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[Gaffers]

I think it is time I got myself another NAS.  My last one, a D-Link 320, was woefully sh!te.  I know there is a fair amount of knowledge on the subject here and I would appreciate a download

It will mostly be for a CCTV system so needs to support SMB 2 or 3.
Expandable to at least 4TB
fastethernet preferable.
Not a chinese manufacturer (I find their manuals and implementations woefully inadequate)
Oh, and don't forget I am a stingy Yorshireman at heart so keep the costs down too

[aaronjb]

Not a chinese manufacturer (I find their manuals and implementations woefully inadequate)

Doesn't that rule out ... everyone?

I have two QNaps and have found those excellent and impeccably reliable (I fully expect one to burst into flames now that I've said that!) despite one being a little long in the tooth now. One is a TS-859 and the other a TS-869, both now superseded by the 827 now.

Doing it now I'd look to one of the units - either Qnap or Synology - with a beefier processor than the little Atom mine has, so that it could handle on-the-fly transcoding instead of needing a secondary unit for that .. but then costs do seem to climb (check out the cost of an unpopulated TS-1277!)


Or, as you are a man who likes to tinker; I have several friends who are very happy with a FreeNAS based system. It won't have the disk throughput of a dedicated NAS, but it has far more flexibility as it can use mixed-sized discs (as long as the parity drive is equal to or larger in size than the largest disk) and as many disks as you can fit in an enclosure. That's what I started off with and the software has now come on a long way with Docker and virtualisation support so that you can run things like Squeezebox server, Plex media server etc on the NAS easily (rather than requiring serious hackery as it was when I started with it!).

All you need is a big tower case, a bunch of drive bays, a big PSU and your motherboard and SATA cards of choice.


BTW, do NASes really come as small as 4TB?  (I have 8x4TB and 8x2TB!)

[Gaffers]

Food for thought

Chinese manufacturer != made in china

That brings me on to the next question.  Who are the current reliable hard drives sourced from.  Last time I was looking Seagate were cr@p but things change and that was a few years ago.

[aaronjb]

I've had the odd Seagate take a dump on me over the years, but haven't had any recent experience.

I've got all WD Red in the NASes and they've been (bar one very early failure) reliable for a few years now

[Kevin Wood]

I've had quite a few WD greens and reds around in various places for quite a while and never had a failure. They tend to sit in a server for years then get recycled into desktop drives for something non-critical and just go on. They're also quiet and consume very little power.

[TheBoy]

If you're looking for cost/performance balance, an old PC with fast drives.  The low end NAS boxes are Atom or Arm based, and poorly performing.

If its a pure file server, you just need to install NFS and/or Samba as appropriate.  Very flexible, but not point & click.  If its just Windows, even a Windows PC will do, and natively supports SMB - though mild tuning needed.  If you need block level sharing, rather than file sharing, that's a different discussion. But fast/free under Linux (but needs Windows Server if you want to use Windows)

The likes of FreeNAS tend to perform badly. Partly because its poorly done, and in FreeNAS's case is its use of ZFS - if you go ZFS, be it BSD or Solaris, the ZIL MUST be on SSD.


Hardware wise, if multiple simultaneous clients, go raid10, not raid5. If using those consumer fakeraid systems built onto motherboards, avoid raid5 all together - TBH the OS's own raid often outperforms them.

Given 1TB consumer SSDs are hovering around the £100 mark, all flash running JBOD is viable and fast, but definitely needs a robust backup (as does anything).

There are some semi server grade systems around for good money - HP were flogging their gen8 variant of Microserver for under a ton. Add some drives and a proper raid card (p410 about £10 of egay - get one with the battery/cap backup though) and would make the basis of a great home nas *IF* 3 drives are enough.  Sadly the new HPE Microservers are expensive and shite.  3 or 4 years ago, OOF (and everything else here) ran off shared storage provided by a (then new) £90 HP ML10v2 with a P410 raid card.  I'd argue it was faster than the super dooper hyperconverged storage now used, though less tolerant of glitches/outages and patching.

[TheBoy]

Generally, if you can keep them reasonably cool, if a disk lasts a month, it will last years in an environment where its not moved.