# Best safest (and cheapest) NAS storage



## zanat0s (May 20, 2010)

Hi all,

i(like most of us) have a huge collection of data. more or less 12 TB.

i have an issues with NAS.

i have treid amny and most of them have disappointed me.

1 Drobo by far the safest but also inredibly slow. so slow that i rather not use it.

2 HP mediasmart EX487. have been using it for a year and all well

3 WD sharespace. once i lost 5 TB of data. rather not have it happen again

4 HP Mediasmart ex495 and EX 490 both of them had issues. In one of them i can only use it as a storage(and not as a server). The second of them has just had a failder drive and now trying to see if i can get any data back from it.

cheers


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## r9 (May 20, 2010)

I think that all of your choices were HIGH .


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## erixx (May 20, 2010)

First of all, sharing is one thing, storage is one thing and back ups another.

Seems to me that the parts you have been using are more 'media sharing' oriented and less a serious storage and backup aproach. Maybe i'm wrong, sorry.


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## Bravo2Zero (May 20, 2010)

check out the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 1TB or the netgear nas


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## zanat0s (May 20, 2010)

actually i just want to store.. you are right guys.. so what are your opinion about storage?


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## zanat0s (May 20, 2010)

what about netgear ones?


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## Bravo2Zero (May 20, 2010)

the "NETGEAR ReadyNAS Duo"  is expandable i believe it takes 2 or 3 1tb drives . And is fairly cheap as well .


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## zanat0s (May 20, 2010)

i need one with 4 drives...

i am sick of having to spend on storage and mostly on getting my data back! any drives you reccommend? until now wd green have been a big disappointment!


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## newtekie1 (May 20, 2010)

1.) Just get a real file server and ditch these dodgy home NAS pieces of crap.
2.) Drop some real RAID cards in the server(or use the onboard if you must) and use some kind of redundant RAID(5 or 6).
3.) ...
4.) Profit.


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## Bravo2Zero (May 20, 2010)

you could spend half a million and get a origon 3000 with fail over raid but i think his budget is around the 400 dollar mark not the 6 grand mark .


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## newtekie1 (May 20, 2010)

Bravo2Zero said:


> you could spend half a million and get a origon 3000 with fail over raid but i think his budget is around the 400 dollar mark not the 6 grand mark .



He says he used a WD ShareSpace, and lost over 5TB of data, that means he had the 8TB model...which is about $1050.  The EX487 is $470, without any drives.

I can, and have, put together a bare server(with no data drive, just an OS drive) for $500, that includes Windows Home Server(the same OS the EX490/5 run on), it is $400 without the OS(and honestly an old copy of XP Pro/MCE does the trick nicely here).  And if he wanted to use the onboard SATA controller instead of a dedicated RAID card, the price goes down to $280 or $380 w/OS.  These are all shipped prices in the US of course, as I can only assume that is where he is from.

Even better, you can equip that bare server with 8TB of data drives to match the WD ShareSpace for $1025, with an OS, or even better $925 without!  Now, you'd have to run the drives without redundancy to get the 8TB capacity, but the same is true of the WD Sharespace, I'm just comparing apples to apples.  I wouldn't run a setup like this in any less then RAID5, which would yeild 6TB of usable space on both the server or the WD Sharespace.

So yeah, putting a server together yourself can actually be cheaper then a NAS.


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## zanat0s (May 20, 2010)

so actually i can set a small pc just to store data on it? how to get it to work? do i need to install raid on it? this sound interesting!


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## newtekie1 (May 20, 2010)

Its pretty easy.

For a home environment, with under 10 users, any Windows Professional grade operating system can be used(XP Pro/MCE, Vista Business, Win7 Pro), or even Windows Home Server, which is only $99.

It is really just as simple as sharing the data drives/volume on your network, and copying the data onto it.

Depending on your needs, you might need RAID or you might not.  As I said, I would run everything in RAID5, this makes sure that if a drive dies, no data is lost.  You can replace the drive, and the array rebuilds, and you are then safe from another drive failure.  Only in the event that two more more drives failed at the same time would data be lost.  Depending on the hardware in the PC, I use custom built machines, you might need a seperate RAID card or the motherboard might already have one built in.


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## Bravo2Zero (May 20, 2010)

I think iscsi on a little pc might do the trick you can host iscsi on any type of drive you wish on linux unix or windows as a server and you can get an iscsi initiator for you main system that will set up the shares to the space . 

If you have an old pc that has at lest a few drives one for the os can be 1 gig and one or as many disks you want for storage sata upto what ever the board can take size wise put it all into a raid and share it with iscsi . very simple process fast easy to maintain and add new space if you need to . you can even use a dedicated server bare bones and add disk when you want .


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## mlee49 (May 20, 2010)

I had been looking at an Iomega ix2.  It seems simple enough and cost for a 2TB model is only $350.


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## Easy Rhino (May 20, 2010)

have you looked at the qnap lineup?


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## zanat0s (May 21, 2010)

i am thinking to create my own server with OS!

is there a way to have in a pc or in a case 8 HDDS?


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## Deleted member 3 (May 21, 2010)

newtekie1 said:


> These are all shipped prices in the US of course, as I can only assume that is where he is from.



Agreed, everyone in the world is from the US. Your logic is flawless. He's from Greece, though that's irrelevant as he never asked for any pricing, just a solution.



Bravo2Zero said:


> I think iscsi on a little pc might do the trick you can host iscsi on any type of drive you wish on linux unix or windows as a server and you can get an iscsi initiator for you main system that will set up the shares to the space .



iSCSI, while fun to play with, will not do the trick. Once you have multiple clients your filesystem gets screwed. Unless you happen to know a clustered file system that is both free and works under Windows. I have been unable to find me one. Besides, I think he is asking for hardware advise, not software.



To answer the question, most high end NAS producers have 4-8 bay products with RAID 6 support. If you want to be safe, get one of those. 12TB requires 7 disks in RAID 5 though, and 8 disks in RAID 6 (2TB is the largest you can get currently, 3TB by the end of the year)
If money is not an issue I'd go for 1 or 2 of those devices. The hassle of building a storage server yourself is not worth it then. 
Though if you're on a tight budget you can build one yourself. A coolermaster stacker can hold quite some drivers for instance. As for the rest of the hardware, get a simple dual core with a hardware RAID controller and you're set. You don't need much RAM at all, nor do you require any other fancy things. 
As for the OS, use anything you're familiar with. Performance wise any of the above solutions can saturate 2 1Gbit lines easily. Going by the questions you asked I'd recommend running a prebuilt, simply because you have no clue about how things work, which is bad if you want things to be reliable.


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## Chris_Ramseyer (May 26, 2010)

I *look* at these and you can't beat QNAP and Thecus. The Netgear is good too since it came from nfrant and has very little Netgear in it.

I have a couple of 8 drive units but the cost is a bit high for something I would normally sell in a forum. I have no problems shipping outside the US, I do it all the time. It is too bad the Euro dropped the last couple of days, 6 months ago you could have bought from the US cheap. Just shoot me a PM if you want.


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## newtekie1 (May 26, 2010)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Agreed, everyone in the world is from the US. Your logic is flawless. He's from Greece, though that's irrelevant as he never asked for any pricing, just a solution.



I'll break the sentence down for you, adding a little detail.



newtekie1 said:


> These are all shipped prices in the US of coursebecause I live in the US, as I can only assume that is where he is frombecause he doesn't mention anywhere where he is from all I can do is assume, and logically I'm going to assume the US since that is where I'm from because it wouldn't make sense to just randomly start picking countries..



No where did I say everyone in the world is from the US.  But if I have nothing to go on, that is where I'm going to _assume_ they are from until the info is available.  I could start picking random countries when people give no indication where they are from. Maybe I could have assumed he was from South Africa, or maybe South Korea, or possibly Japan.  Granted, all would have been just as wrong, but at least then you would be happy because I wasn't assuming he is from the US...

And the prices weren't even for the OP really, they were for the mis-informed poster that wanted to make it seem like it was overly expensive to build a server over buying a NAS.


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