NAS Storage

[voodooflux]

This thread now has me seriously considering ditching my home WinTel server box in favour of something like a QNAP TS-209 Pro II. Couple of 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1 drives in there for storage, and I can also stream media to the PS3/360/SqueezeBox. Sorted

[fmz98]

This thread now has me seriously considering ditching my home WinTel server box in favour of something like a QNAP TS-209 Pro II. Couple of 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1 drives in there for storage, and I can also stream media to the PS3/360/SqueezeBox. Sorted

Well NAS drive will use a lot less electricity than a WinTel server would, plus NAS drives are much quieter.

[dmini]

Well, I bought the QNAP TS409 Pro. End result?
It's very quiet. Made it a WINS server, which helped all the devices see it.
It was very simple to connect to from all my machines - once I fixed my firewalls!
Copy speed to it varies, but so does the spec of the connected machines, and its not a Gb network yet! Put 200+Gb of data onto it so far
Overall very pleased

[Spacecadet]

Well NAS drive will use a lot less electricity than a WinTel server would, plus NAS drives are much quieter.

easily fixed using an air conditioned sound proofed server room

[voodooflux]

Well, I bought the QNAP TS409 Pro.

I'm currently trying to weigh up the 209 Pro II against the 409 Pro and 509 Pro. The 509 seems to support Wake-On-Lan unlike the others, but not Jumbo Frames (which would be handy since the rest of my gigabit kit supports this).

[voodooflux]

easily fixed using an air conditioned sound proofed server room

And any worries over power consumption could be fixed with a dedicated wind farm/solar array - sorted

[Spacecadet]

And any worries over power consumption could be fixed with a dedicated wind farm/solar array - sorted

exactly!
some people just refuse to think outside the box! sheesh

[voodooflux]

exactly!
some people just refuse to think outside the box! sheesh

Absolutely - for any technical problem there's always a solution that involves lots of cool kit

[LazyFan]

Be careful with a NAS solution. The most important issues with a NAS system is speed of file transfers (as this will be your main operation that is performed time and time again with a NAS).

If you’re only serving windows machines, then go for the HP Windows Home Server. This is very fast on transferring files back and forth from other windows machines.

However if you need to transfer files between non-windows machines then you have a problem if you want to map drives and use the native file system of your NAS (which will be the fastest method).

You see Windows uses NTFS which MS have not released the source code or API's for (so, it’s secret). Thus Linux or Mac systems cannot map this file system properly (yes Linux does have a NTFS driver, but its beta/unfinished).

So, how do current NAS systems work? They use FAT32 which is a way older slower file system. And it will feel slow when transferring large files. But this way they can allow all machines to map to them.

This is also why HP's system always beats the compo as it's only benched marked at xfering windows files back and forth using NTFS. Whereas the others have full o/s compatibility but WAY slower xfer rates using FAT32.

So, what other solution can you have if you have multiple o/s?
You could build your own NAS using a standard Linux file system format that Mac's can see and Windows can with an open source driver (Samba). This way your not limited to FAT32.

You will find ALL NAS solutions on the market that can use Linux and Mac, as well as windows use the very slow FAT32. So, the solution is either:

HP Windows Home Server.
or
Build you own Linux NAS.

That's if you want to use your NAS for file transfers :P

[voodooflux]

This is also why HP's system always beats the compo as it's only benched marked at xfering windows files back and forth using NTFS. Whereas the others have full o/s compatibility but WAY slower xfer rates using FAT32.

...snip...

You will find ALL NAS solutions on the market that can use Linux and Mac, as well as windows use the very slow FAT32.

QNAP (and I'm sure some other) devices use an internal filesystem of EXT3 rather than FAT32 or NTFS, and this is accessed across the network via CIFS (mostly Windows clients) or NFS (mostly Unix/other clients). The slower performance of Windows clients when accessing a NAS compared to accessing a Windows Server is attributed to assumptions that CIFS makes on the server filesystem i.e. it isn't a good interface onto sparse filesystems like EXT3 but is better suited to NTFS.