what kind of nas device and storage to get?

[Miguel2013]

I was thinking I'll buy one of the nas devices from the many vendors as long it allows me to connect usb devices to it besides sata drives. What are good options?
how good is the
Iomega Storcenter Ix2 NAS

 

[sam_86314]

I'd personally recommend going the DIY route with something like FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault. It'll likely be much cheaper than buying a specialized NAS.

 

[DrCR]

If I needed a NAS right now, I'd go Ubuntu Server with raid 6 via mdadm (raid 5 if trying to pinch). I'll likely do just that ... someday -- my decade old Debian NAS is still in active service.

Note: Make sure you have a proper backup solution too. Raid is not a backup. Doesn't have to be fancy e.g. rsync/rsnapshot to an otherwise unplugged external drive.

 

[JustAnEngineer]

It costs more than some other brands, but Synology's stuff works very well. Maybe Xpenology would be worth a look if you want to build your own?

 

[Prime2515102]

I'd personally recommend going the DIY route with something like FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault. It'll likely be much cheaper than buying a specialized NAS.

I would agree with this. I bought a NAS, albeit a very inexpensive one (a dual-drive Synology) and it is PAINFULLY SLOW. In normal use it's not a problem, but depending on how much data I have to upload to it, it can take all day (it's seriously bottlenecked by either the CPU or the memory, I dunno). Thing is, I'm the only one using it too - if I had a family here accessing files on it simultaneously I'm fairly sure it would be too slow to stand and I would have returned it within the first week.

I would have rather spent $150 or so on a reburb'ed Dell workstation or something and turned that into a NAS. That would have also had the added benefit of having the ability to upgrade the memory and to faster Ethernet in the future if needed as well.

The one I have is a bottom of the line entry level unit though (DS215J) but in my opinion wasn't worth the price (it was $200 or so with no drives if I remember right). It does have a USB 3.0 port though.

If speed isn't a concern though (which I'm sure will be an issue with any brand at the entry level) I have had absolutely zero issues with it, so although my experience with their stuff, and NAS's in general, is limited, so far I have no complaints with Synology.

 

[londiste]

Rolling your own is also much more PITA than just buying a device.
If you want it to be compact, efficient and carefree, buying some existing device is a pretty good option although it might cost more depending on the size of it.

Regular random PC case tower - yeah, that is cheap enough. But DIY NAS cases are few and far between and can get expensive. Stuff like external drive bays, much better with hotswap, do not come cheap. Even more so when you want something small enough for 2-4 drives.

The first thing about starting to get a NAS is to figure out what you need it for.
- Just file shares (which is easy enough for anything)?
- Do you need media transcoding (which would need either powerful enough CPU or something to do it in hardware)?
- Large amounts of bittorrents (which use some CPU and usually bunch of RAM)?
- Run servers on it - FTP, Web, VPN, AD or something like that (which all have CPU and RAM requirements)?

Are you willing to configure it which even with FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault might not be easy.
Are you OK with software RAID or do you want hardware - expensive and occasionally tricky.

I've had a file server at home (that does little else beyond a number of file shares and transfer speed has been of the essence) for longer than I care to remember but for the last 8 years or so, it has been a Synology NAS. For the simple reason that it is fairly foolproof and completely hands-off small box. Secure enough when it is updated, easy to work with and current box saturates its 1 Gbit link with ease.

Edit:
I have a DS215+ which is not a cheap model but is also pretty old by now.

 

[JustAnEngineer]

Mine's a DS418play. It also easily saturates the 1 Gbit ethernet connection. It doesn't have any trouble running Plex server, etc., but I'm not doing much transcoding.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I was thinking I'll buy one of the nas devices from the many vendors as long it allows me to connect usb devices to it besides sata drives. What are good options?
how good is the
Iomega Storcenter Ix2 NAS

Sorry, but are you serious? That's a device from 2010...

Personally I run OMV on a custom four-bay rig with 10Gbps Ethernet
https://www.openmediavault.org/

 

[John Naylor]

I used one for 7 years ... then I just put an extra set of HDs in my main box. Only thing I miss about the NAS is that in a fire, I just can'r grab the handle and run ... but eveyrhing is sored off site anyway

 

[DrCR]

Personally I run OMV on a custom four-bay rig with 10Gbps Ethernet
https://www.openmediavault.org/

Interesting.

DistroWatch.com: OpenMediaVault

News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.

distrowatch.com

Do you find yourself reaching for the command line at all?

At first blush, it seems like an interesting option for a Windows sysadmin or the like who knows what they need to do and desires to be abstracted from the parent OS, Debian. If you're a Linux user though, any quick comments with regard to what you found attractive vs a normal install of Debian?

 

[Jetster]

Its really about your budget. I could recommend somting from $300 to $5,000

I personally have a FreeNAS with a RAID 6 (RAIDZ2) 5 x 6Tb Its been running for a few years.
But FreeNAS and UnRAID are fairly easy to set up. And Free And you don't need expensive server cases or hot swap cages. Maybe a RAID card if you run more then 6 drives. These OSs will run of a USB flash drive

This system has been running almost three years. In fact its been so reliable that if the hardware broke I would have to relearn FreeNAS instillation all over again. And BTW even if the RAID card failed. The Data would still be intact. Its easy to recover Data on a FreeNAS RAID

If you need it today just order a Synology and be done. But spend the money and get a good one.

 

[sam_86314]

Interesting.

DistroWatch.com: OpenMediaVault

News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.

distrowatch.com

Do you find yourself reaching for the command line at all?

At first blush, it seems like an interesting option for a Windows sysadmin or the like who knows what they need to do and desires to be abstracted from the parent OS, Debian. If you're a Linux user though, any quick comments with regard to what you found attractive vs a normal install of Debian?

I use OMV with an 8-bay eSATA enclosure. I only really use CLI when setting it up, and the web interface works for general stuff. I have eight 3TB WD Reds (the older good ones) running in ZFS RAID Z1
(effective RAID 5). The enclosure is connected to an i3-530 based system with 8GB of memory.

My current NAS was set up using the dedicated OMV install ISO, but for my new one (which I'm currently waiting for the rest of the parts for), I tested installing it on top of Debian so I could manually partition it.

My current NAS has been running for 25 days straight as of writing this without any issues. It hasn't been rebooted at all during that time. I've only SSH'd into it because I wanted to, not because I had to fix something.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Interesting.

DistroWatch.com: OpenMediaVault

News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.

distrowatch.com

Do you find yourself reaching for the command line at all?

At first blush, it seems like an interesting option for a Windows sysadmin or the like who knows what they need to do and desires to be abstracted from the parent OS, Debian. If you're a Linux user though, any quick comments with regard to what you found attractive vs a normal install of Debian?

I'm not great at using Linux to be honest, so OMV was a compromise. I rarely have to use the command line and I recently upgraded from 4.x to 5.x without having to touch the command line. OMV is getting better and better and hopefully at some point, at least for the not so Linux savvy it won't be needed at all. A few things still require it, like if you have some "exotic" hardware or use certain add-ons or plugins, but that's really it.

 

[DrCR]

Sam, Swede, thanks for your thoughts.

My oldest NAS in service is the family home NAS. C2D, Debian, mdadm RAID 5. Yeah, it's 12 years old at this point, but still trucking, so I keep letting it do its thing.