Gigabit Home NAS?

[Dan Irwin]

Hi,

The other day I noticed that numerous computers in my house need more
storage. Rather than add a new drive to each I decided to look into a
home NAS. First i thought about taking a old computer, installing
Linux... but then i remembered that i had read about a new breed of NAS
for homes (dLink, linksys...). Before i started shopping around i
decided a gigabit connection is a must, I'm not interested in
sacrificing hard drive access speed for this, I want to be able to use
it just like it's connected to my computer- no slow downs or
anything.

All the boxes I found that have gigabit connections come with more
storage space than I need, does anyone know of a cheap gigabit box that
comes without a hard drive (I'll put in my own)?

Thanks for the help,
Dan

 

[Will Dormann]

Hi,

The other day I noticed that numerous computers in my house need more
storage. Rather than add a new drive to each I decided to look into a
home NAS. First i thought about taking a old computer, installing
Linux... but then i remembered that i had read about a new breed of NAS
for homes (dLink, linksys...).

If you have some parts already, then a homebrew NAS still might be the
way to go. You'll be able to use software RAID to protect against
drive failure, plus you can use the machine for other purposes, too.
This is the route I went.

 

[Dan Irwin]

Thanks for the quick response,

In that case, what is the minimum parts (cou, ram...) you would
recommend for a reliable, useable linux fileserver (with about 8
connections max)

 

[Peter]

The other day I noticed that numerous computers in my house need more

storage. Rather than add a new drive to each I decided to look into a
home NAS. First i thought about taking a old computer, installing
Linux... but then i remembered that i had read about a new breed of NAS
for homes (dLink, linksys...). Before i started shopping around i
decided a gigabit connection is a must, I'm not interested in
sacrificing hard drive access speed for this, I want to be able to use
it just like it's connected to my computer- no slow downs or
anything.

All the boxes I found that have gigabit connections come with more
storage space than I need, does anyone know of a cheap gigabit box that
comes without a hard drive (I'll put in my own)?

All of the gigabit equiped NAS (Linksys, Buffalo) start at least at 600$.
Is that cheap for you?

 

[Peter]

In that case, what is the minimum parts (cou, ram...) you would

recommend for a reliable, useable linux fileserver (with about 8
connections max)

8 what connections? Disks or connected client PCs?

 

[Will Dormann]

Thanks for the quick response,

In that case, what is the minimum parts (cou, ram...) you would
recommend for a reliable, useable linux fileserver (with about 8
connections max)

I have a K6-III 450 with 256MB RAM set up with 4 hard drives in RAID5
configuration and gigabit ethernet.

It works quite well, but is a bit underpowered to fully realize the full
benefit of GigE. I'm pretty sure it's because the S1590S motherboard
can't handle the heavy PCI traffic well.

But it's stable, quiet, and doesn't seem to draw a whole lot of power.
If you have a system with at least the above specs, it should work
fine. Rather than a full-blown linux distro I chose Gentoo as I could
leave it as stripped down as I wanted. (no X or other components that
would be useless for a fileserver)

If you have 8 machines simultaneously using the storage (actively
performing some sort of read/write), then there may be some contention
for the hard drives, especially with RAID5.

 

[Dan Irwin]

All of the gigabit equiped NAS (Linksys, Buffalo) start at least at 600$. Is that cheap for you?

Nope 600 way out of the range, olny a HS chool student trying to satify
the needs of his house

8 what connections? Disks or connected client PCs?

8 PCs

 

[Peter]

Nope 600 way out of the range, olny a HS chool student trying to satify

the needs of his house

How much are you willing to spend and how much disk
capactity do you need?

 

[H]

I was hopeing for something that let me use ATA drives i already have;
i have a 120gb drive sitting on my desk

 

[Arno Wagner]

I was hopeing for something that let me use ATA drives i already have;
i have a 120gb drive sitting on my desk

Use an older, reliable PC and Linux software-raid. This is cheaper
than anything you can buy and will give you reasonable performance and
(more important) control over what it actually does and the ability to
replace/upgrade things like memory. As GbE cards you can use almost
anything today, but don't expect miracles, 400-600MB/s is the
practical upper limit on a PCI bus.

Personally I tend twards Intel cards at the moment, having had some
Broadcom based die on me recently.

Arno

 

[Guest]

Hi,

The other day I noticed that numerous computers in my house need more
storage. Rather than add a new drive to each I decided to look into a
home NAS. First i thought about taking a old computer, installing
Linux... but then i remembered that i had read about a new breed of NAS
for homes (dLink, linksys...). Before i started shopping around i
decided a gigabit connection is a must, I'm not interested in
sacrificing hard drive access speed for this, I want to be able to use
it just like it's connected to my computer- no slow downs or
anything.

All the boxes I found that have gigabit connections come with more
storage space than I need, does anyone know of a cheap gigabit box that
comes without a hard drive (I'll put in my own)?

Thanks for the help,
Dan

Dan,

Building your own will definitely be cheaper. A couple of expensive,
off-the-sheld options are discussed in this article:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1819356,00.asp

I love the Infrant ReadyNAS, but it is just too darn expensive. The
off-the-shelf systems seem to cost at least $1/MB or about $1000 for a
terabyte of storage. (~$300 for 300GB)

There is also a link in the article about building your own home server...

I use an old P3-700 with integrated graphics for my server. Runs cool
and quiet. I didn't go for RAID - just a Promise 4 port IDE card. I
use imaging and mirroring software for backups of the server drives. I
also used a PC because I had to run a Windows application that serves
MP3s. You will get alot more flexibility out of a PC server.

 

[Peter]

I was hopeing for something that let me use ATA drives i already have;

i have a 120gb drive sitting on my desk

What kind of a drive (model#)?

For a lowest cost, get used (but decent) PC, buy gigabit NIC
and install Linux.
It won't be optimal, but will be cheap and give you a chance to
add another disk later.

 

[Peter]

...As GbE cards you can use almost

anything today, but don't expect miracles, 400-600MB/s is the
practical upper limit on a PCI bus.

I think you meant 400-600Mb/s (megabit per second).

It might be even worse if a disk controller shares the same
bus with gigabit NIC. I get 260-280Mb/s when reading from a
single drive share over the gigabit ethernet.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I think you meant 400-600Mb/s (megabit per second).

Opps, sorry. Yes, that was bit not Byte.

It might be even worse if a disk controller shares the same
bus with gigabit NIC. I get 260-280Mb/s when reading from a
single drive share over the gigabit ethernet.

Indeed. My numbers are for TCP netperf and no disk load.

Arno

 

[Peter]

I love the Infrant ReadyNAS, but it is just too darn expensive. The

off-the-shelf systems seem to cost at least $1/MB or about $1000 for a
terabyte of storage. (~$300 for 300GB)

Maxtor SSD ($340) in that article does not have gigabit.
(OP wanted gigabit interface)

 

[Arno Wagner]

What kind of a drive (model#)?

For a lowest cost, get used (but decent) PC, buy gigabit NIC
and install Linux.
It won't be optimal, but will be cheap and give you a chance to
add another disk later.

Also with this approach you can change any component to suit
your needs. You can even replace the whole machine and just throw
the disk(s) into another one. Linux usually does not care much.

Arno

 

[Peter]

It might be even worse if a disk controller shares the same

bus with gigabit NIC. I get 260-280Mb/s when reading from a
single drive share over the gigabit ethernet.

Even more interesting situation occurs when two clients read large
files simultaneously from that share. For each client network throughput
varies dramatically from 20-110Mb/s.

You said that you have 8 client PCs? If all of them need to
concurrently play movies from that share, you won't be happy
with results. At least not from a cheap server.

 

[Eric Gisin]

Get a used Intel 81X system with P3, under $100.

The ATA ports have 2X 66MB/s or more, and they do not use the PCI bus. The
only bottleneck will be the CPU, so use a good NIC.

 

[Guest]

Get a used Intel 81X system with P3, under $100.

The ATA ports have 2X 66MB/s or more, and they do not use the PCI bus. The
only bottleneck will be the CPU, so use a good NIC.

If building a home server with only 100Mbit enet, would you be able to
improve performance by using two PCI ethernet cards? If using a
switched network, then it should work...depending on how the OS utilizes
the cards.

 

[H]

If your useing 100mb ethernet card yes, but with gbit no, the problem
is the pci bus