NAS recommendations

[Jeff]

Having filled up my home-made NAS (4 x 200 GB SATA drives on a 3-ware 9500 controller) I'm now toying with the idea of adding an off-the-shelf NAS solution.

Any recommendations for something in the range of 1 TB without breaking the bank? (maybe multiple smaller units would be better in case of catastrophic "it can't happen" failure of one of the controllers, etc.)

[Mandi]

Jeff, I know this is like the opposite of the purpose of your thread LOL - but would you describe your "homemade" setup in more detail? I'd love to hear about it - NAS is on my list of projects for the new year.

[Kevin]

I personally would probably just make a bigger version of what you have. A bunch of disks on a 3Ware controller is a pretty good storage setup. I also have a 4x200GB RAID volume at home however it is just using software RAID because I didn't need the extra performance of a 3Ware card and didn't want to add that to the cost.

I investigated a few commercial NAS offerings a few years ago at a previous employer and found that they were all way too expensive and something that I could probably build myself much cheaper and possibly even better. Of course the commercial NAS systems have probably gotten better since then.

[Jeff]

Mandi - nothing fancy. Had a spare windows 2000 box that was motherboard-limited to 512 MB of ram which was too little for graphics anymore, so I bought a 3ware 4-port sata RAID controller for ~$300 (thanks to the advice on this forum) and 4 200 GB drives for $99 each. So for $700 I ended up with 550 GB of usable formatted space on the RAID5 array. (this was back in 2004) It's still running Windows 2000 but that has been plenty stable - I suppose if I do another I'll look at doing it with linux.

I see now you can get the 8-port 3-ware sata raid controller for $400 so that would be even better since the 200-300 GB drives are still the sweet spot for price.

I've been seening a lot of external USB drives from lacie and others hitting the 500 GB mark quite cheaply with 200-300 GB external usb drives as low as $125, so that's what got me thinking of pre-packaged nas solutions again - when I looked at them a year ago they were still far too pricy for my budget.

[Jeff]

Something like this does have a slight ($300) edge on cost though since I don't have an extra case, MB, PS, or Ram at the moment :)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306

BUFFALO HD-H1.0TGL/R5 1TB Network Attached Storage RJ-45
1 GB Ethernet Connection
4 x 250 GB drives in RAID 5 = 750 GB - formatting
$699.00

Not cheap, and it uses PATA drives internally (which I'm not sure matters at all to me.)
Decisions, decisions.

[Matt]

I second the "build it yourself" option. I looked at several NAS solutions and ultimately decided to do the homemade thing. If you're wanting RAID, or multiple hard drives, a pre-built NAS solution can get pricey. -Matt

[Mandi]

Something like this does have a slight ($300) edge on cost though since I don't have an extra case, MB, PS, or Ram at the moment
But do you require $300 worth of those parts to do the job? I think what I would do is spend the cash on a cheap case, and then the differential upgrades to my work box, and use the displaced parts for the NAS. If the price is a wash, then at least you've got a spiffy new work box.