Looking for a good NAS

[yinan]

I am looking for a good NAS device that supports CIFS and iSCSI. Are there any good fast ones out there that are not crazy expensive?

 

[Fezmid]

I used FreeNAS for awhile. It worked well, had iSCSI. Sharing with the Xbox 360 was a bit tricky and flaked out a lot, so I eventually ditched it and installed Windows Home Server (WHS). I don't know if it has iSCSI, but it works great -and can backup all of the workstations on your network as well which is a nice bonus.

 

[sub.mesa]

But no ZFS or RAID.

What made you ditch FreeNAS?

 

[Mark R]

I have a qnap NAS. Good RAID support and iSCSI.

Got the 4 bay TS-410. Fine but not fast. 50 MB/s seq read, 15 MB/s seq write over CIFS. 25-30 MB/s over iSCSI (all benchies are 3+1 parity RAID 5). Also, response time can be slow if you've installed apps on it - e.g. The integrated torrent client can hog the extremely weak (phone grade) CPU and impair streaming performance (streaming video to a STB at 40 Mbps can be unstable while downloading).

There are faster models out, but the price starts going up quickly, and while the TS-410 is a bargain, you'll rapidly get to $1.5k fir the box as you start adding speed and/or drive bays.

For the cost of the 6 bay atom NAS, I worked out I could build a quad core xeon server with 4GB of ECC RAM, and server grade mobo for less. The only thing feature I wouldn't get would be hotswap bays, and setup would be more tricky. The qnap was a breeze to setup.

Also has rsync target for backups, though I don't use that. No ZFS or snapshots though.

 

[pjkenned]

WHS doesn't act (natively) as an iSCSI target, sadly. Luckily, it can sustain 100MB/s (Did 4.2TB the other day at 100MB/s) just transferring over a single GigE link.

You can run raid with WHS very easily. I've been using WHS with raid 1, 5 and 6 for the past 14+ months without issues. It isn't officially supported, and it does take an additional 5 minutes to set up, but it isn't rocket science.

FreeNAS and OpenFiler are pretty easy to setup and have CIFS + iSCSI. If you were going the BYO route, use a Core i3 or i5 (the new Clarkdale ones) and have Atom-like idle power consumption, with the ability to handle VM's easily.

The other big question is how much storage do you need? This has an impact on recommendations. It also helps to define a budget instead of crazy expensive.

 

[yinan]

I decided to upgrade my current iSCSI server box with a much better RAID controller, areca 1222. It was originally only handling iSCSI targets for my ESX hosts, but I will change this to be my VMFS datastores and backup targets.
I also may add a couple NICs to it. It is a AMD dual core box with 4 GB ram and running Windows Storage Server 2008. I think it was the most cost effective solution.

 

[Emulex]

can you run starwind iscsi target on WHS?

 

[pjkenned]

can you run starwind iscsi target on WHS?

Why? It would be cheaper to run FreeNAS or OpenFiler in a VM and use those as the iSCSI target. My excitement with iSCSI in a home environment isn't too high right now, but there are some things that don't like to work off of network shares even mapped as drives. Here is WHS, FreeNAS, and OpenFiler running in Hyper-V on my server: http://www.servethehome.com/?p=341

 

[RebateMonger]

Here is WHS, FreeNAS, and OpenFiler running in Hyper-V on my server: http://www.servethehome.com/?p=341

Are Hyper-V Integration Services available for FreeNAS (FreeBSD)?

Your "Big WHS" is quite a project. Have you determined what's going on with the failing WDC disks?

 

[klocwerk]

I'm a big fan of Thecus's NAS boxen. Had their 8800 running at my last job with 8x 1TB drives as an iSCSI target. Worked great, and has been more solid than the $50k Fibre Channel SAN they put in after I left. My old coworker is very amused by the comparison.

 

[Yellowbeard]

I'm a big fan of Thecus's NAS boxen. Had their 8800 running at my last job with 8x 1TB drives as an iSCSI target. Worked great, and has been more solid than the $50k Fibre Channel SAN they put in after I left. My old coworker is very amused by the comparison.

I bet the FreeNAS guys would get a good chuckle out of this too. Never used or needed iSCSI but 100% satisfied with my FreeNAS build. Rock solid and stable.

 

[klocwerk]

I bet the FreeNAS guys would get a good chuckle out of this too. Never used or needed iSCSI but 100% satisfied with my FreeNAS build. Rock solid and stable.

yeah, I have a FreeNAS install on my VMWare cluster, giving it a shakedown.
Seems like an ok solution, but the AD integration is terrible. Might use it for my apple users though.

 

[Emulex]

what separates the men from the girls - throw about 5 vm's thin provisioned on a single lun. let them loose (heavy i/o). i've seen EMC's fall due to scsi lock's.