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"Cheap" network-attached RAID solutions?

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Pandamonium

Golden Member
I guess what I'd like is an x86 version of the Apple XServe in a much smaller construction. Anything that provides for 2 drives in RAID 1, 3 in 5, or 4 in 0+1 would be sufficient. Does anything exist?

The cheapest I've found is a Linksys, on pricewatch, for ~ $550. It would work but for the fact that it doesn't support 48bit LBA and is priced at $550 for simple mirroring. Is the best value (be a fair margin) still just to rig up an old box w/ spare parts?
 
Edited out first part. I misread your post initially. I was looking for a cheap NAS appliance recently and the Linksys option was the cheapest 2 drive solution available. Anything more than 2 and you are in the 4digit cost zone.

The cheapest network accessible storage is probably a SFF computer stuffed with ATA drives.
 
it really depends on how you're defining cheap... Cost of the total storage device overall, or cost per GB?

Cost per GB, the Xserve RAID from Apple is fairly inexpensive and works well on x86 platforms/networks. We have a Win2000 network and we just purchased an Xserve RAID maxed out with 3.5TB to attach to on of our Win2K servers. It was approxiamtely $3/GB!
 
I guess my perception of cheap is cheap overall, excluding the cost of disks. I'm mainly looking for the enclosure, RAID, and NAS chipsets. (I'm sure there's a more descriptive word than chipset, but it escapes me..)
 
Pariah - is your Linksys capable of supporting >120GB disks via firmware updates or are you limited because of its hardware?
 
I don't own the Linksys, and I don't think it is upgradeable to 48bit LBA, or it would have been by now. It's been out for a long time. I ended up not buying anything after looking around, as there wasn't anything appealing. The most interesting NAS item I saw was this item over at THG which isn't available yet. I'll wait to see how these work out before persuing other options:

http://www4.tomshardware.com/business/20040323/cebit2004_1-24.html

Also, Linksys has released a newer version of their 2 drive setup that does support larger than 128GB drives:

http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=35&scid=43&prid=622
 
Linksys has released a device that will allow you to attach 2 USB/USB2 hard drives to your network for under $100. Looks pretty nice, I'll probably try one of these out:

Linksys NSLU2
 
Thats pretty damn cool. Easier than the dedicated RAID NAS box I was gonna build... I just wish it supported more than two drives 🙁
 
I was looking into this a while back. I ended up going the SFF route with 4 drives in RAID-5 array. It works well, and cost a lot less than a retail NAS solution - more fun too. I have it running through a gigabit switch and the speed is very respectable.

System (~$550 + drives)

Athenatech Micro ATX Case
Chintech 7VIF4
Athlon XP 2500/333 (512K cache)
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR PC-2700
Promise FastTrak S150 SX4
Intel Pro 1000 MT PCI NIC

Drives (~$300)

4 x Seagate 80GB/7200RPM SATA 8MB
 
Have you consider a Firewire multi-bay enclosure instead? You could share if it has to be on the network. Some of them also allow swap, even hot swap. It should be faster than 100Mb Ethernet on the attached machine too. Some do RAID 0/1 at around $500.
 
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