Server and network advice

[CCS]

Morning all. Over time I have filled all of the slots in all of my machines with HDDs, and the ones assigned to project files and support files are now completely full, so no more room to keep at it that way...

Time for a file server of some sort. I'm not in love with Windows, so I'm not keen on getting an MS server unless someone can convince me it is necessary. Can I get away with one of these new NAS units? I've seen a lot about Buffalo, LaCie, Infrant... Is one better than another? Would like some level of redundancy as well as ease of backup.

Also - I've not used Linux before. Can these be partitioned, or do you use them as one drive?

And... I'll take this opportunity to upgrade to gigabit. Anyone recommend a specific brand of switch?

[jacksc02]

i would personally go with the lacie.
You can get some good NAS units for really good prices and they are really easy to use

[mike.edel]

i have some experience with linux+samba3
there are differences in the filesystems and partition schemes (compared to windows that is)

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/requirements.html
most linux distributions help you with the right partitioning structure
it's not that bad...

you can (and should) partition under linux
usually 3 partitions are used:
system (system folders: boot - boot images, var - spooler directories for printing/mailing, tmp - temp , usr - this is where executable programs get installed)
swap (similar to the windows swapfile but on a seperate partition)
user (home - this is where all user data and documents end up, probably the largest directories on a file-server

usually for a file-server you'd define a larger partition as user-space (home) and point samba to that partition for shares

if you later add in additional disks, you can just add the whole capacity of that disk within the shared tree

example

hdd0 (drive number 1):

boot partition (primary partition)
swap partition (linux swap partition)
home (extended partition) folders:-->samba-shares
-->project1
-->project2
-->project3

--------------------------------
if drive1 fills up you can add another one and put it in the home-->samba-shares tree
hdd1:
primary partition over the whole disk:, gets mounted into the samba shares folder (for example as projects_new)
-->project3
-->project4

-------------------------------

some help:
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/linuxdir.html


-------------------------------
NAS have some advantages over linux+samba:
easier to set-up (setting up samba at first can be a bit difficult for windows people
lower power consumption

disadvantages:
less flexible (difficult to add in more/different disks if the installed one fills up - which is a matter of minutes on linux)
i don't know of any NAS that has a gigabit interface
the performance when serving lots of files could degrade
linux can act as all kinds of server besides file-serving (backburner is supposed to run using windows emulation, mailserver, printserver, faxserver, domainserver)

[CCS]

Mike - maybe you are thinking I said DAS. I'm looking at NAS. And actually, all the contenders I've been looking at *do* run linux, and they are gigabit also. Most of them come preset to RAID-0 or RAID-1, but most have options - even RAID-5 compatible - and I've heard under RAID5, disk swapping is a snap.

[siliconbauhaus]

I think you need to give you system a good enema mate

[CCS]

High-larry-us

Too many blasted projects. I've deleted every non-necessary file, and there ain't no mo room.

Plus, it can't be doing me any favors having my machine serve all the others....

Got any useful, constructive information silicon????

[mike.edel]

i see,
my info on the network interfaces was a little out of date

given the price of a multi-disc NAS (i was refering to a NAS that comes with one disc only - f.e. NAS at Dell) taking an old pc and installing linux+new discs seems to be worthwhile

[CCS]

I've never installed Linux or setup a RAID. Could I really setup a Terabyte system with a gigabit connection and RAID for significantly less than $600 (The price of a buffalo unit.)

If so, please explain. I'm all ears.

[arobbert]

I got a Buffalo NAS. 640 GB, 1000 GIG ethernet, Raid 5. It works great. Plugged it in and that's it. It took 10 min. to get online.

[CCS]

thanks arrobert

A few Qs...

Did you get it in the US? If so, how much?

Running under RAID5, how much disk space do you have?

Do you know if you can setup logical drives on it? I'd like to move contents of 3 drives to this device, and replicate their mapping.

[mike.edel]

just looked at the terastation...
$600 would be very fair, given the price of the 4 250gb discs alone (cheapest i found was about 90€ per disc) - over here the terastation is about 700€

I'd try to find out which kind of brand they use, though
since the discs will probably be running 24/7 the drives should be specified for non-stop use

if you run the 1TB version in raid 5 mode, you only get about 750gb of usable space (due to parity data)
i'd recommend raid5 for security reasons, though

in terms of having logical drives: i dont think that's possible on a raid (just browsed through the manual and didnt find anything, too)
you'll probably need to move the old drives to seperate shares

btw: the only catch i found about the terastation is that changing/replacing discs would be quite difficult (i remember reading this in a review, too)
you need to screw out 22 screws and more or less disassemble the whole unit to exchange one disc
the terastation pro has hotswap slots for sata drives

ps: according to a news report, the terastation uses Western Digital Caviar, 7200 upm, 8 MByte Cache discs

[suurland]

what is the speed of these "lowend" nas, I've read varies review of the terastation, buffalo infrant and so on, and they are all around 10mb/s which is very slow, something about the controller is very slow or something.. any insight?

/Thomas

[arobbert]

I got mine here for $589: http://www.provantage.com/buffalo-te...ge~110BFLS.htm

You can see the set up options here:
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/...&categoryid=19


I got the .6 terabyte so I ended up with 640 gig at RAID 5.

I havn't noticed a problem with speed. It's faster than my old server. I'm sure better performance can be had if you spend more money.

[mike.edel]

what is the speed of these "lowend" nas, I've read varies review of the terastation, buffalo infrant and so on, and they are all around 10mb/s which is very slow, something about the controller is very slow or something.. any insight?
/Thomas

just got a new issue of my computer magazine, with a review of some nas', including the terastation pro 1000 and the infrant readynas 600

they concluded similar things:
the terastation had a througput of about 10 MByte/s
the infrant about 20 MByte/s
and the Iomega NAS 200d had about 30 MByte/s
(all over gigabit network)

the reason is that all NAS units (except the Iomega) use processors that can't handle more load (the drives would be able to)
the Infrant uses a specialized processor that is faster (called network storage processor), while the others use slower Intel cpus

the iomega uses an intel celeron 2ghz, so it more or less is a normal computer (running windows 2003 storage server)
their recommendation was to go with the infrant system (4xsata 250GB, up to 4x400GB, 2x usb2.0, gigabit, samba 3, acts as a media server for streaming stuff)

list prices:
infrant: 1200€
buffalo: 900€
iomega: 1900€ (for that money one could easily have a sama server set up on a similar machine i think)

they didn't test the normal terastation, but i guess it uses a similar processor

mike