What are you doing for home NAS?

[John Abreau]

I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive,
but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to
spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than
one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing
option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1
safety net when the disk starts to go bad.

Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it,
on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the
motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy
with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the
unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more
quickly.

I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives,
configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I
followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the
RAM at 8 GB.

It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer
model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM.

After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the




On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Mark Komarinski <mkomarinski at wayga.org>wrote:

> I have a bit of end-of-the-year money that I'd like to spend and
> thinking of a dedicated NAS device for my home rather than having hard
> drives start spilling out of my basement server.  I figure I need about
> 4TB usable, so either 2x4TB or 4x2 or 3TB is a configuration I could
> work with.
>
> In looking at the products that are out there for standalone NAS,
> they're REALLY expensive even before adding the cost of drives.  The
> two-drive systems seem to be just barely adequate for my needs, and the
> four-bay ones jack the price up to just going BYO ($700-$800 without
> drives).  Even then, the Drobo a friend has puts its NFS server in
> userspace (WTF?) so performance and features like file locking are lacking.
>
> So I ask the question - what are you doing at home?  Build my own? Have
> any device that's still for sale you can recommend?  Anyone using
> FreeNAS and have suggestions?
>
> -Mark
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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