What are my options for a multi-Terabyte home NAS? [closed]

Question

I've got alot of DVDs and have been slowly ripping, encoding, and tagging them and I've nearly filled my WD MyBook 1TB. I'm estimating that I've got about 1.5 or 2Tb to go to complete my current collection. I've spent alot of time on the files, and the peril they are in recently struck home. I had a second 500Gb MyBook that I was using, essentially, as a scratch drive, ripping raw Video_TS folders to them, and then encoding from there. It failed spectacularly a few weeks ago. I've convinced my wife that we need to redundancy, and she's agreed (bless her heart!).

What are my options?

I'd like something in the 4-6Tb range to give me room to expand. Should I build a machine? Should I buy an off the shelf NAS? What are some good brands?

I'm not too worried about write performance, as I'll be ripping to a faster drive and then copying once, but read performance should be pretty decent so I can stream video without any hiccups.

For the sake of argument, let's assume a budget of $1500 US.

Answer 1

I'd highly recommend a Windows Home Server (WHS) machine, such as a HP MediaSmart Server or Acer EasyStore Aspire. They are an excellent value, reliable, and very flexible (far more than even a ReadyNAS -- you've basically got a Windows 2003 environment to work with). One of these with a set of TB drives would easily fit within your budget.

WHS doesn't do RAID, but does provide configurable (and transparent) data duplication. With WHS, you can also mix and match drives and add/remove them on the fly, as with a Drobo. Honestly, RAID is just a bag of hurt in the home environment.

See a bit more info on the HP MediaSmarts in my answer here.

Answer 2

I agree with Rob that for that much data the consumer-level devices get pretty expensive. It may make the most sense to jam a desktop computer with as many disks as possible since your utility stack probably doesn't have to be particulary robust.

The trade-off with a lot of RAID setups is that as the size of an individual disk grows the much more difficult it becomes to rebuild the array after a drive failure (which WILL occur: plan on it).

So, you could go with a unit with the largest drives possible (2TB?) but rebuilding a 2TB stripe will take AGES -- and as most devices buy disks from the same batch (and failures come in groups) you face a big risk to lose the entire array should a second drive fail while the rebuild is happening.

My recommendation would be to get a unit that offers as many disks as possible and get something along the lines of RAID6 (dual parity drives) to support multiple disk failures.

Since RAID6 is just RAID5 + 1 add'l parity you need a unit that has at least 4 disks.

The only units that do RAID6 that would have enough storage I'm aware of are the Drobo Pro (which I've never used) http://www.drobostore.com/store/drobo/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/categoryID.14398600 or the ReadyNAS Pro http://shop.buynetgear.com/store/netgear/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/parentCategoryID.18327200/categoryID.18327600

If you are really serious, you can get the ReadyNAS 3200 which supports up to 12 disks: http://www.readynas.com/?cat=73

The reason why I like the ReadyNAS product line is that they have a really nice set of tools to manage the device (from notifications, backups, remote access, cloud-level backups, 3rd party add ons, etc.) that the rest of the systems don't seem to touch (and DIY certainly won't).

Either way you're looking at MUCH more than a $1,500 price tag. Not to mention, how do you plan on backing up this data? RAID is not a backup!!!!

Answer 3

Many of these answers provide excellent network based storage and many devices are excellent devices, but as any professional system admin worth his salt will tell you...

RAID is not a backup.

It's not, plain and simple. If you plan your network storage like it is, you will be devastatingly disappointed. Especially with multiple terabyte sized drives, a single drive failure and associated rebuild will immediately and brutally read and write to every sector on every drive at least once. This often causes unknown faults to surface on the remaining disks, which trashes your data.

So, consider the options carefully and don't forget that despite RAID's excellent advantages, they should not be considered substitute for a permanent backup. Consider adding an external drive or two, and regularly copy the most critical files off the raid, and into a safe location.

Answer 4

You might want to check out the QNAP range of products - I think these will do exactly what you want in the price range you specify.

Answer 5

Drobo

Answer 6

What I did to build a 6 TB storage array is build a cheap linux box, < 200$, threw in 2 4 port pci sata controllers, and just filled it up with hard drives. Using ubuntu and mdadm I have a multi use, somewhat powerful NAS.

Answer 7

I'm a fan of the Western Digital ShareSpace NAS. They have capacities up to 8TB, RAID0, 1, and 5 options, and a significant amount of software on the NAS for streaming and downloading. I was partial to the Active Directory integration when I was looking at them, but I assume you won't be using that at home. They're very reasonably priced and will definitely fit within your budget.

Answer 8

For most big storage needs, snagging one of these diskless systems and loading it with commodity drives seems like the best solution.

If you need more performance, then grab a used Dell PowerVault off of eBay which uses SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives which may last longer and have faster reads.

Answer 9

-1 for ReadyNAS. Too cantenkerous to properly update w/ new software load. I've run a DNS-323 for the last 12 months and it is very low maintenance.

Answer 10

For this kind of usage I would simply use a second HD which would be a clone of the main one. Tools based on or similar to rsync, launched periodically help maintaining data in sync.

Answer 11

As per this answer on another similar question I can recommend a Thecus N4100 PRO or similar model. This one has 4 bays, but they have also NASs with 5 and even more bays.
If you put 1.5TB drives in this one, you have 6TB (4.5TB usable if using RAID 5).
And you're still below your 1500$ price-mark (even below 1000$ I guess).

Answer 12

+1 for ReadyNAS. I have a NV that is several years old and ReadyNAS still releases firmware updates that support it and has new functionality with every new release. So count me as a big fan of them. I'll be getting another ReadyNAS once I fill this one up.