fastest cheapest networked drive access

[Sumotku]

I admit to limited knowledge about servers, NAS etc, and would like to set up some way to share files between a few computers at home. There's a wired network in place, with one workstation out of the loop for peace of mind. I've been told employing NETBUI is a safe way to allow it network access with no internet access, I have yet to set it up. I'm sharing critical files with higher speed USB drives at the moment, boy it's getting old.
I have been meaning to pick up a NetDisk NDAS drive but Ximeta are talking about a new SATA version with higher speed coming Q308 (end of this month is coming fast...) but even those projected 50Mb/s seem slow to me (granted faster than my USB drives, but still).
I'd like to learn what you think is the most practical, fastest and economical for this situation.

 

[JackMDS]

I do not know about the specific NAS that you are talking about.

The marketing states the core capacity of the NAS? NIC but do not tell you what is the functional Network Speed.

Almost all of the Entry Level NAS' are Much slower on the Network than their stated core Speed (it even worse than the Wireless Speed schemes).

Thus in most cases current HDs Speed (RAID or Not, PATA, SATA, USB2, whatever) are better than the Network transfer speed of the NAS.

When it comes to Networking, you start first with the network components, and then you find HD or whatever else is needed.

The fastest inexpensive NAS is a P-III- 1GHz Box and above, with Windows 2000, and above.

The coolest is probably Windows Home Server (http://www.ezlan.net/WHS.html ).
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ght_key=y&keyword1=nas

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2179111&enterthread=y

 

[Aarondeep]

I like the idea of using an old win2k box due to cheap licensing and whatnot. I've been meaning to setup a FreeNAS home server built on freeBSD, it can use some nice spare hardware you may have lying around.. Check it out http://freenas.org/
It looks like its starting to come along with a nice web-based administration interface.

 

[Sumotku]

Plenty of spare parts on hand, it'd nice to revive them. Is it the case with home server tech that the write speeds on a wired network will be limited by the hard drive employed? Estimated average around 70MB/s with a WD6400AAKS for arguments sake? I see servers pushing high RAM quantities, in this scenario, how much will RAM be a factor in efficiency?
Thanks so much for the help.

 

[JackMDS]

Even the Best Giga Network can not do 70MB/sec.

A good Home network does 40 to 48M/sec. at best. Most are in the lower 30MB/sec. The Giga NAS' do even less.

 

[Sumotku]

Wishful thinking from the outset : ). Now the real monkeywrench in the works: Mac read/write access. Fat32 formatting is the obvious choice, but what does that do to a windows home server setup?

 

[JackMDS]

http://mswhs.com/2007/11/13/re...mac-available-for-whs/

 

[cuti7399]

i need a raid controller to use with freenas right? or can I use on board raid? and freenas is install on top of windows?

 

[phisrow]

Originally posted by: cuti7399
i need a raid controller to use with freenas right? or can I use on board raid? and freenas is install on top of windows?

FreeNAS is an OS of its own, not an application(technically, it is a customized version of freeBSD). You don't need any particularly special hardware for FreeNAS. Normal onboard HDD connections IDE or SATA are just fine. You can use SCSI/SAS and a full blown RAID card if you want(assuming you get a model supported by freeBSD); but that is pretty serious overkill for home jobs.

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: Sumotku
Wishful thinking from the outset : ). Now the real monkeywrench in the works: Mac read/write access. Fat32 formatting is the obvious choice, but what does that do to a windows home server setup?

I believe there is 32gb limit on partition sizes for fat32. At this size, small files are extremely inefficient due to the large cluster size.

 

[Goosemaster]

1. yes you need a raid controller (onboard or addin are fine if supported)
3. freeNAS is a project based on m0n0wall. m0n0wall is a very bare version of FreeBSD (Unix) that stores it's entire configuration in an xml file (same goes for FreeNAS). This results in a server that can run off of a 128MB flash drive and never hope to fill it up all while controller TB worth of disk arrays.


Solution (the best):

-FreeNAS running off of a USB key
requires:

nice cheap computer with onboard pci slots and a lot of bays (I have a 2ghz P4 doing 38MB/s)
1-3 promise raid cards (IDE or SATA)

The beauty of FreeNAS is that it can create afp/smb/nfs and other shares to the same data, so you can take advantage of AFP on a mac, SMB/CIFS on a windows machine, and nfs on *nix **
** haven't actually tried NFS at the same time as the others.

appropriate drives.
setup RAID 1 or 5

 

[cuti7399]

ok, which raid card would you suggest? hopefully something around $50

also, how do i get around the issue of 2gb file size limit? i have some iso files

 

[phisrow]

I'm not current on recommended RAID hardware; but the 2GB limit should no longer be an issue. It was an unpleasant side effect of the bad old days of fat32. I don't think that any modern filesystem suffers from that one.