Do you generally think it best to make your own file server, or just buy one ready done? I'm wondering between the following
1) Sheeva plug off ebay, and add a usb hard drive. £100 or so.
2) The Ryan Alubox, which is around £85. I am having trouble seeing why the sheevaplug is better than this.
http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/home.php?cat=842
3) Or, we could buy the £140 Acer with FreeNAS or Clark Connect and add a usb double enclosure to it for another £40.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153
4) Or the Netgear dual enclosure which right now is coming with a FREE 500G drive, and it does RAID automagically if you put in a second drive, and that is around £150
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510
On the whole I'm inclining to the £140 Acer + usb enclosure, but I've never done this stuff before so would be really interested to hear the opinions of people who have.
We do have one or two old machines lying around which we could fill up with drives, but I'm veering away from that as they are big, quite old, noisy, rather power hungry, and I am not certain of durability if running 24/7.
Probably you guys have been through this and have favored solutions. Its a smallish charity with three or four computers which at the moment are only networked for printing. But we do need a simple internal web server, and we do need some central file storage, and we will have a couple of spare new 160G drives from another purchase.
Peter
The issue with the AC Ryan box and the Netgear is that although they both probably run Linux they are essentially closed systems that aren't supposed to be tampered with..you will get a basic web interface for configuration and that is it.
So later on if you want to run say rsync you are stuck, or you want it to be your MTA as well..you are stuck, or perhaps hang your printer off it and use it as a print server too...guess what ?
Or like me with my Buffalo Linkstation, fighting up against the slightly buggy samba version it runs.
Even if someone has released an open distribution or hacked firmware for them, you will probably find they have a fairly mediocre CPU/RAM/flash. Also the AC Ryan box is only 10/100. I'd be going for something that is Gig-E in case you decide to upgrade your switches at some point.
So that leaves the sheeva plug vs the Acer Revo. This isn't as clear cut...The sheeva is fanless and consumes less power. With the Revo you are powering things like the nvidia gfx chipset and wireless which you don't need and ARM chips are just more efficient than even the Atom. But the Revo has more potential for re-purposing I guess, should your needs change.
Also the Revo was really designed to be a mediaPC so I am not sure if it supports things like autopower on after a power cut...I'll check on my one later.
All that said, there is another issue which is tidyness. With the two out of the box nas solutions you will have one box and two cables, network and power.
The sheva plug is going to need two wall sockets one for itself and one for an external HDD, plus network, plus usb cables and the HDD will be using a power brick so more clutter there. With the Acer it gets even slightly worse as you have the Acer plus the HDD enclosure, 2 power bricks and the network/usb cables.
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:16:32AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
The issue with the AC Ryan box and the Netgear is that although they both probably run Linux they are essentially closed systems that aren't supposed to be tampered with..you will get a basic web interface for configuration and that is it.
So later on if you want to run say rsync you are stuck, or you want it to be your MTA as well..you are stuck, or perhaps hang your printer off it and use it as a print server too...guess what ?
Or like me with my Buffalo Linkstation, fighting up against the slightly buggy samba version it runs.
Another one! :-)
That's why I like the WD MBWE, accessible Linux in it so you can easily install rsync and rdiff-backup etc. without serious hacking.
Even if someone has released an open distribution or hacked firmware for them, you will probably find they have a fairly mediocre CPU/RAM/flash. Also the AC Ryan box is only 10/100. I'd be going for something that is Gig-E in case you decide to upgrade your switches at some point.
So that leaves the sheeva plug vs the Acer Revo. This isn't as clear cut...The sheeva is fanless and consumes less power. With the Revo you are powering things like the nvidia gfx chipset and wireless which you don't need and ARM chips are just more efficient than even the Atom. But the Revo has more potential for re-purposing I guess, should your needs change.
Also the Revo was really designed to be a mediaPC so I am not sure if it supports things like autopower on after a power cut...I'll check on my one later.
I have a Revo as well that I run as my 'in the house' server, no backups on that but it's the mail server and web server that's always on.
All that said, there is another issue which is tidyness. With the two out of the box nas solutions you will have one box and two cables, network and power.
The sheva plug is going to need two wall sockets one for itself and one for an external HDD, plus network, plus usb cables and the HDD will be using a power brick so more clutter there. With the Acer it gets even slightly worse as you have the Acer plus the HDD enclosure, 2 power bricks and the network/usb cables.
Again I say WD MBWE II, single box, very low power (down to 6 watts when idle), has been very reliable. Oh, built in RAID as supplied but you can turn it off if you want.
Chris G wrote:
Or like me with my Buffalo Linkstation, fighting up against the slightly buggy samba version it runs.
Another one! :-)
<me too!>
That's why I like the WD MBWE, accessible Linux in it so you can easily install rsync and rdiff-backup etc. without serious hacking.
Chris, care to expand on this please? Currently as backup for ourselvs and clients I have a couple of PCs with lots of disks in, RAID-1 one as backup and the other as the backup's backup. My electricity bill here is massive, over £500 a month, and I'm looking at ways to reduce it significantly. Investment in low-power modern kit seems the only way, so I'm very interested in what you said above as we use rdiff-backup here...
Cheers, Laurie.
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:38:49AM +0000, Laurie Brown wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Or like me with my Buffalo Linkstation, fighting up against the slightly buggy samba version it runs.
Another one! :-)
<me too!>
That's why I like the WD MBWE, accessible Linux in it so you can easily install rsync and rdiff-backup etc. without serious hacking.
Chris, care to expand on this please? Currently as backup for ourselvs and clients I have a couple of PCs with lots of disks in, RAID-1 one as backup and the other as the backup's backup. My electricity bill here is massive, over £500 a month, and I'm looking at ways to reduce it significantly. Investment in low-power modern kit seems the only way, so I'm very interested in what you said above as we use rdiff-backup here...
The actual device I have is the 2Tb version of this:-
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=589
I found it after searching around quite a lot looking for something that does have NFS and doesn't cost too much. The following site is quite useful too:-
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/
Out of the box the MBWE has NFS support (as well as lots of other things), does RAID between the two hard disks (you can choose the sort of RAID you want) and has ssh login. There are web configuration pages to set it all up.
For adding software to the MBWE you can go to:-
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/
It has its own software repository with a deb/rpm like format which automates installs and dependencies called optware. Once optware is installed on the MBWE it's like using yum or apt-get to install software.
For its price the MBWE is good, it's not the world's fastest system by any means though. The Web configuration runs quite slowly for example, but the actual data transfer via its ethernet seems quite quick (the smallnetbuilder site above has speed benchmarks and comparisons).
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 09:14:10AM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Do you generally think it best to make your own file server, or just buy one ready done? I'm wondering between the following
Sheeva plug off ebay, and add a usb hard drive. £100 or so.
The Ryan Alubox, which is around £85. I am having trouble
seeing why the sheevaplug is better than this.
http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/home.php?cat=842
- Or, we could buy the £140 Acer with FreeNAS or Clark Connect and add a
usb double enclosure to it for another £40.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153
- Or the Netgear dual enclosure which right now is coming with a FREE
500G drive, and it does RAID automagically if you put in a second drive, and that is around £150
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510
On the whole I'm inclining to the £140 Acer + usb enclosure, but I've never done this stuff before so would be really interested to hear the opinions of people who have.
We do have one or two old machines lying around which we could fill up with drives, but I'm veering away from that as they are big, quite old, noisy, rather power hungry, and I am not certain of durability if running 24/7.
Probably you guys have been through this and have favored solutions. Its a smallish charity with three or four computers which at the moment are only networked for printing. But we do need a simple internal web server, and we do need some central file storage, and we will have a couple of spare new 160G drives from another purchase.
My preferred solution is a Western Digital My Book World Edition NAS, all ready made, has NFS *and* you can log into it as root via ssh. It runs a version of Linux.
On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 09:14 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Do you generally think it best to make your own file server, or just buy one ready done?
I think a few years ago I would have built a PC to be the file server but I now think a typical PC is a bit power hungry to be left on 24/7 which was one of the reasons for me to get a specialised NAS.
In choosing my NAS I wanted something which:
1. Has low power consumption. 2. Supports the applications I want to run on it. 3. Is open enough to support further applications as time goes by. 4. Is neat and tidy.
I ended up with a QNAP TS-419P which is the four bay unit based on the Marvell Kirkwood (an ARM SOC). Against my criteria above:
1. This advertises low power consumption mainly due to ARM CPU and being able to spin down the hard disks when not in use.
2. I wanted a file server, a web server, an IMAP server and Squeezebox server with the possibility of supporting further digital media players. These features are available while running the supplied firmware, some built-in, other via optional packages (QPKGs).
3. As well as a comprehensive web interface the built-in firmware allows you to log in via ssh where you have a shell (of sorts, it's busybox). In addition to the official optional packages (QPKGs) this can also run packages from Unslung Linix (iPKGs). Finally if that is still not flexible enough it can be made to run Debian. Older units in this range (the Marvell Orion based ones - TS-109, TS-209 and TS-409) already have a Debian installer and it should be coming soon to the Kirkwood based units (TS-119?, TS-219, TS-419) - in the mean time there is a method for manual installation. Although the Debian port is not done by QNAP it is being done with their support.
4. This model uses hot-pluggable SATA hard disks so for four hard disks there are only two boxes - the base unit and the power supply. A similar setup with USB hard disks could well be eight to ten boxes if each hard disks needs its own PSU.
The one criteria I didn't mention above is speed though this is frequently reviewed. When I first got the unit the speed was limited by the network because my PC only had 100baseT and I was getting about 8-9 Mbytes/sec which is between a third and half the speed of a local hard disk. Upgrading the PC to gigabit Ethernet has increased the speed somewhat and I think I remember seeing about 20 Mbytes/sec which is getting close to local hard disk speed (about 25 Mbytes/sec IIRC). This mattered a lot more when transferring 1.6Tb of data from my PC than it has in daily use since.
I guess the main drawback of the TS-419 is that it is quite expensive. If you're after something cheaper I hope this was still useful in understanding the possible compromises.
Regards, Steve.
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Chris G -
Laurie Brown -
Peter Alcibiades -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood