Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

A few of you guys have asked about this after I leaked that I had started putting one together so I thought I'd share.

For those of you that aren't familiar with what an NAS is: An NAS or Network Attached Storage device is basically a shell with hard drives installled in it that you access over your network. it's great because you can have one central location where you can house your music, movies, photos, or just a central location to back up all your computers in your home to. It's very helpful in today's age when you have more than 1 or 2 computers in your home or for other uses which I'll mention later.


Background:

I've got three computers at home, one windows PC, a RHEL server, and a dell laptop which my wife uses. I haven't been good at all about backing up my data And for that reason I decided I can't do that anymore and needed to take the proper step at protecting my investements. I've got a lot of data between my three machines, music, photos, videos, programs, and a lot of other files and data.

A few weeks prior to deciding this my best friend showed me the Infrant ReadyNAS. at the time I thought it was really cool, but that was about it. After I decided I needed a backup solution I checked it out in more detail. It's got it's own OS installed on it that you access via a browser.

My other need for this was that I've been tinkering with the idea of building a media box that I could run MythTV on to stream movies, photos, music etc. It's a great program as well, it's free too. Basically you can use MythTV on a linux based computer and store all your movies, music, photos, and connect your cable box to it to record broadcasts. You can rip all your dvd's to the box as well and stream those to your tv. My other good friend has this setup in his living room and it's so great because he has full control over all of his movies, music, and photos at his fingertips 24/7. never has to touch a dvd, or worry about scratching them because they are just streamed to his tv. So by having this NAS i could mount it to my media center at a later date when I build it.

After reading the documentation on the product I decided to go for it.

http://www.infrant.com/download/ReadyNAS_NV.pdf
http://www.infrant.com/download/UserGuide_V3.pdf
http://www.infrant.com/download/QuickInstall_V3.pdf
http://www.infrant.com/download/Read...ingStarted.pdf

My Pictures:


















Infrant ReadyNAS: $599.00 + $22.30 (shipping) (no-tax-transaction)
Seagate 500GB HDD ST3500641AS: $189.00 + tax

Total: Approx $1450

The 2TB retail kit sells for approximately $2,000 at some locations. Eaegis.com where I bought my diskless unit currently has a 2TB version on sale for $1549 with Seagate 500GB hard drives, although they are different model from the ones I purchased. Newegg sells a 2TB version for $1899! So by building it myself I saved quite a bit of money which is why I went that route, and I like building these things. Yea I'm a nerd.

So far I've installed the drives but haven't had a chance to configure the NAS. I still need to boot it up, configure the RAID, shares, and other settings.

The NAS supports RAID 0,1,5, and their propietary format known as X-RAID. X-RAID is good for those that want to expand along the way. Basically you can start with one or two drives. and simply add a drive and the NAS automatically reconfigures itself to use the three drives instead of the two. This is good if you can't afford to spend all the money on the drives at the start.

Setup:

I'm going to go with RAID 5 for my setup because the X-RAID doesn't offer me anything since I'm already going to have 4 drives. I know I'm going to take a big hit on capacity with RAID 5, but that's going to provide me with the best data security which is why I'm doing this in the first place. Everything else I want to do is secondary to that.

Basically that's it for now. I'm hoping to have the rest of it configured this weekend so I'll have more info about the setup later.

If you guys want more info about it though go here:

http://www.infrant.com/products/prod...=ReadyNAS%20NV


Other Info:

one of the other cool things I found are the devices you can use in conjunction with this NAS. SlimDevices carries some products you can use to stream your audio to any room in your house that has their product.

http://www.slimdevices.com/

Their device called Squeezebox is their most popular:

amisconception

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

fast-tl

awwwwwsome! What will you use as a backup client? Can you put backup software on teh NAS to grab backups of your machines, or will each single computer be configged to backup to the server?

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

I copied this from the NAS Documentation. I won't know how well it works till I get it setup.

http://www.infrant.com/download/UserGuide_V3.pdf

So to answer your question, it supposedly comes with it's own backup client that I can configure to pull data from my machines. How well it works I don't know yet. But I'm it will work. If not I'll have to move data from my windows machines myself, and I'll just write a simple perl/bash script or use rsync to do the backup from my linux server.

Beelzebub

Nice

I am building one useing an older machine and openfiler and some perloined dual gige network cards

Billiam

NAS in da house!

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

cool, yea I gotta add a Gb nic card to my linux server and I bought a gigabit switch that I'm going to connect the NAS, linux server, and my windows machine to for faster backups and data access.

svtmike

I've been thinking of adding an NAS to my house, but speed has me worried - I've tried the cheapy devices and they are just horribly slow. I'm interested in hearing how this thing performs for you - I want to offload my growing digital photo library (not pr0n) from my main computer but I don't want that to slow me down to a crawl when working with the photos.

Malayalee King

iTrader: (1)

nice work anil!

sounds like a solid investment. i've been meaning to do that too -- outlook data file got corrupted and just like that email and, most importantly, address book went out the window.

have you looked into the mediagates (seen in another thread) ? they are network attachable and play divx/xvid/ac3/mp3/ogg/etc (everything but wmv) natively so, to my knowledge, there is a lot of hw decoding going on. they maybe a good place for mythTV to write to. i've currently got my machine encoding the streams, compressing, and a script the dumps everything to the mediagate at midnight. i do this because i do not want to send the compressing file stream to a network device across -- wear on the mediagate drive this way as well. i'm sure the network could handle this, but why put the wear on the IDE drives lol

ps next machine i build, all scsi or bust! haha

cool stuff!

Costco

....I thought NAS was a rapper?

Whiskers

pimp....

saiko_cl_duck

damn, that's awesome, something i'll look into. What the hell is a Fry's? Cause i was happy with my Seagate 80GB HD, and those 500GB's are cheappp for only 189.00, i wanna know where i can get one.

doopstr

Nice looking box, but why is there a hole on the bottom where the power plug should be?

astro

that's SICK Anil. nice post too

moeronn

That is very cool. Thanks for posting the details. I was wondering if you were building from scratch or using something like this.

We have the 4x250 GB version at the office I'm working in, also setup in RAID 5. Performance seems to be pretty good, but we haven't really been doings too much with it yet.

Setup of the CIFS wasn't difficult at all, but we had a hell of a time getting an FTP working. We're actually still not completely functional on that side. Also, we're still trying to sort out how the permissions on the CIFS work. They don't seem to play nice with Windows.

Keep us posted on how things work out. When we finally move into a house, that will be one of the first projects I want to do. We'll see what the wife says about it though

Congrats and good luck.

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

Thankx

I haven't looked into the mediagates. to be honest with you I haven't heard of them prior to this. I'll keep that in mind when I need to start thinking about setting my media center. I agree on your setup though.

If anything I'd throw a large disk on the media center, do whatever I wanted during the day, and then execute a script to transfer the files at midnight. that way it's streamlined workflow and easier to maintain.

I am going to hook up my computers to a gigabit switch so hopefully network speed shouldn't be too much of a problem. My wife doesn't have too much on her computer to back up yet, so backing in up via wifi isn't an issue at the moment. but I can always do a hard wired connection if needed.

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

Fry's is an electronics store out here on the west coast and other areas. It's funny because in Arizona they have Fry's Supermarkets. When I first saw one I was so happy to see a fry's then when I found out it was just a market I was

The online extension of fry's is outpost.com just so you know.

Anyway, the hard drives I got from them were on sale. But the thing with fry's lately, is that they practically always have sales. every monday, wednesday, friday, and sunday they have ads that come out with specials. every week or every other week you'll always find a great deal on hard drives. you just have to keep looking.

In fact recently they had the 750GB drives on sale for $299!!!! I contemplated getting those for my NAS for the extra $100 per disk, but the Infrant NAS doesn't support the 750GB drives yet.

They have a device compatibility list that they maintiain to help you decide which hardware works which sets them apart from many other companies out there.

Check it out....

http://www.infrant.com/forum/

http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewfor...7fbc3451984f8b

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

The power connection slot is recessed in that hole that you're referring to.

Billiam

Fry's opened up their "Chicago" store about two years ago. It's about a 35 minute drive from me but I have never received an ad from them. On two separate occasions I asked the customer service desk in the store how I could get their ads. No one knew. Maybe the run ads in newspapers now but I don't get any papers delivered.

One thing I do know for sure though is that the sales Fry's runs are local to specific regions. I've seen several posts on other forums where a person in one state would post about a sale at Fry's and a person from another state would say the deal was not in their ad or available in their store.

moeronn

^^ Yes, they are in the paper and very local.

Another cool thing about the Inrant NAS is the USB connectors. You can connect a printer and/or an external hard drive (for additional space or if you don't think RAID 5 is safe enough )

stangg172004

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

ON the topic of data storage and backups:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/index....try_id=1567877

Beelzebub

1TB of storage for 500 bucks.

This is getting nuts. 3 years ago we spent 150 grand for 4 TB

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

Beelzebub

EMC Symmetrix with 60 73GB 15k drives

Billiam

Yeah, we spent about $45K for 10 TB earlier this year. I'll bet ours are just a might bit faster and more reliable thant the $0.50/Gig stuff. Still though, pretty nuts.

Beelzebub

Absolutly. Which brand, model did you get.

I play with them all.

Billiam

It's our first SAN so we didn't go too terribly nuts. Ended up with a Hitachi Data Systems 9570. Two FC trays (5 TB) and one SATA tray (5 TB). A couple of 16 port Brocade 3850's, and Emulex HBA's.

No one at my place cared for the way EMC handled us when we were shopping around. The only other player we considered was Sun since we have four production Solaris/SPARC boxes. While Sun's products were nice on paper, a fair amount of the care and feeding required a Solaris platform which we have limited expertise in. And well.... they're Sun, not a storage company.

Beelzebub

Hitachi is a good choice, they make very good equipment we had a HDS Lightning with 50TB of storage for a loaner hooked up to a Sun E12k to run some benchmarks for Sun and Hitachi with one of our storage products.

We generally get EMC as we have a very good relation with them so we get very good deals.

I like the Emulex cards and the Brocades are both very good products.

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

Well I set up my new router and gigabit switch tonight and installed a gigabit nic card in my linux server and all seems to be working well.

Next step, setting up the NAS. I tried to do all this last weekend but was too drained.

Smalls

beautiful

stogie1020

SCSI aint cheep.

I think I may run Fiber in my house to stream media to my entertainment center.

Am I crazy? It would only be about 50 ft of line, plus two cards. How temperature sensitive is fiber line? (I have to run it through a non-air conditioned Arizona attic)

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

wow, you are crazy. I really don't know if anyone has done that before. Cat 6 550Mhz patch cables can deliver pretty decent streams using gigabit connections and is much more affordable.

Fiber lines are also delicate aren't they? I've heard that when they lay those lines, they don't lay just one, but very many of them because if one goes dead, they just switch to another line instead. Is that true?

JnC

iTrader: (12)

Nice work


P.S. I see a 2TB Ipod on the horizon .

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

Gotta start somewhere. The first video recorders had video players and huge battery packs that you had lug around with you just to record video! Now you can do it all on your digital camera.

Billiam

If you're only talking 50' (hell even 200') and your only forseeable intention is to run Gigabit Ethernet over it, then you're absolutely throwing money down the drain by running fiber. Have you priced how expensive fiber NIC's are? You're probably talking a minimum of $350 each.

Sly, fiber cabling is pretty damn tough. You certainly can't bend, twist, or kink it like you can copper, but I would definitely not consider the cabling delicate. What is generaly delicate, however, are the connectors at the ends of the cables. The ST type of connector that was common in the early days of Ethernet-over-fiber could be cracked very easily. The common connectors in use now (SC and LC) are much more durable.

Beelzebub

And to add to Billiam, you can step on it in sneakers but if you have hard soled shoes and it is sitting on the floor it will break.

And the other comment Billiam made about money. Fiber NICS will run you minimum 500 bucks a pop, the cable a 50' run of LC/LC (smaller connection) will cost you about $150

We just spent 5 grand on about 40 cables.

Stogie

Just buy a NAS device like Sly and a few GigE cards. It will be a hell of a lot cheaper and the performace isn't that back.

You can run 80 to 90meg per second transfer rate across it.
We deliver 5 and 6 gig Ghost images to machines in a few minutes.

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

found out 2 weeks ago that slim devices was purchased by Logitech. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing yet.

svtmike

I picked up a ReadyNAS this week from NewEgg, put two 400GB disks in it - will probably get the other two very soon. It was an absolute snap to get working. With only two disks it's also very quiet - I haven't had to banish it to the basement yet.

Also put in a GigE router (D-Link DGL-4300) but since my cable is all Cat5 the network is still running 100Mb. I've got the Cat5e in my trunk to change the wires out over the next couple evenings and get it running at full network speed.

Mike

Sly Raskal

iTrader: (1)

I finally had some time to devote to working on this over the holidays. I was so swamped with work after I bought it I couldn't even get this thing out of the box. In any case.....

Background (for those that haven't read the thread):

I bought a diskless ReadyNAS NV that I installed 4 500GB Seagate drives into because I got a great deal on the drives.

After the NAS was setup using X-RAID, I have approx 1,368 GB of space at my disposal. The drives can be interchanged whenever I want with larger capacity drives and the resyncs are automatic. The time to resync is the issue. My NAS took 10 hrs to sync the blank drives up!

A memory upgrade to 1GB of RAM is on the horizon for my NAS. At the moment it is running at 256MB of RAM. Which can be slow at times especially when running FrontView, which is the web based interface to administrate the NAS

I've got my computer, linux server and NAS hooked up to a gigabit switch for optimal speed.

I haven't setup my client machines to do auto backups but that's next. The NAS came with backup software to install on windows machines that I will use on my desktop and 2 laptops. I'll probably be using Rsync for my linux server.

iTunes Streaming Service:

After getting the darn thing setup initially I started tinkering with the options and built in services to get familiarized with it because there is so much!!!

One of them is the "iTunes Streaming" service. Basically you can place all your iTunes files on the NAS, and any computer that is on the same subnet as the NAS can utilize that streaming service.

So I copied my iTunes files to the NAS, and pointed the Streaming service to the share folder. After doing that, the NAS has to scan the folder so it knows what it will be streaming. The scanning is automated to rescan at whatever intervals you choose. The default is set to rescan the media every 24 hrs. So after it finished scanning I started up my iTunes and voila, it listed my iTunes streaming service without any other work. As long as that computer is authorized to play those iTunes files, it will play them. It's really cool, but the streaming service lacks much of the functionality that we use in iTunes like playlists for instance.

So I tried to point iTunes to my the music folder that is on the NAS after mapping a network drive to the NAS. This proved to be disappointing [so far]. iTunes sees that the files are on the NAS, but unless the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file is updated to point to the NAS as well it's a no go. This isn't a fault of the NAS, but a lack of functionality on iTunes part. Lack of functionality on Apple software, that's proposterous!

In any case, just thought I'd share a little bit of info about that service. I'll have more info as I do more with the NAS. It's a really cool device for securing your data for backups and integrity and to make it more convenient to access your data on your home network.