Network Attached Storage News, Reviews, and Information
This post has been around for a while, but there is a nice writeup at techradar.com about how to make a FreeNAS server using the ZFS file system. The post has good screen shots and deals with the issue of having old hard drives with different sizes, yet wanting to use them all for as an efficient a storage pool as possible:
Read more »The important part of creating your storage pool is working out how to arrange your drives for best effect.
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I came across a long and detailed post along with a discussion thread about building a NAS. The author goes into great detail about the choices he made for hardware and software.
The post is called "Sam's NAS project powered by Unraid". He includes some pros and cons of various software choices including Flexraid, FreeNAS and of course, Unraid.…
Read more »Newegg has a pretty good deal on the 2 item combo listed below - $89.99 while it remains in stock today only. Seems to be a great combo for adding external storage to a WHS, WHS 2011 or other server.
2 Item Combo
Sans Digital 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure (no eSATA Card bundle) TR4M+BNC
bundled with:
- 1x HighPoint RocketHybrid 1222 PCI-Express 2.0 x1 ...
Servethehome.com has an interesting post about the speed differences in NAS devices over time. It seems that as the NAS drives fill up, the speed degrades:
Read more »First, the data was being written to the inner parts of the drive platters. On modern disks, it is not uncommon to see a drive go from 130MB/s or more at the outer edge to half of that at the disks inner edge.
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There is a new guide on how to install and configure SnapRAID on Ubuntu Server. Snapraid is a snapshot RAID opensource project that provides the following features:
Read more »Beside the ability to recover from disk failures, the other features of SnapRAID are:
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- You can start using SnapRAID with already filled disks.
- The disks of the array can have different sizes.
Over at thephoblographer.com, there is a new post describing a backup strategy in some detail. What it amounts to is a multi-layered approach with on site and off site backups providing redundancy that should cover just about any reasonable contingency.
The strategy outlined uses a Drobo (not the NAS version, the Drobo FS) as part of the local component of the backup strategy:
Read more »In addition, if you really want to get crazy with on-site redundancy, consider putting together a RAID system or similar.
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I am not sure exactly when this happened, but I just noticed that FlexRAID, the pooling storage solution for Windows (including Windows Home Server) and Linux which allows for multiple hard drives of different sizes to be in a protected array and allows for pooling of the storage space is now up to version 2.0 and is no longer free.…
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