NAS solution for mac based household

[agnipankh]

Hi:

I am primarily a mac only home with a few macbook pros and an airport extreme. I was considering hanging a raid 1 NAS off my airport extreme. Some questions and advice:

1. The reason for picking a raid 1, is that in case I have a raid failure, in the worse case I can plug one of the hard drives into the a portable drive enclosure and connect it directly to a Mac. Is it possible? or a raid 1 hd drive not really configured like a plain data drive?
2. What is the failure rate on the synologies? I was looking at something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108162. In my experience with hardware raids is that when they die, recovery is difficult and hoping to have a way around it.

agni

 

[gea]

If you want to use a NAS disk on your Mac without problems, you
probably need a Mac based solution with HFS+ disks ex a Mac mini.
This is not a cheap or fast or regarding data security a comparable solution.

Another option is a Linux based NAS with ext4 like a Synolggy.
This will offer ready to use, comfort and many apps around homeuse.

If your main concern is datasecurity and performance, you should look
at ZFS storage appliances. They offer a newer filesystem with copyonwrite
(crash resistent), checksums (validated data) and versioning (snaps).
Afp with netatalk is another option there but I would prefer SMB (the
current Apple default network protocol)

There are ZFS options around BSD, OSX, Linux and Oracle Solaris.
I prefer solutions from Solaris where ZFS and SMB integration is best
like Oracle Solaris 11.3, the current champion around ZFS or a fork like
NexentaStor or the free Illumos what I mainly use with my napp-it web-ui.

My option would be something like a HP Microserver G8 with 4 or more
GB ECC RAM, a 30 GB bootdisk or Sata DOM, a pair or disks for a mirror
and one ore two extra disks for backup that are removed when not in use.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Hi:

I am primarily a mac only home with a few macbook pros and an airport extreme. I was considering hanging a raid 1 NAS off my airport extreme. Some questions and advice:

There are any number of NAS appliances that work pretty much seamlessly with MacOS and/or provide Time-Capsule-like services, appletalk file sharing, mDNS (Rendesvous) networking, etc. (My macbook thinks the server in my signature is a Mac Pro and uses it as a time machine backup target. My Windows desktop does double-duty as an AirPrint compatible print server for my iPhone. Etc., etc.) You just have to figure out how to set it up - unlike an Apple product, they generally don't have all that stuff turned on out of the box.

1. The reason for picking a raid 1, is that in case I have a raid failure, in the worse case I can plug one of the hard drives into the a portable drive enclosure and connect it directly to a Mac. Is it possible? or a raid 1 hd drive not really configured like a plain data drive?

RAID-1 HDDs are not a plain data drive. You can, however, mount them individually in "degraded" RAID mode, provided you have system that uses the same RAID controller (software or hardware) that the disk was in. (Most off-the-shelf mini-NAS units use some variety of Linux and mdadm for software RAID. So you'd have to be using Linux to recover the data from the single disk. Windows RAID volumes would need to be mounted on a Windows System. OS X also has a software RAID option - same caveats apply.)

2. What is the failure rate on the synologies?

Very low. But greater than zero.

I was looking at something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108162.

That's a nice one.

In my experience with hardware raids is that when they die, recovery is difficult and hoping to have a way around it.

Well, these are all software RAID anyway, like I mentioned above. In either case, recovery usually involves replacing the failed HDD and rebuilding the array - not all that difficult.

If the Synology box itself dies, the drives can be transferred to another Synology fairly simply.