[ale] [OT] Home nas

[Greg Clifton]

One problem with many of the Atom and Hudson A350 boards is a minimal
number of SATA ports ( often only 2). If you are interested in an Atom
board with more SATA ports, check out Supermicro's embedded product line,
they have some with 4 or more SATA ports, but they ain't cheap. I recently
came across a nano board that VIA is evidently producing in response to
the Raspberry Pi and similar such products. It has 2 SATA ports and a quad
core processor. Looks like it would make an adequate board to base a
mirrored pair of drives off of, when it is available. I could envision such
a device with a pair of hard drives "living" in the same case as a desktop
system that might be your "main" computer. The article says the price is
not yet set, but surely it will be less than $100:
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/via-launches-tiny-quad-core-x86-epia-p910-board-2012097/


I would love to hear anybody's experience that has used an Atom, or esp. an
A350 board for a NAS box, because that is an idea that I have been kicking
around.

GC

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 4:59 PM, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:

> Backups don't need RAID. You want RAID on the main storage, if that is a
> requirement.
>
> For simple backups, buy a USB3 dock and connect it to a router with USB
> ports
> for storage.  Using a dock means he has "unlimited storage", just swap in
> a new
> 2TB hdd when the old one fills up.  If performance isn't good enough, newer
> routers should support USB3 soon.  Even some of those $50 media streaming
> devices will share USB HDD storage on the network.  I'm positive that a
> WD-TV
> Live HD does.  At 100base-tx, it is painfully slow compared to everything
> else
> that is GigE connected here.
>
> USB3 is not a good idea for anything other than backups or streaming media,
> IMHO. There has been a queuing issue with USB for years. It handles 1 or 2
> different requests at a time nicely, but not 5-20 like a full OS will make.
> There are eSATA docks for that, but then he needs to leave a PC on all the
> time.
> eSATA behaves just like internal disks. Same performance, same command set.
>
> I wouldn't completely knock out building a NAS-PC either.  The AMD APUs
> and Atom
> APUs can use 20W of power + however many HDDs are inside.  Last month if
> saw
> (and purchased) a Slickdeal E-350 MB+APU+case for $100. That's hard to
> beat on
> the price.  Drop in 1-2G of old RAM and an old HDD means a new system is
> ready
> and will be stingy on electricity.  I am not using it as a NAS, but might
> in the
> future.
>
> I have a home-built NAS with an external 4 disk array currently. That is
> primary
> storage running Linux software RAID.  To back it up, a USB3 WD external
> disk is
> used. Simple, cheap and effective.  If the backup disk fails - oh well.
>  That
> same disk array has been moved between systems and Linux installs multiple
> times. It was a non-event every time, extremely flexible.  Software RAID
> can be
> slower than HW-RAID.  The RAID5 here is much less speed than a single WD
> Black
> drive for writes. The OS disk cache is about 4G on that box, so the first
> 4G of
> transfer is always 65-75MB/s. Writing large files (10-22G HD recordings)
> to the
> single Black drive achieves about 40MB/s over the network, after the cache
> is
> full.  Going to the RAID5 storage might get 10MB/s after the cache is full.
> Same client, same server, same network, just the storage being written
> onto is
> different. Guess which drive I transfer new files onto over the network?
>  To be
> fair, the Black drives are fairly new and the disks in the array are 5.5+
> yrs
> old.  I'm burning in replacement HDDs as I write this.
>
> With purchased NAS devices, much flexibility is gone. There are limits set
> by
> the maker. I guess that is what you are asking - about those limitations?
>
> Anyway, I hope these ideas are helpful to finding the best answer for his
> needs.
>
>
> On 09/16/2012 12:56 PM, John Anderson wrote:
> > I guess the issues other than the basic one of price would be:
> > reliablility.
> >
> > raid 1
> >
> > Ability to pop a drive out and read it if the unit fries. Are there
> > systems with software versus hardware raid? My understanding is that
> > software is easier to recover if the hardware fails.
> >
> > Transfer speed is probably not an issue. This is more for the first
> > layer of backup for multiple pc's in the household. It probably won't be
> > getting hammered on a regular basis.
> >
> > On 09/16/2012 12:39 PM, JD wrote:
> >> On 09/16/2012 12:02 PM, John Anderson wrote:
> >>> Any recommendations/cautions about picking up a home nas? It's for my
> >>> brother in law so he probably won't want a re-purposed PC. Looking to
> >>> spend <$500
> >> You usually get what you pay for.
> >> http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view will get you (or
> him) started.
> >>
> >> There are many other caveats, but without requirements or use
> scenarios, I can't
> >> begin to make any suggestions.
> >>
> >> If he wants low price over all else, there are cheap 1 or 2 disk
> options without
> >> any advanced capabilities. However, these have pretty poor performance,
> but that
> >> may not be an issue.
> >>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120916/37105a05/attachment.html