues with drives from a single bad manufacturing run.

Second.... it will run on inexpensive hardware. You are not dependent on a $700 raid card and using proprietary striping of data on the disks readable only with a specific raid card.

Third... unlike a RAID array where data is stripped across all your drives, unRaid does not need to spin up all your drives to read a single file. Most of the time in my house all the drives are spun down. When I go to play a movie, only one drive is spun up, the one with that movie. The only time all drives are operating is when I initially calculate parity on the array, or replace a drive with a bigger one and parity is used to load it with the contents of the smaller disk it is replacing. I set my drives to spin down when idle for an hour.

Because the drives are used at different times, and only spinning when needed, the MTBF figures don't have them all failing at the same time. Because I am incrementally growing my array when I find a sale I will never end up with two drives with the same run-hours, and likelyhood of multiple failures in a short time frame is far less.

You are correct in that all hard disks will fail... it is only a matter of time. But I'll bet the disks will last way longer when idle then when spinning. I know the server case temperature is lower too, because the drives are not spinning... High heat will hasten failure of any electronic device, so the lower case temperature is a good thing. It helps on my home electric bill too... also a good thing.

You are correct in that you need a good UPS and surge protector. Also correct that nothing will save you from a direct lightning hit. A RAID array is not a replacement for backup copies of your data. In my case, I have all the physical DVDs on the shelf in my theater.

Why do some of us need 3 Terabytes of storage??? Simple... we have large media libraries and want to access them online. Personally I have about 1/5th of our DVDs online with more every week as I have time to rip them. When I'm done I'll have a large portion of my collection online.

As far as a 5 year lifetime of drives... I usually purchase the "retail" drives that have a 3 to 5 year warranty. If a drive fails, I'll replace it as soon as I can. One of the scripts I wrote for unRaid provides an alert over my LAN when a failure occurs. Odds are high I'll not have a failure in the warranty period, but who knows. Newer drives have better bearings.

Lastly, when I eventually do have a failure, odds are the replacement drive will be bigger, faster, and less expensive. In my unRaid array I can use ANY drive, PATA or SATA. I don't have to get one exactly the same size as the others in my array... just as big or bigger. Those 1Terabyte drives due out soon are expected to have a retail price of about $399. That is not expensive at all for that amount of storage. I'll bet we see them at $299 or less on sale. When they get to that price, I'll be expanding my array once more.

Joe L.

I currently use two Mediagate MG-35 media players, one in my den, and the other in my bedroom for day-to-day playing of movies. They have the ability to browse network shares. They both feed 720p over component to the HDTVs in the den and bedroom.

I also have an HTPC in my basement theater, but do not use a front end on it to get to the media collection. I simply use demon tools to mount the ISO image if I want to play something from the server. Most times in the theater I play the physical DVD. I've been thinking of adding a front-end. Do you use one on your HTPC?

Joe L.

I don't have any streamers or a HTPC yet. The streamers just don't have a interface that would be easy for the family to use. If I go with a HTPC I like the look of DVD LOBBY.

I do like unRaid. It's extremely fast because it uses RieserFS Journaled filesystem. The down side of it though is the free version only supports 3 disks, plus only 6, and pro up to 12. With my current FreeNAS setup, i have 18 disks currently running (testing growth). Very similar featureset, and they do sell a turnkey box over there at unRaid. (A pretty good deal, even if it is using 5 year old hardware to get it done) As for spin down of disks, FreeNAS can do that too, with the exception that if you do run a software raid, all disks spin up, due to the nature of raid. (i'm not sure how unRaid has done their filesystem. They say that all disks can be spun down, and when accessing a file, only the disk with the file spins up. This is not how RAID works. (hence unRaid) That's a JBOD with parity...)

Also, the 700 buck controller was an example. I can easily go buy a bunch of highpoint sata controllers and do software raid as well within FreeNAS. Thus keeping the cost down. (or buy one of those new spiffy Asus boards with 8 sata channels onboard, or get a few of the old promise controllers off ebay for 20 bucks a pair, and use PATA disks i have laying around. The controller is just one item i would think about when doing something like this, as it can, and will affect performance.)

FreeNAS can also control the rotation speed of a disk to quiet them down and thus reduce heat as well. FreeNAS can do XRAID style growth to an array, as i'm sure can unRaid. (i've personally never tested it) Only downside there is that it cannot shrink the array, only grow. And obviously, parity drive has to be greater than or equal to the biggest drive in the array.

As for mounting images, i do the same with daemon tools. Just store the ISO online. I'd imagine one could "hack" freenas to incorporate the mount() command and assign it a drive letter, as it is possible to do under freebsd natively.

And i'm right there with you on the retail drives! Seagate is local to me, so RMAs take no time at all. :) I don't think there's a better drive out there currently. WD only has a 1yr on OEM, 2 on retail. Hitachi is 1yr only no matter what. Maxtor i think has a 3 year on their retail drives. Seagate is 3 years on OEM, 5 on retail.

Oh, and street price rumored to be $299 for the 1TB hitachi. Also, rumor mill has it that Seagate will introduce their 1TB disk around the same time.

I'm partial to FreeNAS because i tinker, and i like to rip into things. (read: power user) unRaid i think would be a good alternative as would NASLite. But if Joe is the guy behind unRaid, he's gonna have to rethink his pricing structure to keep competitive, IMO. It's not unreasonable, but not competitive either.

To stay on topic. I think people will buy what they feel their comfort level is. A lot of people have old PC's laying around, and i would encourage tinkering with FreeNAS, NASLite, unRaid before dropping a cool grand on one of these commercial solutions. Think of it as try-before-you-buy. If you like FreeNAS, think about how to make one, same with unRaid, and NASLite, etc. See what your costs are, and then compare. If the buffalo terrastation still appeals to you because it's small, cute, and just sits there, by all means.

But don't discount the free stuff. Some of it is actually quite good. (others, well, yeah.)

This is just my opinion. Nobody else. I've made some good arguements to try this stuff out first, before having to pay a 10% restock on the one you didn't like. :)

I'm partial to FreeNAS because i tinker, and i like to rip into things. (read: power user) unRaid i think would be a good alternative as would NASLite. But if Joe is the guy behind unRaid, he's gonna have to rethink his pricing structure to keep competitive, IMO. It's not unreasonable, but not competitive either.
I'm not the guy behind unRaid. I am probably one of the first 20 or so who ordered a fully assembled system about 1 1/2 years ago. I'm a customer.

Early purchasers of unRaid (those who purchased version 1.xx or 2.xx) were given two free "pro" keys for the current version 3.x of unRaid when Tom changed his business model from selling hardware to selling software versions of his OS. I think he sells very little hardware these days...

So... I'm just a customer. Not somebody who sets prices or figures out a business model. At the time, I purchased a full hardware configuration. It was worth it to me. I'm sure Tom will keep things competitive.

I am a UNIX guru, having been involved with UNIX since about 1980. I once wrote a device driver for a commercial product that needed a special communications protocol. I am comfortable in kernel code. Probably a step or so beyond a power user.

unRaid is based on Slackware. I've used Slackware at home since its initial release (I think it was 1994 and version .98 or thereabouts) At that time I re-wrote my sound card device driver to properly initialize so I could play Doom on x-windows.

I too am a power user of linux/unix. I liked that unRaid is based on Slackware.
I preferred it over the other linux based software raid solutions because it did not require all the disks to be the same size. I could re-use disks I already owned and replace them with larger drives incrementally. unRaid is a modified version of RAID4, but without the striping of files across the drives.

As far as the number of drives... 12 is plenty for now. From what I understand, Tom is coming out with a rack mounted server with 14 SATA disk slots soon. For that reason the next version of unRaid will support 14 drives. Loaded with 1Terabyte drives that would result in 13 Terabytes of storage.

Since I have two unRaid keys, I might eventually set up a second server... but first I need to fully populate the one I have today.

I agree with you, if you want NAS storage there are several free (or inexpensive) versions out there if you have some old hardware to put it on. It is easy to try them out if you want to tinker.

Joe L.

J.L. Have you had a disk die yet? Were you able to rebuild the array? the few times I have used a software RAID and a drive went out, I was never able to get a good rebuild and lost data. I don't trust software RAID and only use hardware now. Never tried unRAID though.

http://www.promise.com/product/images/ST%20EX8350-enlarge.jpg

while its not an external solution, I'm currently using a Promise EX8350 (http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=RAID%205%20HBAs&product_id=156#) with 4 Seagate 400GB drives in a RAID5 configuration and it works fine. Unfortunately I'm already at 1TB of files so I'm looking at upgrading to 750GB drives.

J.L. Have you had a disk die yet? Were you able to rebuild the array? the few times I have used a software RAID and a drive went out, I was never able to get a good rebuild and lost data. I don't trust software RAID and only use hardware now. Never tried unRAID though.I have simulated a disk death many times by unplugging a drive and then plugging in either a disk of the same or larger size.
Because unRaid does not need all the disks to be the same size,lots of disk "upgrades" occur when sales of larger drives occur.

So, I tested by alternating between two old 8 gig drives in the array many times, then swapping in a 20 gig drive, then finally a 350 gig drive. In each case my data was correctly rebuilt on the replacement drive. There was a bug that was fixed in July of last year where a completely new and previously unformatted drive could not be used to replace a failed drive until it had already been formatted once before. I was involved in the analysis and testing of that bug.

It was so elusive that the developer of unRaid had never encountered it in his testing, mainly because he was constantly re-using the same set of drives in his lab... ones that were previously partitioned when they were originally used to grow the array in a spare slot in the array. Adding an additional drive to an existing array using a completely blank drive worked fine, replacing an existing drive needed the new drive to be pre-formatted.

As I said, that was found and fixed last year in July. unRaid now handles all formatting and partitioning, both when growing the array, addinng additionnal drives, and when replacing failed drives in the array, even when the replacement is completely blank, unpartitioned and unformatted.

I've only read of one person who lost data with unRaid. They accidentally overwrote their own data, and then rebuilt the array after swapping drives around. They only lost the one drive they accidentally cleared though, not the whole array. It was not the fault of the raid software, it was user error.

Joe L.

I do like unRaid. It's extremely fast because it uses RieserFS Journaled filesystem

Did you read that somewhere, is that why you believe it?

Time deleting a 10GB file on an XFS file system vs. a ReiserFS file system. It's instantaneous in the XFS file system, and takes many seconds, maybe ten or more on the ReiserFS file system. If you have to delete 100GB of files you'll be waiting minutes with your ReiserFS; it only takes a second or two on my XFS formatted file systems.

ReiserFS is the last file system I would use for a file system with large media files. I'd use XFS first.

Did you read that somewhere, is that why you believe it?

Time deleting a 10GB file on an XFS file system vs. a ReiserFS file system. It's instantaneous in the XFS file system, and takes many seconds, maybe ten or more on the ReiserFS file system. If you have to delete 100GB of files you'll be waiting minutes with your ReiserFS; it only takes a second or two on my XFS formatted file systems.

ReiserFS is the last file system I would use for a file system with large media files. I'd use XFS first.

Writing and reading to the RiserFS filesystem is very fast. And you're quibbling about 10 seconds for a 10Gb delete?! XFS/UFS is faster because it deletes the file handler, and just overwrites, where Riser does actually delete the data.

And no, i've used Riser before on some installs. And for small (read home directories for a large userbase) files, riser has more of an edge. Unfortunately, most systems cannot cope with it. I think it might just be ahead of it's time. (not to mention Mr. Riser is now sitting in prison for allegedly killing his wife, and the project has been slowed if not halted)

For those looking for a commercial install of NAS, Openfiler does look to be a better option than unRaid, FreeNAS, etc. Someone basically reverse engineered and opened the way that NetApp systems work. (security per user/group, permissions, segregated filesystems, etc) Pretty spiffy.

EDIT: Sorry about the spelling of Riser, something on my PC is deciding to spellcheck it for me... and aparently it's a horrible dictionary. :)

http://www.promise.com/product/images/ST%20EX8350-enlarge.jpg

while its not an external solution, I'm currently using a Promise EX8350 (http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=RAID%205%20HBAs&product_id=156#) with 4 Seagate 400GB drives in a RAID5 configuration and it works fine. Unfortunately I'm already at 1TB of files so I'm looking at upgrading to 750GB drives.


Aren't those controllers "host controllers" or basically proprietary software RAID cards?

So let me get this straight...

(BTW, I'm a total newb to building a server)

I could take a PIII 733mHz I have around the house, add a couple of large IDE Drives, install a server OS like the ones mentioned (freeNAS, NASlite, etc.), plug in a CAT cable from the NIC to my router and voila! I have an NAS?

Would it work as well as say, the Buffalo Linkstation products?

How would it work with any of the Media Players mentioned on the forum here?

(Right now I don't have any players, but I want to build a system that will eventually feed the whole house)

Jay B.
I am asking basically the same question...if I take a PC and install freeNAS or NASlite, install a few HDD and plug it into my home network will the drives show up in the network and be easily accessable by everything on my network(PCs, networked media players ect.) given that my PCs for example run XP Home.

I am not interested in RAID, all I want is a server with 3-4 large drives but I do not want to spend $600 without drives. I can purchase a cheap PC for around $300, wipe the Microsoft OS and install one of the mentioned OSs.

Thoughts?

Another route would be to purchase the $300 PC + XP Pro ($140) and install MS SFU(Free)...thoughts on this approach?

I've really been researching this stuff over the last month and I'm really getting sold on unraid. I've worked with raid5 all my career but with the speed that unraid has for streaming media over GigE, the drive spin down factor, and the fact that data isn't stripped so you don't lose all data on a 2 drive failure has me convinced.

I am asking basically the same question...if I take a PC and install freeNAS or NASlite, install a few HDD and plug it into my home network will the drives show up in the network and be easily accessable by everything on my network(PCs, networked media players ect.) given that my PCs for example run XP Home.

I am not interested in RAID, all I want is a server with 3-4 large drives but I do not want to spend $600 without drives. I can purchase a cheap PC for around $300, wipe the Microsoft OS and install one of the mentioned OSs.

Thoughts?

Another route would be to purchase the $300 PC + XP Pro ($140) and install MS SFU(Free)...thoughts on this approach?You can use still unRaid OS, but NOT assign a parity drive in its config. It will then work as you described (Just a bunch of disks) . It supports 3 drives for the free version at least, and more drives if you pay for a license key. It will still present combined user network shares and if you ever decide to make it a raid array you just need to add a drive and assign it as the parity drive.

In other words, at any time you can change the config of an unRaid server to take the parity drive on or offline. Online, it is a raid array, offline, it is a JBOD array with the added feature of user shares for top level folders on the drives. (You can have a single Movies folder showing all in the similarly named folders on all the drives)

Joe L.
When you add a parity drive, or put one back online, it will re-calculate parity. That can take 5 or 6 hours or more with 500G or larger drives.

Writing and reading to the RiserFS filesystem is very fast. And you're quibbling about 10 seconds for a 10Gb delete?!

Yes - for the usage patterns on the data drives on a media server, which for me is very low frequency access of a small number of very large files, the only difference I've ever seen is in delete performance, where ReiserFS is at least two orders of magnitude slower than XFS. When I'm moving archived HD TV shows and movies around, the minutes it takes to delete 100GB of data compared to a couple seconds is huge.

My root file system is ReiserFS - it makes much more sense there, although I'm seriously considering rebuilding my system with an ext3 root. Performance would be worse than with ReiserFS (though the difference might not be noticeable), but ext3 isn't as susceptible to unrepairable damage in the event of power or hardware failures.

I came to the forum today to see if any more recent discussions would change my mind from my many months of research. I am about to pull the preverbial trigger on the ReadyNAS NV+. Thecus 5200 is a close second for me.

To the questions below, there are differences in the features and performance between these products. Buffalo and several others are very much 'entry level' products where the Thecus, Infrant and some others are 'Prosumer' products. If you look at the reviews that can be found on places like Tomshardware and others, you will see that Infrant usually wins out on performance. As to features, it really depends on how you intend to use the device. If you are interested in NAS because you simply need significant storage capacity to hold gigabytes / tereabytes of data, performance and other features probably become less of an issue. If you are looking to stream data (movies, home videos, photos, music, etc.) to one or more points concurrently, interface with UPnP devices (MS Extenders, DLink DSM520, etc.), use the NAS device as a FTP server, etc., then performance and features become more of an issues.

The Infrant supports a number of different protocols and features, along with support for some third party producst such as 'Twonkyvision' (I know, I don't like the name either). They also provide not only their own backup solution but also now bundle a 5 user pack of EMC Retrospect. Their somewhat proprietary 'X-Raid' technology seems to offer an array of features for managing your array, live upgrades to your array (swapping drives out for larger ones over time) without having to remove and restore data all have mee looking very seriously at this product.

If you are considering Infrants ReadyNAS product, there is the NV and NV+. The NV+ is the newer generation. There are two base (diskless models) with 256mb (approx $605) and 1gb of RAM (approx. $740) respectively. The NV revision B hardware approx. $520) has much of the hardware upgrades that are in the NV+ with the exception of the LCD display (limited benefit in my opinion unless you are sitting near it all the time). The CPU and firmware is the same in both models. The memory upgrade (SODIMM modules) and hard drives can be bought cheaper independantly then buying it already installed. However, if you are not one for building your own array, buying it all in one is a better alternative.

So for instance, if you buy the NV+ fully loaded with 4x750gb Seagate NS drives (enterprise level drives) and 1gb memory, you will pay around $2800. If you build the same yourself with a diskless NV+, 1 gb SODIMM memory module and 4x750gb Seagate NS drives, you will spend about $1900-2000. You'll end up with the same gear at the end of the day. (email me and I'll tell you who has the best buys on each component).

So, you really need to know what your intentions are before sinking an investment into a large storage array. The prices do vary but you will find that you get what you pay for!

My two cents and much homework! :-)

Regards,
David


What I don't really understand is why it's so expensvie for just the case and software, really.

For instance this Buffalo NAS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306
Has 1TB of capacity, and is $499.

Here is another buffalo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822165011
That also has 1TB and it's $699.

And the diskless infrants:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822329006
and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822329023

Are at $499 and $615, respectively, without any drives at all.

I don't understand the price differences between each respective product, and also between the two brands. I was looking at the Infrant stuff before, but it seems like to get similar kind of storage space as the Buffalos, that I'd have to spend at least several hundred dollars more to buy the drives I need, and I don't really understand why that price discrepancy is so large.

Today, I am living with a PC based raid solution. In order to benefit from the Raid storage across my home network, utilized by multiple PCs and MS extender devices, my wife wanting to look at photos or listen to the music through our home theater, etc., it requires that this PC be powered on and ready to go all the time. The software based Raid5 solution puts a big burden on the CPU and drags down the performance of the machine itself.

For these reasons, I would personally prefer a standalone raid solution, hanging off of my router rather than hanging off a locally dependant PC. Hardware raid is by far more robust from a performance perspective and potentially quieter / cooler solution to running an entire PC.

There are pros and cons to all options. This is only my opinion based on my needs.


Alright, let me clarify my question. I'm going to do one of two things, either convert an existing computer, which is still going to cost some $$$ to buy drives, etc. or purchase something like a Linkstation Live, that will not only be an NAS, but also has media and print server included, and I could chain an existing 500G USB drive to it.

Which would be more reliable and less hassle overall?

:) Thanks to all for their replies and input - AVS Rocks!

You need 3GB or 3TB? Currently, I believe the Buffalo solutions support up to 2TB. The Infrant solution supports up to 3TB. I'm not sure about the Thecus solution but would think they are at 3TB as well until the 1TB drives are readily available and testing can be done and firmware upgrade. Nice thing about Infrant and Thecus is that they provide frequent firmware updates. I'm not sure about the Tereastation.

Again, you need to list your requirements and decide how you expect to use the device. From that, you can setup a spreadsheet and check off the features against the various products.

BTW, don't forget that HP, Intel, Linksys, Dlink are all jumping in (or already in) the game.

I guess I was looking at the comparison to the Terrastaion mentioned above. I know these upscale units are better than the terrastation spec wise but is there anything that the terrastation isn't providing for it's users with a lot lower cost. For the same price as these empty boxes you can get a fully populated terrastation.

I'm actually having the same dilemma. I can't decide between Freenas, Naslite, Terrastations, or a Readynas. I'm probably going to need 3GB+

A bit more food for thought. I've just been speaking with a sales rep and tech from Infrant. They are having some issues with communciations of the NV and NV+ with any Vista machines. They tell me that XP to XP is faster than Vista to XP or Vista to Vista. They didn't provide an ETA for the results.

Excellent summary David!!

I was myself coming to similar conclusions so it was great to read this laid out clearly!

I had a few questions relating to the Infrants ... maybe someone can take a crack?

a) What are the functional differences between the NV and NV+ apart from the LCD panel? Will these matter if I am planning to just use the NAS to store multimedia files and movies which I can play back from a media player?

b) What are the real differences between X-Raid and Flex-Raid (Raid 5?)? The Infrant site appears to be vague in the differences and just highlights the advantages of X-Raid.

I understand that X-Raid allows one to add disks as you go along, but what if I plan to use 4 disks to start with? Does X-Raid have some "downside"? Is the available space the same with X-Raid and Raid 5? Or is it that X-Raid has a greater space overhead?

c) If I start with 4 disks at 500Gb each and later want to upgrade disk by disk to 750Gb each, Infrant highlights that X-Raid can help. What about Raid 5? Can I change the 500Gb disks to 750Gb (or more) in a non-destructive manner?

a) What are the functional differences between the NV and NV+ apart from the LCD panel? Will these matter if I am planning to just use the NAS to store multimedia files and movies which I can play back from a media player?
Functionally they're the same. The NV+ does have the LCD panel that gives you the IP address immediately if you were to move the ReadyNAS to a different DHCP environment. You can get this through our RAIDar program as well. LCD also allows you to get instant feedback on events, such as when backup has started, progress of expansion, etc. NV+ also ships with a 5-user Retrospect Backup Manager license. But if these features are not important, you can opt for the NV and probably save some dough.

b) What are the real differences between X-Raid and Flex-Raid (Raid 5?)? The Infrant site appears to be vague in the differences and just highlights the advantages of X-Raid.
This link provides some useful info: http://www.infrant.com/wiki/index.php/FAQ#What_is_the_advantage_of_using_X-RAID_over_RAID_5.3F

Let me know if something's not clear and I can explain it a little more in detail.

I understand that X-Raid allows one to add disks as you go along, but what if I plan to use 4 disks to start with? Does X-Raid have some "downside"? Is the available space the same with X-Raid and Raid 5? Or is it that X-Raid has a greater space overhead?
RAID 5 typically will get you better random I/O performance whereas X-RAID is designed to give you about a 20% better sequential performance. With regard to RAID redundancy overhead, they're both the same.

c) If I start with 4 disks at 500Gb each and later want to upgrade disk by disk to 750Gb each, Infrant highlights that X-Raid can help. What about Raid 5? Can I change the 500Gb disks to 750Gb (or more) in a non-destructive manner?
With RAID 5, the capacity of the existing volume will not change, but you can create a 2nd volume to take advantage of the extra space. With X-RAID, your volume automatically expands, as it's a single-volume architecture.

Thank you yoh-dah ("da master"!)!

That wiki link you posted was very informative and helpful. Since I am considering the unit primarily to stream video/audio I expect that the access will be mainly sequential and thus X-Raid should be preferable. As I see it one advantage that Raid 5 offers (over the speed benefit for random i/o) is that if I were to replace some (but not all) of the 500GB disks with a larger capacity, the extra real estate could be configured as a new share. With X-Raid the extra space is only realized when ALL the disks are replaced.

Also, in my case the benefits of the NV+ over NV (rev B) should not matter. I plan to stick this in a closet in the basement adjoining the media room anyways, so most of the time it will be out of sight (and "sound"!). Also I don't quite know what the Retrospect Backup Manager exactly does, so I suppose that I won't quite miss the lack of a 5-user license! ;)

You might want to investigate EMC Retrospect a bit. It is commercial level data management (backup) software. I'm not sure if the user licenses is per PC, per server, per user,etc. I just did a quick glance at EMC's website. There are home and SMB versions. I don't know if Infrant's website is clear as to which version is bundled.

As someone said early in this thread and elsewhere in the forum, don't mistaken RAID for backup! But also don't forget that utilizing something like Infrant's product to backup localized data from home machines could also benefit from software like this.

BTW, I don't work for EMC and not pushing this software. I too need to investigate the value of the EMC software bundled with NV+ versus the cost savings of NV without it.


Thank you yoh-dah ("da master"!)!

Also I don't quite know what the Retrospect Backup Manager exactly does, so I suppose that I won't quite miss the lack of a 5-user license! ;)

You might want to investigate EMC Retrospect a bit. It is commercial level data management (backup) software. I'm not sure if the user licenses is per PC, per server, per user,etc. I just did a quick glance at EMC's website. There are home and SMB versions. I don't know if Infrant's website is clear as to which version is bundled.

As someone said early in this thread and elsewhere in the forum, don't mistaken RAID for backup! But also don't forget that utilizing something like Infrant's product to backup localized data from home machines could also benefit from software like this.

BTW, I don't work for EMC and not pushing this software. I too need to investigate the value of the EMC software bundled with NV+ versus the cost savings of NV without it.

Thanks! I checked out the EMC website. (http://www.emcinsignia.com/) It was useful and helps clarify my inclination towards NV even more.

Actually I didn't mean to imply that backup as such is irrelevant -- just that an "automatic" backup is irrelevant for me. Having suffered through a couple of hard disk crashes for the past few years I have gotten into the discipline of always backing up everything on a hard medium like CD/DVD. This includes any shareware I download, driver updates, home videos/audio/stills, downloaded mutimedia files, etc. Pretty much *everything* that comes into my computer! The cost of media is so cheap and indexing software so prevalent, that for me it hardly makes sense to not do so!

So for me the RAID just provides a "soft" backup protection over having to recreate everything (including the directory structure) from my backup dvds in the event of a crash. In addition since I currently have a directory where I let stuff accumulate till it reaches the 4.3Gb level before I stamp it, I am exposed to a crash in the interim (I do try to manually copy this directory onto another disk, but once in a while I forget). But again, this is usually only with stuff that I wouldn't mind losing -- I keep multiple copies on the LAN of anything that is important and not yet backed up. The RAID will also help mitigate this risk + the "snapshot" feature means that I can back that particular directory on the external disk I plan to connect to the Infrant via USB on a daily basis.

The software bundled with NV+ is bit heavy for me and even though in absolute and relative terms the additional dollar amount is not all that much, I don't see the myself regretting not having got it. Which means that I can use that extra $150 that separates the NV and NV+ to buy some movies! ;)

Can anyone who has a Thecus 5200 speak to how loud the unit is? I am sitting on 5 500gb drives right now and had been considering an external drive enclosure and a software RAID configuration on a host PC, but I really like the idea of just plugging them into a stand-alone NAS unit and forgetting about trying to maintain a host PC, not to mention the problems inherent in making sure the cables stay connected to the external drives, etc. Most of the external enclosures I've seen approach the price of the Thecus or the ReadyNAS, so the NAS solution is looking more and more like a no-brainer. It definitely follows the KISS principle!

I have this setup for about two years now.

I started with Philips Streamium players. The streamium line from Philips is pretty much gone now but there are plenty of devices on ebay that can be snatched cheap. It is worth noting that Philips still supports Streamiums, providing web content and software updates...

My digital media server/client setup for approx $350. What this money gets you:

- HQ playback of audio files (via Windows Media Lossles and PCM out to the amp, hence the same quality as source) no AAC support so if you are an IPOD fanatic no luck here...
- playback of DIVX'd (or XVID'ed) movies and MPEG2 DVD vob's
- playback of pictures (JPEG, BMP)
- on-screen (TV) interface


My living room (yes, that's not the only one) setup consist of Philips Streamium SL-400. SL-400 has video component out (progressive) and digital out (PCM) via coax. This ensures my $1.5k amp gets pure digital signal (PCM) to its A/D converters and that my HDTV gets 480p picture.

My son's bedroom has Streamium SL-300 which has composite and S-VIDEO out (no component or PCM out on this unit) which is more than enough so that he can play his 130GBs of cartoons (cartoons compress beautifully, vector graphics) over an over...

There is another, audio only, Streamium in my bedroom, but that's hardly used.

The core of my setup is TwonkyMedia (DLNA/UPNP compliant) server ($20) running on hacked (easily) Buffalo Linkstation NAS. Buffalos NAS's can be easily hacked turning them in essence to Linux boxes that can be used as any other linux machine.

My network runs on Wi-Fi G which is more than enough for lossless audio and MPEG-4 video.

I chose specific devices through research, and recommedn the same choices based on my own experience. There may be other, more advanced solustion but my setup easily performs task for which it was designed.
Couple of points to consider:

- media player. I chose Philips Streamium because it plays standard MP3 and WMA which is the format in which most of the IP radio stations I listen to play.
IP Radio was not however a top priority, I wanted a player that can play lossless audio and both SL-400 and SL-300 support WMA Lossless format. Notably SL-400 has a digital out so the sound is not afected by its cheap (presumably) D/A converters. The conversion is done inside of my $1.5K amp. Audio sounds as good as CD.

- server. Twonky was one of the first fully DLNA/UPNP compliant multiplatform media servers. DLNA compliance means that it can be used with variety of devices simultaneusly. It can also independently serve files to all three of my Streamiums in the same time, even when the same file is requested from all of them. Notably it offers Linux, PC and other versions which makes changing hardware very easy.

- NAS. Buffalo Linkstation has a history of being hacker friendly (Buffalo never threated to sue anybody for hacking its products) and the hacked firmware is easily available on the net (linkstationwiki.net)
Once hacked you gain full control over the device, including telnet, SSH etc etc. Typically for NAS devices, Linstation has a http interface plus, not so usual telnet.. What makes it really special is that it has two USB 2.0 ports that can be used for adding an additional storage. This is a very convenient and money saving feature since it allows add simple USB hard drives, without the need to invest in another, expensive NAS device just to add storage space...

To summarize: All the gear together Philips SL-400 ($60 on ebay), Buffalo HD-250HLAN 250GB (original price $250) and Twonky server ($20) was approx. $350 which make this setup extremely cheap, especially since others spend thousands on similar in functionality systems... Agreed, it may not be the most advanced one, but heck, I am living the digital dream, with no CD's or DVD's to jugle for a mere $350!

Good luck in your digital endeavours...

I came to the forum today to see if any more recent discussions would change my mind from my many months of research. I am about to pull the preverbial trigger on the ReadyNAS NV+. Thecus 5200 is a close second for me.

To the questions below, there are differences in the features and performance between these products. Buffalo and several others are very much 'entry level' products where the Thecus, Infrant and some others are 'Prosumer' products. If you look at the reviews that can be found on places like Tomshardware and others, you will see that Infrant usually wins out on performance. As to features, it really depends on how you intend to use the device. If you are interested in NAS because you simply need significant storage capacity to hold gigabytes / tereabytes of data, performance and other features probably become less of an issue. If you are looking to stream data (movies, home videos, photos, music, etc.) to one or more points concurrently, interface with UPnP devices (MS Extenders, DLink DSM520, etc.), use the NAS device as a FTP server, etc., then performance and features become more of an issues.
Regards,
David

David,

Read my post below. I am listeing to lossless audio at 900kbps and my kid is wathing a 1100kbps DIVX movie in the same time. From the same server on the same disk.

The device is $250 Buffalo Linkstation HD-250HLAN streaming over wi-fi G netwrok.
Not even Linstation PRO or Live. Just plian Buffalo linkstation with plain old 100MBs ethernet. I believe it has 64MB of RAM total:)))

I think you are close to overspending on your gear... Keep in mind, average CD in lossless compresion is 300MBs... Even thousand of CDs will only take 300GB (roughly), pictures take even less space unless you literally have tens of thousand of them... Do you really need disk arrays and terabytes of storage that you mentioned :)) Also, unless you are running gigabit ethernet in you house performance of the NAS will always be the least important factor in your transfer speed...
My setup runs without a PC, on top of that while serving files my Linkstation w/ 64MBs of RAM also runs mlDonkey so I can feed the beast additional MBs of uncompressed audio... Stay away from MS products (CPU and bandwidth hoggers, first class ) and do not buy that old, beautifull bridge in Brooklyn. It's been sold long time ago.

Take it easy...

... Even thousand CDs will only take 300GB (roughly), pictures take even less space unless you literally have tens of thousand of them... Do you really need disk arrays and those terabytes of storage that you mentioned

I think that I do. I am ripping my dvd collection and home movies to my hard disk for easy access and do not want any compression. Many DVD-9s are around 7G to 8G so I am already at around 400Gb ... and I have some more to do. I think that by the time I'm done I'll be at around 600Gb. Allow space to grow for the next year or two and a Tb or two don't seem all that cavernous and unattainable!

:)

I think that I do. I am ripping my dvd collection and home movies to my hard disk for easy access and do not want any compression. Many DVD-9s are around 7G to 8G so I am already at around 400Gb ... and I have some more to do. I think that by the time I'm done I'll be at around 600Gb. Allow space to grow for the next year or two and a Tb or two don't seem all that cavernous and unattainable!

:)

You already have your DVD compressed :)) DVDs are in MPEG2 which is a compressed format itself, going to DIVX which MPEG4 means utilizing a more advanced, newer compression scheme. The same compression scheme, by the way, that is used by both by satellite HD broadcast, BlueRay and HDDVD disks.
On the audio side lossless compression, similar to the one used on DVD-A and BlueRay saves 40% with NO quality difference, hence the name lossless...
Before you waste time and space do some reading on both subject...

Thanks your input, all taken aboard. No, I don't think I'm overspending. The collection of ripped movies, music and photos are ever growing. Certainly, I can change out the drives as growth warrants it. As to the device itself, I am not interested in a 'hackers special'. Though I don't want something that is completely plug and play, I want something that is well supported and 'prosumer' in quality. I've been building and repairing PCs for many years and no longer have the desire to be a slave to these devices. For me, they need to be as reliable as the copper POTS phone that is hanging on my kitchen wall (no, I don't subscribe to VOIP for that reason!). I know, a bit of a pipe dream but CE are getting closer all the time.


David,

Read my post below. I am listeing to lossless audio at 900kbps and my kid is wathing a 1100kbps DIVX movie in the same time. From the same server on the same disk.

The device is $250 Buffalo Linkstation HD-250HLAN streaming over wi-fi G netwrok.
Not even Linstation PRO or Live. Just plian Buffalo linkstation with plain old 100MBs ethernet. I believe it has 64MB of RAM total:)))

I think you are close to overspending on your gear... Keep in mind, average CD in lossless compresion is 300MBs... Even thousand of CDs will only take 300GB (roughly), pictures take even less space unless you literally have tens of thousand of them... Do you really need disk arrays and terabytes of storage that you mentioned :)) Also, unless you are running gigabit ethernet in you house performance of the NAS will always be the least important factor in your transfer speed...
My setup runs without a PC, on top of that while serving files my Linkstation w/ 64MBs of RAM also runs mlDonkey so I can feed the beast additional MBs of uncompressed audio... Stay away from MS products (CPU and bandwidth hoggers, first class ) and do not buy that old, beautifull bridge in Brooklyn. It's been sold long time ago.

Take it easy...

I think you are close to overspending on your gear... Keep in mind, average CD in lossless compresion is 300MBs... Even thousand of CDs will only take 300GB (roughly), pictures take even less space unless you literally have tens of thousand of them... Do you really need disk arrays and terabytes of storage that you mentioned :))

Let's see, Apocalypse Now Redux clocked in at over 20GB, recorded from HDNet. I've gone through 300GB of space in less than two weeks.

6TB and counting...

Thanks your input, all taken aboard. No, I don't think I'm overspending. The collection of ripped movies, music and photos are ever growing. Certainly, I can change out the drives as growth warrants it. As to the device itself, I am not interested in a 'hackers special'. Though I don't want something that is completely plug and play, I want something that is well supported and 'prosumer' in quality. I've been building and repairing PCs for many years and no longer have the desire to be a slave to these devices. For me, they need to be as reliable as the copper POTS phone that is hanging on my kitchen wall (no, I don't subscribe to VOIP for that reason!). I know, a bit of a pipe dream but CE are getting closer all the time.

David,

If you are in IT business you should know that there is no such a think as pro-sumer. There are consumer and commercial grades. Everything else is just a matter of image and product positioning. Now, the hacker special as you call it, runs open Linux OS and the fact it is "hacked" means that you are not at the mercy of manufacturer but can get updates to your software from many sources. The so called tech support from big companies often means being at the mercy of manufacturer who can, but does not have to release updates to anything else but his latest product line during its very short production run. I am an IT profesional and pretty happy about being able to control the environment myself. I am not a slave, I am in control. Of course, this is a matter of personal preference. I just can't stand seeing people so oftne being taken and paying an extra for something that is just a marketing scheme or irrelevant claim.

Cheers

DAS or SATA multiplier (difference?)

Currently I own a Thecus N2050 with 2x500 disks in RAID1 configuration connected to my PC via ESATA.
I'm extremely satisfied of this setup but need more storage and would like to have the same configuration with 4 or 5-disks, preferably in RAID1 or RAID1+0 setup.

Now I've been reading the AMUG review and I'm not sure that this is what I'm looking for. Can someone explain the difference between a DAS (which the Thecus N2050 is) and a SATA port multiplier?

I would like to use hardware RAID and preferably not software RAID.

4-DATAport ESATA STorage
and
Norco DS-500e

review Norco DS-500:
You can view a review on AMUG on this device.

Sorry as this is my first post, I cannot post the URL here above

Thanks in advance..

You already have your DVD compressed :)) DVDs are in MPEG2 which is a compressed format itself, going to DIVX which MPEG4 means utilizing a more advanced, newer compression scheme. The same compression scheme, by the way, that is used by both by satellite HD broadcast, BlueRay and HDDVD disks.
On the audio side lossless compression, similar to the one used on DVD-A and BlueRay saves 40% with NO quality difference, hence the name lossless...
Before you waste time and space do some reading on both subject...

Thanks for the valuable advice! I admit that I am ignorant in these matters but one way for me to learn is to ask questions, provoking though they may be. ;)
What I meant was that I didn't want any additional compression, but I admit that is a personal choice and that I was not clear in my post.
I apologize if you perceive my ignorant questions as a waste of time and space. I will be more careful in addressing you the next time. :)

Thanks for your note. I have not only been an IT professional for many years but I am also a consumer of electronics too. So I'm quite aware of marketing and various levels of product, product quality, etc. So, my comments re: prosumer was geared towards products that tend to be of a better quality and have a richer set of features. I guess you would argue that Buffalo fits the bill since you are able to 'control' the product in ways in which you wish. I don't see Buffalo in that way however, as I've been a consumer of their products since their days of making buffered printer switches. This certainly is a topic that can be heavily debated but is not one for this thread.

Point is, the level of product and expandability that Infrant, Thecus and some others offer, will provide me some ability to expand as my needs grow. I don't think I'm overbuying as the solution and the solution's features appeal to the direction in which I am wanting to take my home media needs, both from a consumer and business perspective.

Enjoy your gear!

David,

If you are in IT business you should know that there is no such a think as pro-sumer. There are consumer and commercial grades. Everything else is just a matter of image and product positioning. Now, the hacker special as you call it, runs open Linux OS and the fact it is "hacked" means that you are not at the mercy of manufacturer but can get updates to your software from many sources. The so called tech support from big companies often means being at the mercy of manufacturer who can, but does not have to release updates to anything else but his latest product line during its very short production run. I am an IT profesional and pretty happy about being able to control the environment myself. I am not a slave, I am in control. Of course, this is a matter of personal preference. I just can't stand seeing people so oftne being taken and paying an extra for something that is just a marketing scheme or irrelevant claim.

Cheers

Sankar -

I'm really hoping for the sake of (i)user and their interaction with these forums that they didn't imply that as a direct insult, rather a play on words in regard to spending time and utilizing 'disc space' in selecting the products you use.

These forums are here to help people share information. Part of that sharing requires asking of questions so that one can learn. I hope they intended their comments in that light.


I apologize if you perceive my ignorant questions as a waste of time and space. I will be more careful in addressing you the next time. :)

These forums are here to help people share information. Part of that sharing requires asking of questions so that one can learn. I hope they intended their comments in that light.

Again, I am a newb to the server side of this.

At this time, I am not going to be able to allocate the kind of funds or time required to have a multi-disk RAID setup, nor do I have the desire to maintain a SW-based NAS cobbled together from an old PC. Because the participants in this thread have a lot of expertise, maybe I can just ask a more specific question at this point.

I am thinking of just adding a Linkstation Live NAS to my network as a simple storage solution for my home. Why? Because it seems like its mostly plug and play with minimal configuation and upkeep AND because I can take my 500G USB Mybook and plug it in to the unit for additional storage. All this for $200-300.

Another reason I am interested in the LS Live is that I will want to add a Media Player to the system soon, and I want it to be able to serve files to it. The LS Live is already set-up for this (DLNA compliant, etc.). Will this work? How well? Are there big drawbacks or limitations to going this route? Is expandability the only one?

Thanks for your feedback....

Jay B.

You already have your DVD compressed :)) DVDs are in MPEG2 which is a compressed format itself, going to DIVX which MPEG4 means utilizing a more advanced, newer compression scheme. The same compression scheme, by the way, that is used by both by satellite HD broadcast, BlueRay and HDDVD disks.


Where's the eye roll smilie?

Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

HD Satellite (esp. LIL) is using MPEG-4 part 10, aka AVC aka H.264. This is completely different from MPEG-4 part 2 (Divx, Xvid). HD-DVD and Blu-Ray do not use MPEG-4 part 2 at all either.

DivX: MPEG-4 part 2
Satellite MPEG-4 part 10/AVC/H.264
HD-DVD: MPEG-4 part 10/AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2
Blu-Ray: MPEG-2, MPEG-4 part 10/AVC/H.264, VC-1

They are completely different codecs, and completely incompatible (witness the discussions on why none of the streaming players that can play HD MPEG-4 part 2 can't play HD MPEG-4 part 10), and the only thing they have in common is that they happened to appear as different chapters in a much larger MPEG4 spec (23 parts).

Before this thread gets too far off track, can I suggest we get back to the thread author's original comments / questions and leave ultra technical debate for another thread! :-)


Where's the eye roll smilie?

Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

HD Satellite (esp. LIL) is using MPEG-4 part 10, aka AVC aka H.264. This is completely different from MPEG-4 part 2 (Divx, Xvid). HD-DVD and Blu-Ray do not use MPEG-4 part 2 at all either.

DivX: MPEG-4 part 2
Satellite MPEG-4 part 10/AVC/H.264
HD-DVD: MPEG-4 part 10/AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2
Blu-Ray: MPEG-2, MPEG-4 part 10/AVC/H.264, VC-1

They are completely different codecs, and completely incompatible (witness the discussions on why none of the streaming players that can play HD MPEG-4 part 2 can't play HD MPEG-4 part 10), and the only thing they have in common is that they happened to appear as different chapters in a much larger MPEG4 spec (23 parts).

Back on topic, I just ordered a Thecus 5200. It will live on my GigE network and will support a Sonos system, a Windows PC, and eventually a Mac mini and perhaps an AppleTV device. It suited my purposes nicely, because it holds five SATA drives and I happened to have five 500GB SATA drives left over from an old system. Other advantages for me are (1) always on; (2) doesn't require a host PC; (3) works with Mac and Windoze; (4) will support my Sonos system (no need for any PCs to be on for Sonos to play); and (5) decent (but not great) support.

I'll post here when I get it up and running.

- Ken

Aside from the 5th bay, can I ask what steered you in the direction and not the Infrant or others?


Back on topic, I just ordered a Thecus 5200. It will live on my GigE network and will support a Sonos system, a Windows PC, and eventually a Mac mini and perhaps an AppleTV device. It suited my purposes nicely, because it holds five SATA drives and I happened to have five 500GB SATA drives left over from an old system. Other advantages for me are (1) always on; (2) doesn't require a host PC; (3) works with Mac and Windoze; (4) will support my Sonos system (no need for any PCs to be on for Sonos to play); and (5) decent (but not great) support.

I'll post here when I get it up and running.

- Ken

Sorry to dumb this thread down but has anybody tried using Linspire as the server software on a PC based server in a home network?

SteinyD:
I don't have any profound reasons other than the 5th bay and the fact that I don't foresee any need for X-RAID or some of the other features of the Infrant. The Thecus may have been a few dollars cheaper as well, certainly on a per disk basis. If I need more storage, I'll just add a second NAS, but I don't foresee that happening until I start recording HD on the system. Right now it's just ripped DVDs and my iTunes libraries (I maintain separate libraries for the iPod in AAC and for the Sonos in lossless). If for some reason the Thecus doesn't work out or is incompatible with my disks, then I'll return it and go for the Infrant.
- Ken

Thanks Ken. I've been struggling with this decision and think I've decided to do nothing at the moment. I might go for a low end (inexpensive) solution to hold a couple of drives for now. The more I read and play with various things at home, the more I realize that video streaming at DVD quality (or better) isn't there yet. Until it is, there is no sense in my making a major investment or money or time just yet. This is the year though. I can feel it!


SteinyD:
I don't have any profound reasons other than the 5th bay and the fact that I don't foresee any need for X-RAID or some of the other features of the Infrant. The Thecus may have been a few dollars cheaper as well, certainly on a per disk basis. If I need more storage, I'll just add a second NAS, but I don't foresee that happening until I start recording HD on the system. Right now it's just ripped DVDs and my iTunes libraries (I maintain separate libraries for the iPod in AAC and for the Sonos in lossless). If for some reason the Thecus doesn't work out or is incompatible with my disks, then I'll return it and go for the Infrant.
- Ken

Again, I am a newb to the server side of this.

At this time, I am not going to be able to allocate the kind of funds or time required to have a multi-disk RAID setup, nor do I have the desire to maintain a SW-based NAS cobbled together from an old PC. Because the participants in this thread have a lot of expertise, maybe I can just ask a more specific question at this point.

I am thinking of just adding a Linkstation Live NAS to my network as a simple storage solution for my home. Why? Because it seems like its mostly plug and play with minimal configuation and upkeep AND because I can take my 500G USB Mybook and plug it in to the unit for additional storage. All this for $200-300.

Another reason I am interested in the LS Live is that I will want to add a Media Player to the system soon, and I want it to be able to serve files to it. The LS Live is already set-up for this (DLNA compliant, etc.). Will this work? How well? Are there big drawbacks or limitations to going this route? Is expandability the only one?

Thanks for your feedback....

Jay B.

From the looks of things, yes expandibility is the only limiting factor. (and again, no exotic multi-function dohickers, it just serves up disk)

Not to mention, with the USB port, you can get a multi-drive USB enclosure and add a few disks to that, it'd seem. Not a bad idea or deal for that matter. For a starting out setup, it wouldn't be bad.


--
goobenet

Thanks, goobenet. Now for the right player.....darn that 1080p TV I bought.....

Jay B.

Great thread guys. :)
I would like to ask your opinions on this setup I am thinking of implementing.
First some background.

I am going to be using a modded Xbox running XBMC to stream video and music via wired ethernet to my Panasonic plasma and Onkyo A/V receiver.
I have a buttload of DVD's I want to rip and put on the network.
I have a box here that is my sandbox for webmaster/forum duties.
It's an Asus P4P800SE motherboard, P4 Prescott @3GHz, and a gig of Kingston DDR RAM.
My plan is to use this as the basis for a storage solution.
I am thinking of buying a CoolerMaster STC-T01 (http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/Products.aspx?pid=633) case to put that motherboard etc. in.
This case will allow me to add a second power supply when needed.
Buy some Cremax/Icydock MB454 (http://www.circotech.com/icydock-mb454-sata-ii-aluminum-hard-drive-cage-for-4-hard-drives.html) 4 to 3 drive enclosures. (Haven't decided if I really want to spend the money on these yet...)
Buy some Seagate Barracuda 500GB (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148136) Sata II drives. These should run fine off of a Sata 150 controller from everything I have read.
Get a 3Ware 9500S-12 (http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/9000_DS_012605.pdf) controller card to hang those drives off of.
Seem like nice cards. They support online expansion of the array. I can add drives as needed. I wouldn't have to buy them all at once.

I can hang 12 drives off this card. Since Windows can't see a drive larger than 2TB, I figure I could make 2 arrays (in time).
5 500GB drives per array. (The card can handle arrays >4.8TB)
Windows would be seeing a 1.86TB drive if it was configured in RAID 5.
2 arrays would leave 2 ports empty on the card. If I bought 2 more drives I could either add 500GB more by mirroring those last 2 drives OR I could have hot spares for the existing arrays.
So the final config would be either 3.72TB with hot spares or 4.19TB with the last 2 drives as a mirror.
Now that I think on it I bet I could have all this in one array, only lose one drive to parity and just split it up as logical drives to get around the limitation in Windows. Hmmm

I would probably load Windows 2003 Server on the box (on it's own IDE drive) since I am very comfortable with it and I have an unused license here. It would also work well on my LAN since I am running an AD Domain. Browsing for movies could be made very easy for my wife by using DFS (which I already use here).
AD security groups to keep her and I from accidentally deleting files. I don't logon as Domain Admin very much, only when needed. ;)

I know there are better solutions out there, but since I already have many of the components to make this work I think it is the answer for me.
I figure the cost to implement as follows:

CM Stacker Case: $145.00
Drive Enclosures if I go that route: $109.00 ea.
Second Power supply once I get above 4 or 5 drives: $60.00 bucks? I don't know how many watts I would need if the supply was just running 7 drives.
Seagate HD's: $150.00 ea.
3Ware card: I have found one for $330.00 including the BBU unit!!

What do you guys think?
Any and all feedback appreciated.

Matt

I'm doing a similar setup, but some differences

I do use windows 2003, but not in domain mode -- I understand this, but find it to much hassle for the home. Works just fine as a server on my LAN as file server in a workgroup..

I have my firewall from watchguard do the DHCP stuff..

anyway -- I had a P4P800 in my server for a long time, but when I went for the 3ware raid card -- I went with a cehap intel server MB and reused the CPU and memory from the P4P800. I wanted 64 bit PCI-X card slots so I could get a 12 port 9550SX 12 ML card

it works great so far -- 3ware has feature call autocarve - so I have basically 11 drive in one array that the raid control carves into 2 LUNS/VOLUMES for windows 2003 - one drive of the 12 is always a hotspare. I suggest always having a hotspare online... I have had one drive go out in the last year - had to replace that one and recently one drive in the array went offline. in both cases the arrya auto rebuilt from the hot spare. the last drive the went offline appears to work fine in standalone testing -- so I do not know why the raid card stopped seeing it.

I actually just removed it and added in another drive the weekend to again have a hot spare in place..

so with 400gig drives at the moment - this is two volumes\drives to windows -- one is 1.9G and the other is about 1.6G

I have a LIAN server case hold about 19 drives. 2 are the OS and IMAGE backup, 12 are the arrays about -- I'm about to add 5 x 500 gigs and another 3 ware card and 8 port model. the extra ports will connect to an external sata case I have with drive slide

I pushing the 650 watt high quality supply in the case to run all this at the moment

I may add another or just a bigger one when I add the other drives..

it works well so far



Great thread guys. :)
I would like to ask your opinions on this setup I am thinking of implementing.
First some background.

I am going to be using a modded Xbox running XBMC to stream video and music via wired ethernet to my Panasonic plasma and Onkyo A/V receiver.
I have a buttload of DVD's I want to rip and put on the network.
I have a box here that is my sandbox for webmaster/forum duties.
It's an Asus P4P800SE motherboard, P4 Prescott @3GHz, and a gig of Kingston DDR RAM.
My plan is to use this as the basis for a storage solution.
I am thinking of buying a CoolerMaster STC-T01 (http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/Products.aspx?pid=633) case to put that motherboard etc. in.
This case will allow me to add a second power supply when needed.
Buy some Cremax/Icydock MB454 (http://www.circotech.com/icydock-mb454-sata-ii-aluminum-hard-drive-cage-for-4-hard-drives.html) 4 to 3 drive enclosures. (Haven't decided if I really want to spend the money on these yet...)
Buy some Seagate Barracuda 500GB (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148136) Sata II drives. These should run fine off of a Sata 150 controller from everything I have read.
Get a 3Ware 9500S-12 (http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/9000_DS_012605.pdf) controller card to hang those drives off of.
Seem like nice cards. They support online expansion of the array. I can add drives as needed. I wouldn't have to buy them all at once.

I can hang 12 drives off this card. Since Windows can't see a drive larger than 2TB, I figure I could make 2 arrays (in time).
5 500GB drives per array. (The card can handle arrays >4.8TB)
Windows would be seeing a 1.86TB drive if it was configured in RAID 5.
2 arrays would leave 2 ports empty on the card. If I bought 2 more drives I could either add 500GB more by mirroring those last 2 drives OR I could have hot spares for the existing arrays.
So the final config would be either 3.72TB with hot spares or 4.19TB with the last 2 drives as a mirror.
Now that I think on it I bet I could have all this in one array, only lose one drive to parity and just split it up as logical drives to get around the limitation in Windows. Hmmm

I would probably load Windows 2003 Server on the box (on it's own IDE drive) since I am very comfortable with it and I have an unused license here. It would also work well on my LAN since I am running an AD Domain. Browsing for movies could be made very easy for my wife by using DFS (which I already use here).
AD security groups to keep her and I from accidentally deleting files. I don't logon as Domain Admin very much, only when needed. ;)

I know there are better solutions out there, but since I already have many of the components to make this work I think it is the answer for me.
I figure the cost to implement as follows:

CM Stacker Case: $145.00
Drive Enclosures if I go that route: $109.00 ea.
Second Power supply once I get above 4 or 5 drives: $60.00 bucks? I don't know how many watts I would need if the supply was just running 7 drives.
Seagate HD's: $150.00 ea.
3Ware card: I have found one for $330.00 including the BBU unit!!

What do you guys think?
Any and all feedback appreciated.

Matt

Thanks for the feedback Stevetoney.

Have you had an opportunity to use the online expansion in these 3Ware cards?
Does it work as advertised?

Yeah, running an AD Domain at home is big time overkill. :p
I do it so my skill set doesn't go stagnant. I am stuck in the desktop side of things and if I don't use it. I'll forget it!
I've been running a domain ever since W2K first came out.
I am constantly bailing our "sys admin" out of jams at work. The other day I had to show him how to setup the new style DFS in Win 2003. He was lost. :rolleyes:

I'm playing around with UnRaid this morning. Pretty cool stuff so far, but I don't think it is the answer for me. If something goes wrong I'll be lost.
I know just enough Linux to be really, really dangerous. That makes me nervous. ;)

yep, the expansion works -- takes a while to add drives, but it works

I added drive to the card this way

I have one unit (3ware term) with 11 drives in raid5 then another unit with the other drives as a hot spare

you have to use a 3rd party tool to expand the windows partition onto the new space -- I used Acronis disk director suite - booted from a CD and expanded the partitions

I'm not using DFS for this -- just plain NTFS local to the server and standard sharing with the proper permissions



Thanks for the feedback Stevetoney.

Have you had an opportunity to use the online expansion in these 3Ware cards?
Does it work as advertised?

Yeah, running an AD Domain at home is big time overkill. :p
I do it so my skill set doesn't go stagnant. I am stuck in the desktop side of things and if I don't use it. I'll forget it!
I've been running a domain ever since W2K first came out.
I am constantly bailing our "sys admin" out of jams at work. The other day I had to show him how to setup the new style DFS in Win 2003. He was lost. :rolleyes:

I'm playing around with UnRaid this morning. Pretty cool stuff so far, but I don't think it is the answer for me. If something goes wrong I'll be lost.
I know just enough Linux to be really, really dangerous. That makes me nervous. ;)

yep, the expansion works -- takes a while to add drives, but it works
Cool, glad to hear that from someone who has actually used it. :)
you have to use a 3rd party tool to expand the windows partition onto the new space -- I used Acronis disk director suite - booted from a CD and expanded the partitions
I figured as much. I have a copy of Server Magic here. It should do the trick.
Thanks for all the info. You've convinced me this is the way to go for my particular situation.

Been doing some more reading and found that Windows 2003 w/ SP1 can have volumes larger than 2TB. In order to do this you have to use dynamic disks.
Has anyone here done this under Win2K3?
Obviously, a major advantage of this would be the ability to expand the simple volume "on the fly" after adding disks to the array. There wouldn't be a need for a third party application such as Server Magic or Acronis Disk Director. A simple volume can be expanded as long as it isn't the boot or system volume. There are other circumstances where they can not be extended as well.

I haven't used dynamic disks in 2003, just Win 2000 and frankly I had come to the conclusion that they are evil. :p
If anyone would like to share their experiences under Win 2003, I'd love to hear them.

The relevant info from MS is here (http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/59a9462a-cbdd-45e7-828b-12c6cd9ae4781033.mspx?mfr=true) and here (http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/8cc5891d-bf8e-4164-862d-dac5418c59481033.mspx?mfr=true).
Here is a copy and paste of the relevant info from the second link.
************************************************************ *****
NTFS Size Limits
Description Limit

Maximum file size:
Architecturally: 16 exabytes minus 1 KB (2^64 bytes minus 1 KB)
Implementation: 16 terabytes minus 64 KB (2^44 bytes minus 64 KB)

Maximum volume size:
Architecturally: 2^64 clusters minus 1 cluster
Implementation: 256 terabytes minus 64 KB ( 2^32 clusters minus 1 cluster)

Files per volume:
4,294,967,295 (2^32 minus 1 file)
************************************************************ *****

Cluster size will determine the maximum size of a dynamic NTFS volume.
Even using the default cluster size of 4KB, it would allow a volume up to 16TB (minus 1 cluster - 4KB)

Another question:
Since we are storing large files what is the consensus regarding cluster size when formatting a NTFS partition/volume?
Do most of you leave it at the default of 4KB, or do you go with larger cluster sizes?

tried dynamic volumes in 2003 -- quickly determined I did not like them

only use basic disks..... much better for me and the hardware raid card

I do not mind the 3rd party software to expand the partition onto the new space

--

I have increased the cluster size on my large arrays to the largest size


probably should have tested various sizes for performance with my setup of gigabit nics and switch to see what the actually best size would be, but just went down a path that guessed a larger cluster may be better for streaming the video

this may or may not be true -- have not properly tested the results and this is an areas where cluster size adjustment may or may not be noticeable helpful



Been doing some more reading and found that Windows 2003 w/ SP1 can have volumes larger than 2TB. In order to do this you have to use dynamic disks.
Has anyone here done this under Win2K3?
Obviously, a major advantage of this would be the ability to expand the simple volume "on the fly" after adding disks to the array. There wouldn't be a need for a third party application such as Server Magic or Acronis Disk Director. A simple volume can be expanded as long as it isn't the boot or system volume. There are other circumstances where they can not be extended as well.

I haven't used dynamic disks in 2003, just Win 2000 and frankly I had come to the conclusion that they are evil. :p
If anyone would like to share their experiences under Win 2003, I'd love to hear them.

The relevant info from MS is here (http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/59a9462a-cbdd-45e7-828b-12c6cd9ae4781033.mspx?mfr=true) and here (http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/8cc5891d-bf8e-4164-862d-dac5418c59481033.mspx?mfr=true).
Here is a copy and paste of the relevant info from the second link.
************************************************************ *****
NTFS Size Limits
Description Limit

Maximum file size:
Architecturally: 16 exabytes minus 1 KB (2^64 bytes minus 1 KB)
Implementation: 16 terabytes minus 64 KB (2^44 bytes minus 64 KB)

Maximum volume size:
Architecturally: 2^64 clusters minus 1 cluster
Implementation: 256 terabytes minus 64 KB ( 2^32 clusters minus 1 cluster)

Files per volume:
4,294,967,295 (2^32 minus 1 file)
************************************************************ *****

Cluster size will determine the maximum size of a dynamic NTFS volume.
Even using the default cluster size of 4KB, it would allow a volume up to 16TB (minus 1 cluster - 4KB)

Another question:
Since we are storing large files what is the consensus regarding cluster size when formatting a NTFS partition/volume?
Do most of you leave it at the default of 4KB, or do you go with larger cluster sizes?

Thanks for the reply Stevetoney.
My gut tells me to stay the hell away from dynamic disks. I think I will listen to it. ;)
I have 5 500GB disks coming in tomorrow from Newegg. That will allow me to make 1.86TB logical drive in RAID5. When I expand the array I may just buy another 5 and make another 1.86TB logical drive and add a hot spare. Then I wouldn't even have to go the Server Magic route. If I top it out at 12 drives (controller has 12 ports) I will just have a third logical drive of 930GB.

I should have time to do some testing on cluster sizes once my gigabit switch gets here next week.
I'll try and remember to post my results in this thread.

Matt

Okay, so I just decided to get the 2TB terastation for $900. From what I could figure it's the simplest way to go for me and adequate for my task of streaming DVD and HD content over my network. Going the NV route was much more expensive, and didn't seem to provide anything additional that I needed. Building a server myself was something I'm capable of doing without any problem, but I just didn't want to spend the time on it and researching all the possible choices, so I just went with the Terastation for simplicity since hopefully I'll just be able to plug it in and be up and running.

Here is another vote for the ReadyNAS NV from a happy customer. I would like to add a few points that haven't been raised.

Infrant provides excellent vendor support. I purchased my NV last summer. Since then there have been many firmware updates which provided better functionality. They also provided a reasonably priced upgrade to the newer silent power supply that significantly reduced the noise of the NV. And they allowed existing users to get the Retrospect backup package for $20.

The hard drives are VERY easy to swap out. Just open the front door and pull them out. With XRAID, upgrading to higher capacity drives is very simple.

What's your time worth? The ReadyNAS NV is ready to run out of the box, esp if you get the hard drives preformated.

Best of luck to all who are considering a purchase.


Discover the best radio station on earth: kexp.org
Nah! Best is RadioParadise.com. Second is kexp.org. ;)

I should have the 2TB Terastation this week, so I'll let people know what I think when I get it hooked up and using it.

I got my TeraStation hooked up, but it seems slow. I'm ripping a DVD right now and it's taking significantly longer than it normally should. It started at a little over 4,000KB/s, and now it's slowed to the high 3,000KB/s. Usually it takes maybe 20 minutes to rip a DVD, this is like 30 minutes now.

I was expecting this to be faster? Are there settings that I could explore to increase this speed, or did I end up with a product that isn't fast enough? That would be unfortunate, someone might have mentioned that...

I got my TeraStation hooked up, but it seems slow. I'm ripping a DVD right now and it's taking significantly longer than it normally should. It started at a little over 4,000KB/s, and now it's slowed to the high 3,000KB/s. Usually it takes maybe 20 minutes to rip a DVD, this is like 30 minutes now.

I was expecting this to be faster? Are there settings that I could explore to increase this speed, or did I end up with a product that isn't fast enough? That would be unfortunate, someone might have mentioned that...

How long does it take to read/write a DVD worth of data (4.3Gb)? (I assume that you are running a gigabit network?)
I'll try this with my new Infrant to give you a reference point.

It took 30 minutes this morning, the file was like 6gb I think. Usually it takes me about 20 minutes or so. I am not sure about my network, but I assume so. The 20 minutes or so has been the same with previous drives which were in the same computer, attached to USB, on other computers, or on others computers attached by USB, so previously the rip speed was limited by I assume the ripping computer's processing speed mainly.

It's not a deal breaker, but it's dissappointing. PLayback is just fine though, although I've not tested with HD files yet.

edit: the file was 6.7gB and it took 31 minutes.

Based on what I've read I'd expect the infrants to be much faster. I was under the impression that the Terastation would still be plenty fast for my tasks, and it is mosly I guess, but it would be nice if it wasn't the bottleneck for ripping.

It took 30 minutes this morning, the file was like 6gb I think. Usually it takes me about 20 minutes or so. I am not sure about my network, but I assume so. The 20 minutes or so has been the same with previous drives which were in the same computer, attached to USB, on other computers, or on others computers attached by USB, so previously the rip speed was limited by I assume the ripping computer's processing speed mainly.

It's not a deal breaker, but it's dissappointing. PLayback is just fine though, although I've not tested with HD files yet.

edit: the file was 6.7gB and it took 31 minutes.

Based on what I've read I'd expect the infrants to be much faster. I was under the impression that the Terastation would still be plenty fast for my tasks, and it is mosly I guess, but it would be nice if it wasn't the bottleneck for ripping.

Your performance is perfectly normal. To stream video that file needs to take 2hours instead of 30 minutes. So its 4x faster than it needs to be play video... you get what you pay for... you choose the cheaper and slower solution and thats what you got...

Sean

Well certainly I understand that it's not as fast as a local disc, but I expected it to keep pace reasonably well. That's why I keep asking in this thread. Like I said, it's sufficient for playback, but I'm dissappointed insofar as it makes ripping DVDs slower which was something that I had not expected and that nobody suggested would be the case.

Well certainly I understand that it's not as fast as a local disc, but I expected it to keep pace reasonably well. That's why I keep asking in this thread. Like I said, it's sufficient for playback, but I'm dissappointed insofar as it makes ripping DVDs slower which was something that I had not expected and that nobody suggested would be the case.


All the benchmarks in the reviews at places like toms hardware would have shown you this.. Send it back and buy an infrant... :)

and BTW: this is what you originally posted

"It seems like the Buffalos are maybe noted for being slow, but as I said I'm not looking to move a huge amount of data around, just streaming one HD or DVD program at a time basically."

How long does it take to read/write a DVD worth of data (4.3Gb)? (I assume that you are running a gigabit network?)
I'll try this with my new Infrant to give you a reference point.

I just copied 1.95Gb (small and large files) to my Infrant NV and it took almost 3 minutes and 30 seconds. This translates to 12 minutes for 6.7Gb. I am running a gigabit network (no jumbo frames enabled). I wonder if I read the clock wrong or something.
I will run some more tests with a larger set and revert. Maybe run a dos batch file with a bunch of copies and time stamps at the start and end ...

:edit:
I just copied 7.79 GB (8,375,119,872 bytes) across from the hard on my PC to the Infrant NV using a batch file and recorded the amount of time it took (directories 3 levels deep). It took 13 mts 48.44 seconds.

All the benchmarks in the reviews at places like toms hardware would have shown you this.. Send it back and buy an infrant... :)

and BTW: this is what you originally posted

"It seems like the Buffalos are maybe noted for being slow, but as I said I'm not looking to move a huge amount of data around, just streaming one HD or DVD program at a time basically."

I really appreciate your attitude. Thank you for that. It's extremely helpful and productive to the forum.

I just copied 1.95Gb (small and large files) to my Infrant NV and it took almost 3 minutes and 30 seconds. This translates to 12 minutes for 6.7Gb. I am running a gigabit network (no jumbo frames enabled). I wonder if I read the clock wrong or something.
I will run some more tests with a larger set and revert. Maybe run a dos batch file with a bunch of copies and time stamps at the start and end ...

:edit:
I just copied 7.79 GB (8,375,119,872 bytes) across from the hard on my PC to the Infrant NV using a batch file and recorded the amount of time it took (directories 3 levels deep). It took 13 mts 48.44 seconds.

Yeah that's faster than I'm seeing as I expect. In any case, I'm okay with the terastation's speed so it will do. But if others are hunting for a NAS device this is something important to note. I would expect it to be faster if I eliminated the raid5 which is what I assume clogs it up, but then I wouldn't have backup in case a drive goes so I think I'll just live with it for now. If I need to rip faster I can rip to another drive and then transfer it later on so it's not a big deal.

Hi everyone, Like many of you I've finally run out of storage space, I have around 1tb of files on 3 computers, and to make life easier I want to have a central storage location so I'm in the market for a NAS. I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but I thought I'd post my decision making process for those who are in the same situation.

For my purposes I've narrowed it down to 3 choices, ranked as follows:

1. Infrant ReadyNas (I would buy a diskless unit and put in 4 500gb drives)
Pros: Mature firmware, excellent & timely support.
Cons: Not as fast as Thecus, only 4 drives instead of 5, price can be a little high.

2. Buffalo Terastation pro (either 1.6 or 2tb pre-loaded drives)
Pros: Price is attractive, unit is plug & play since it's already pre loaded with drives.
Cons: Speed is slower than Infrant & Thecus, drives are not hot swap (minor).

3. Thecus N5200B (I would put in 5 500gb drives)
Pros: Speed blows anything out of the water according to benchmarks. Five drives make the unit more efficient from a price/storage perspective.
Cons: Poor interface, very limited support, immature firmware. Not a big deal for a hands on tech type, but not something I want to deal with.

I think at this point I am leaning to the first 2 choices because I don't want to chance running into immature firmware on the thecus. I'm sure these will be very nice in a year or two (or probably now)..but I want something rock solid and proven. This is why the infrant appeals to me. For the record, I worked in IT for years and could easily build a NAS server myself, but honestly the time just isn't worth it for me. I'd rather just plug something in and add more units as necessary when I run out of space. Also, as for the speed, at first this was a big deal for me, until I realized that for my purpose (streaming media) any of these units would be fast enough.


Something I haven't seen a lot of here is price breakdown per terabyte. Here are some quick comparisons of the various units as of 4-3-07:

Option 1: (2.5tb capacity)
Total price $1240
Thecus 5200 diskless ($640 newegg)
5 500gb Seagate 120/ea ($600 outpost)
Price per tb: $496

Option 2: (1.6tb capacity)
Total price $811 (newegg)
Buffalo Terastation pro 1.6tb disks included
Price per tb: $506

Option3: (2tb capacity)
Total price $1095
Infrant ReadyNas diskless unit ($615 newegg)
4 500gb Seagate 120/ea free shipping ($480 outpost)
Price per tb: $547

Option 4: (2tb capacity)
Total price $1200 (newegg)
Buffalo Terastation pro 2tb disks included
Price per tb: $600

Option 5: (1tb capacity)
Total price $699 (newegg)
Buffalo Terastation pro 1tb disks included
Price per tb: $699

Option 6: (1tb capacity)
Total price $850 (newegg)
Infrant 1tb with disks included
Price per tb: $850


I know if price is the primary concern, then it would be much cheaper to get a direct attached storage solution, build your own server, or just use regular single/double drive nas external drives (I've seen costs go down to $212 per tb) . You could get 500gb NAS drives for a couple hundred bucks easily on ebay. Of course, then you don't have RAID, which for me is important. The convenience of not having to build & maintain something, and having RAID is what you pay for with these units, but they are still pricey - hopefully they come down more.

Could anyone with one of the Buffalo Terastation Pro units tell me if the unit could be powered up/down on a schedule? What other power management functions does it have? (I couldn't find this on the website).

I believe the Infrant allows power up/down on a schedule. I don't need the unit on 24/7 so I'd like to save power and (hopefully) drive life - although I've heard mixed opinions on whether spinning the drives down saves life. Some people have said the spin-down/spin-up process causes more wear then leaving them on 24/7. Any opinions on this?

Steven: yes it has an on and off time for a sleep function. It would be nice if it had some way to wake up automatically, but it does not. You can press the power button if it is asleep though, and it will power up, if you need to use it for some reason while it is asleep.

I believe this is all in the manual which you can find on the bufallo site.

I don't know about the wear issue with regards to hard drives, I always assumed letting them spin down prolonged them. In any case it saves energy.

Thanks a lot Chris, I guess I'll do a little more thinking between the terastation pro & the infrant before I pull the trigger in the next few days. They both look like good solutions.


Steven: yes it has an on and off time for a sleep function. It would be nice if it had some way to wake up automatically, but it does not. You can press the power button if it is asleep though, and it will power up, if you need to use it for some reason while it is asleep.

I believe this is all in the manual which you can find on the bufallo site.

I don't know about the wear issue with regards to hard drives, I always assumed letting them spin down prolonged them. In any case it saves energy.

BTW; to be clear, I was referring to the terastation, not the terastation pro. I would assume the pro would have at least the same functionality, but it may have additional features as well.

Hate to cross-post but it looks like I'm a lot cheaper than you guys and wanted your input. Just started a thread (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=10312404#post10312404) about buying a $330 1TB NAS from LaCie and thought I'd mention it here for others who want this functionality but want it cheaper (50% cheaper than the cheapest option listed above).

I'm confident there's something I'm missing, but right now it looks like it'll do all I ask and more (with a spare USB port to grow!) so please let me know what you guys think.

That looks like a pretty great steal, but it is just a single drive, not with any RAID capabilities it looks like, thus why it's so cheap. If you don't need RAID capabilities, then it would be a great route to go, but it would certainly not be a good thing to lose a TB of stuff should it fail...

Thanks for your insight Chris. I have basically no redundancy in my data storage as it stands now (I backup critical folders from my main machine every couple months to an external HDD) and while I agree that a RAID5 or whatever would be ideal, it's already a financial stretch to think about 1TB even at these prices. I've been thinking I'll probably just add 1TB of networked storage per year, and maybe a year from now it'll be enough cheaper that I'll buy 2-3 of these units to back each other up...

My other consideration is that I spend 7-8 hours a day on generator/battery backup so power consumption is a big issue. I really want as few devices on as possible.