Need Network Storage Recommendations!!!

[rpr13]

I am looking for a relatively affordable network storage solution...most bang for the buck in terms of performance/speed. I have a Netgear WRDN3700 wireless router and a WD My Book Essential connected to the routers USB port. It works, but its slow!

Short of spending mega bucks on a network server, what other options do I have that will offer significantly better performance than my current config???

 

[phillyTIM]

For a quick and cheap solution, perhaps the Seagate GoFlex Home Network Storage System? It's better than USB-attached because it plugs into Ethernet and is readily available to everyone on your network. 1Tb=$159, 2Tb=$229

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pr...age/?intcmp=bac-en-us-home-h_hero1-goflexhome

NAS devices such as Synology can be obtained for a decent price in the $300-400 range plus cost of disks. But beware of you data if you don't have it backed up somewhere else because if the NAS unit fails, especially if you RAID it, your data will be gone if the NAS unit fails. It can easily rebuild a RAID if a drive fails, but I'm talking about the NAS device itself failing...that can be quite the headache!

Windows Home Server is an interesting platform; they tend to be in the range of a regular NAS, if not just a bit higher; but if the WHS unit fails, the hard drives can be pulled and transferred to a new WHS unit and you can be on your merry way pretty quickly.

 

[cmetz]

rpr13, there's pretty much a direct correlation between money and performance here. If you don't want to spend at least a few hundred dollars, stick with what you have. There are $100-$200 SOHO NAS devices, but they aren't going to be a lot faster than what you already have. There are a lot of pretty good SOHO file servers in the $300-$600 price range that should give you a noticeable performance improvement (take a look at Thecus / Synology / QNAP appliances or the Acer/HP Atom servers). The next tier up is going to cost around $1000, and the next tier up from that is many thousands.

 

[Emulex]

qnap and drobo are popular and work pretty good.

just remember cheap drives = unreliable.

There is a reason there are RE3/RE4 WD, Enterprise hitachi sata, Seagate NS/ES, Constellation.

even those fail way more often than normal sas drives. you get what you pay for and huge amounts of unreliable storage is worth $0.00.

 

[Tbirdkid]

I would find a cheap workstation around the hood with like an amd cpu, 2 gigs of memory, built in graphics, and throw a big 1TB drive in it. Then put freenas on it, and done. completely configurable solution that you can make work with just about any protocol, and just about any file system.

 

[BTA]

unRAID on a cheap atom-based box with however many hard drives you want is another option.

 

[Emulex]

emc celerra uber edition vsa or lefthand vsa trial would smoke those on reliability

 

[boomhower]

I use WHS and love it. I tried several different solutions and they were either slow or didn't work right. I finally broke down and spent the money on a WHS and all my problems went away. Having my printer being on the network is a nice bonus. I bought the Acer Easystore for $330 and it's a pretty darn good value for what you get.

If you have cheap parts laying around that can be used Freenas and some of the other linux based solutions are good options if you either have the knowledge or the time to learn how they work. I didn't have either so I went the WHS route.

 

[cmetz]

Emulex,

>just remember cheap drives = unreliable.
>
>There is a reason there are RE3/RE4 WD, Enterprise hitachi sata, >Seagate NS/ES, Constellation.
>
>even those fail way more often than normal sas drives. you get >what you pay for and huge amounts of unreliable storage is
>worth $0.00.

In my experience (I'd say a medium-sized sample set), the "nearline enterprise" SATA/SAS drives are not more reliable than the desktop SATA drives after you've weeded out DOAs and infant deaths. The main actual difference I see between the desktop drives and the nearline drives is that the latter are supposed to be 100% tested at the factory, while the former's testing is only on a small sampled portion of the production run. I always, ALWAYS put drives through a decent workload of diagnostics before putting them into production, and that weeds a decent number of DOA/infant deaths out. Considering that I always test anyway, the DOA+infant death rate on nearlines does not justify the delta cost in my opinion. I just buy more of the desktop drives and expect to throw some away, and come out ahead vs. paying for the "nearline" version. Note that WD at least is now crippling the firmware in the desktop drives when it comes to RAID-useful features, just to segment more. Way to lose my business back to Seagate, WD

Real, ground up SAS drives do appear to be a tier better in reliability, and they sure are in IOPS kind of performance.