(Contra-?)recommendations on consumer-grade NAS?

Sun Oct 26 08:37:04 PDT 2008

On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Holt Sorenson <hso at nosneros.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 12:35:27PM -0700, David Mack wrote:
>>If you want an appliance type NAS system that does NFS, make sure that
>>they advertise that feature.
>
> Many people have very positive things to say about Infrant ReadyNAS (now
> NetGear) if you are trying to buy (instead of build):
>
> http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx
> http://www.readynas.com/

I've had one of these at home for the past year or so, and it has been
just fine.  A couple of my home Macs back up to it every night (one
via Retrospect, the other via SuperDuper!), and I keep my music
collection on it.  I blogged a review of it after I'd had it for a few
weeks:

http://www.greatcircle.com/blog/2008/01/09/great_little_so.html

> It supports NFS, AFP, SMB, FTP, HTTP, rsync and some media streaming
> protocols.

My biggest complaint is that it doesn't support ssh, and thus doesn't
support rsync-over-ssh.

> It resizes and re-allocates space on the fly as you add disk. If you
> by larger disks, it uses RAID to rebuild as you swap each disk and when
> you swap the final disk (if you move from say 4x500 to 4x750) it
> increase storage after the final swap to N-1 automagically.

Yes, adding disk to it was painless: open the front door (don't shut
it down), slide the disk in, close the door, wait a few hours while it
initializes the new disk and redistributes the RAID, and then "boom"
suddenly you've got more free disk space.

You can set up multiple users, groups, and logical partitions.  Access
control (which filesharing protocols are active, and which
users/groups can do what via those protocols) is on a
per-logical-partition basis.  So, for example, I have 4 logical
partitions set up on mine, largely for different access control: a
"music" partition that anybody on the LAN can read, a "family"
partition for my wife and I, and a logical partition for each of the
two companies that I'm currently running out of my house (with
different access controls on each, for the different people involved).

You can also have the box automatically set up a logical partition for
the private use of each user that you define.

All the logical partitions draw from the same pool of free disk space;
you don't have to size them when you create them (though you can
impose quotas or size limits on them if you want to).

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have any support for LDAP or
anything like that; you have to manage users and groups directly on
the box.  (This might have been added in a later release than I'm
running, I don't know; I'm still running the release mine came with a
year or so ago, v3.01c1-p6, because it works and I didn't want to mess
with upgrading.)

One cool thing about it is that the disks do NOT all have to be the
same size; it will make the best of whatever disks you give it, to get
the most space out of the set while preserving the RAID
characteristics.

Another cool thing about it is built-in support for monitoring a
number of UPS makes/models via USB.  So, if you plug it in to a
supported UPS, and connect the UPS to the ReadyNAS via USB, then the
ReadyNAS will notice when the UPS goes active (and log it, and email
you about it, if you've got email alerts for logs set up), and when
the time remaining on the UPS drops below some threshhold, the
ReadyNAS will do a clean shutdown of itself.

Yet another cool thing about it (though I haven't actually tried this
yet) is that there's a USB port on the front panel that you can plug
an external disk into, and it will automatically make a copy of
everything from the RAID onto that external disk (assuming it's big
enough); you can then put that external disk someplace safe for
off-site storage.  (I don't think it does any encryption of the copy
it puts on the external disk, though, so you still need to keep it
someplace safe from unauthorized access.)

> Also, there is an ssh module that you can put on the gear so you can get shell.

I wonder if that gets you rsync-over-ssh as well?

> One could definitely do worse.

Yup.  If you don't want to waste time tinkering with a do-it-yourself
solution, this is pretty good.  Amazon has a 1 TB unit (2x500GB
drives, and 2 empty drive bays for future expansion) for a little over
$900:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000R99GJ0/greatcircleassoc

(They have plenty of other configurations available as well, and you
might find better prices elsewhere; I just included that link to give
folks an idea of pricing.)

-Brent