Posted: 5/8/2012 4:50:29 PM EDT
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I've been looking for this for years. I think the answer is "buy a netgear or a synology" but I'm not sure. I REALLY want to build my own NAS, but there is a very specific functionality that I require, and every few months I troll the freenas, openfiler, etc forums for answers, and I still come up short.
I want to have a pair of redundant (mirrored) NAS devices for my home network. I'd like to start with three 1TB disks each. As my needs grow, I want to be able to add a 1TB disk. Then pull one or two and add 2TB disks. Or 3TB disks. I want to dynamically upgrade the volume (the way the ReadyNAS and Synology boxes can) but not have to worry about extra drive pools or creating more shares.... I want the drive pool and share point to stay the same, but simply dynamically increase in capacity as I add or upgrade disks. if I could afford to buy 4 4TB disks and run a hardware RAID, I would, as that would last me a few years. But I can't afford that, so I have to start small and upgrade over time. I wish freeNAS could do this. Openfiler looks like it can, but the interface is taking me a while to learn. I have an old system and just ebay'd a bunch of old SATA disks to experiment with. If anyone has the answer, I'd happily take it. I can build two D2700-based, or older dual-core-based systems for the price of one ReadyNAS. And the Synology models that are in my current price range are not being reviewed as having stellar network or array rebuild performance. A pair of mirrored Core2Duo systems with 4GB RAM and a free unix-based OS would be perfect, I just have to find the right free software... Advice welcome. |
yea..so um ..synology  sorry but it fits what your asking . i have 3 , 1 at home and 2 at work and they are rock solid reliable and do damn near everything. I cried once and i got the 410j and stuck 2 x 1tb drives in it for Raid 1 and I got a cheap 1 tb usb drive as a futher backup . I have since slowly upgraded it and now they support 3tb drives and i run Raid 5 and backup to rotating USB drives with 1 kept offiste at all times. the rebuild time when adding a drive is not bad , about 36 hours but im not worried if i have a problem as I have a backup on a USB.
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I went s slightly different route with a FreeNAS home-built NAS. I have 3.5TB space on four 2TB WD Green HDDs. (With RAIDz2 & zfs I can lose up to two drives w/o data loss) The motherboard is an ASUS with an Atom D525 dual core and built in graphics. It boots from a 4GB thumb drive, and uses 4GB of memory. I'm pretty happy with it. m |
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I think the FreeNAS family is the best. Cost effective and powerful. Pick either the FreeNAS 8 fork or the NAS4Free fork. Both are pretty new, but NAS4Free is closer to it's FreeNAS7 roots. Both software takes advantage of ZFS which in my opinion is the end all and be all of storage filesystems. |
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Quoted:
I think the FreeNAS family is the best. Cost effective and powerful. Pick either the FreeNAS 8 fork or the NAS4Free fork. Both are pretty new, but NAS4Free is closer to it's FreeNAS7 roots. Both software takes advantage of ZFS which in my opinion is the end all and be all of storage filesystems. Has it become easier/possible to add drives to an existing array, and/or drives of different sizes, without a lot of linux commands and kludges? This was my first choice (FreeNAS) but unraid behaves more like a Drobo (that doesn't suck) so that's what I went with. |
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Quoted: Quoted: I think the FreeNAS family is the best. Cost effective and powerful. Pick either the FreeNAS 8 fork or the NAS4Free fork. Both are pretty new, but NAS4Free is closer to it's FreeNAS7 roots. Both software takes advantage of ZFS which in my opinion is the end all and be all of storage filesystems. Has it become easier/possible to add drives to an existing array, and/or drives of different sizes, without a lot of linux commands and kludges? This was my first choice (FreeNAS) but unraid behaves more like a Drobo (that doesn't suck) so that's what I went with. ZFS can add disks together for a JBOD type storage array, but it doesn't automatically resize partitions within the devices in order to reallocate space like a drobo does. It can handle striping, mirroring, single/double/triple redundancy, hot spare, cache, log and any combination thereof. My current favored method is a RAID10 like strategy. Use base mirrored pairs of drives and then stripe data across all pairs. Adding more to the stripe is easy, and I don't have to buy the same sized disks. RAIDZ is great and space efficient, until you have to upgrade... :( Still confident that the ZFS team will overcome that in the future. I have found that adding drives and virtual devices to a stripe or adding drives and vdevs to a mirror is very easy, both through CLI and on the newer WebUI. As far as I know, there is still no way to expand a RAIDZ array by adding a drive. The old method of upgrading all drives works, as does adding another vdev and striping across both vdevs. Not perfect yet I guess, and there are lots of people talking about unraid on the FreeNAS forum, but I don't know if unraid does data checksumming and scrubbing like ZFS. I have honestly never tried unraid. Maybe I should look into it so I can give a better opinion. |