storage headache - DONT USE NETGEAR

neil_g

neil_g

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Neil
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see page 2 for netgear rant

this should be easy i do this sh..stuff for a living for petes sake.

but what im struggling with is putting together a cost effective storage solution. i mean for example a 4 drive NAS enclosure costs £400 without disks then for 2TB drives youre looking at £99 each.

baring in mind i need to expand on my current 4TB this is going to cost a small fortune, itd cost less to build a new PC and fill it with drives..

and thats without factoring in a backup lol

ho hum, semi-rant over.

any cheap suggestions? lol
 
What total volume of storage do you want? You say "2TB drives", plural, but don't specify a limit.

Is RAID1 redundancy important to you? (If you're sane, you'll answer 'yes' to that).

Say you want 4Tb of storage, that's 4x 2Tb drives to go into some RAID config.

You could purchase a used PC with 4x SATA ports and onboard display/Gbit NIC for little over £150 (Just make sure the BIOS supports large disks...), 4 drives for £400, a copy of OpenE storage server for free, a 2Tb licence extension key for $104 (USD) and you're all set.

OpenFiler is an OSS/Free solution compared to OpenE but it's not quite as userfriendly, as well supported, or as well featured (If indeed you need any features... ). Would save you the $104-per-2TB levy from OpenE, though.

Your largest cost is the drives and alas there's no way to skirt that.
 
Denyerec said:
What total volume of storage do you want? You say "2TB drives", plural, but don't specify a limit.
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this is the 2nd quandry, replace the current 4TB and make that part of the new solution or not. if not a 2nd batch of 4TB should do for a bit.

Is RAID1 redundancy important to you? (If you're sane, you'll answer 'yes' to that).
Click to expand...

no. see my sig ;) generally i prefer to sync the drives rather than RAID them.

You could purchase a used PC with 4x SATA ports and onboard display/Gbit NIC for little over £150 (Just make sure the BIOS supports large disks...), 4 drives for £400, a copy of OpenE storage server for free, a 2Tb licence extension key for $104 (USD) and you're all set.

OpenFiler is an OSS/Free solution compared to OpenE but it's not quite as userfriendly, as well supported, or as well featured (If indeed you need any features... ). Would save you the $104-per-2TB levy from OpenE, though.

Your largest cost is the drives and alas there's no way to skirt that.
Click to expand...

yeah thats the alternative to a specialist NAS enclosure. the other software i was looking at was FreeNAS.
 
I am aware RAID isn't backup, but it is a decent way of maintaining data availability alongside a backup solution. Depending on your workflow for example it may be better to work the remains of a day out on a degraded array than to interrupt things to perform a restore operation. Again, depending on the backup strategy employed this can be mitigated, but hopefully you get my point :)

Personally I've got two RAID1 arrays that get backed up to single drives that can be easily taken offsite, the rate I kill disks would mean I'd spend half my time restoring otherwise ;)

FreeNAS and OpenFiler lack pretty heavily in the user-friendly stakes compared to OpenE, and I think FreeNAS needs to hook in to an existing account management framework. Openfiler hasn't been updated for (literally) years and fell a long way short of its feature list in actual deployment, though depending on demand this might be workable.

I could never manage to get > 50MB/s to a NAS share, but can achieve 115MB/sec to an iSCSI target via OpenE quite easily, making it preferable (For my application) in comparison to simple NAS/NFS. I'd be able to hit 200MB/sec easily if the stupid B*****s at Micro$oft hadn't removed MPIO support from Windows7. XP64 has it, but I'm not downgrading my OS. Bloody muppets.

The Acer product looks nice, would love to see what OS it's running and whether or not the same box would be capable of running OpenE!
 
/edit looks like it runs Windows Home Server.
 
Denyerec said:
I am aware RAID isn't backup, but it is a decent way of maintaining data availability alongside a backup solution. Depending on your workflow for example it may be better to work the remains of a day out on a degraded array than to interrupt things to perform a restore operation. Again, depending on the backup strategy employed this can be mitigated, but hopefully you get my point :)

Personally I've got two RAID1 arrays that get backed up to single drives that can be easily taken offsite, the rate I kill disks would mean I'd spend half my time restoring otherwise ;)
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yup im aware you can keep running a RAID1 while degraded but id prefer to switch to my syncd drives than take the performance hit :)

steep - cheers for that
 
just pulled the trigger on the netgear readynas nv+ (no disks).. found them on amazon via netgear for 327.

figured i can grow into it lol

the acer was tempting but the max supported storage was 4TB so no expansion.
 
neil_g said:
just pulled the trigger on the netgear readynas nv+ (no disks).. found them on amazon via netgear for 327.

figured i can grow into it lol

the acer was tempting but the max supported storage was 4TB so no expansion.
Click to expand...

Any reason you did not look at building a Windows Home Server? I built one out of an old GX620 stuffed with disks. Backups work a treat and also you get bare metal restores and remote access etc. Mine works a treat.
 
LemmingLover said:
Any reason you did not look at building a Windows Home Server? I built one out of an old GX620 stuffed with disks. Backups work a treat and also you get bare metal restores and remote access etc. Mine works a treat.
Click to expand...

space mainly, ive already got 2 machines in a pretty confined space i inhabbit. my main box is an ITX system to try and save some space for example. building a storage box would mean having another tower etc etc..
 
neil_g said:
space mainly, ive already got 2 machines in a pretty confined space i inhabbit. my main box is an ITX system to try and save some space for example. building a storage box would mean having another tower etc etc..
Click to expand...

My wife would agree with you on that one ;)
 
LemmingLover said:
My wife would agree with you on that one ;)
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lol :)

seriously if i have any more stuff in the room i rent i would not be able to move. its litterally a double bed, desk and tv with my media center and amp under the bed with a load of storage boxes.. with just about enough space to open the door..

least the readynas is fairly compact :thumbs:
 
Denyerec said:
I am aware RAID isn't backup, but it is a decent way of maintaining data availability alongside a backup solution.
Click to expand...
If it's just storage, do you really need the availability?

I'd only consider RAID really for a 'live' server where I needed it to be up 24/7. For storage there are many hassles with RAID where it's easy to trash the whole set if you muck about to much, and if you corrupt something on one disc it will get replicated to the others also.

Windows Home Server has an option of mirrored backup which isn't too restrictive and works on the structure of data rather than just mirroring whole discs. e.g. you can have a bunch of discs as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Discs), and allocate a specific disc, partition or folder on the array which is the mirror. You don't have to mirror everything either, so you can have system and unimportant stuff non-mirrored, and the the key parts mirrored just by specifying which folders to mirror. On top you can have the external backup also.

For backup, I'd consider off line storage. I use JungleDisk paired with Amazon cloud storage. The price is peanuts. Okay at the moment I only store about a gig, but it's like 10 cents a month (I'm on the US billing plan but you can use the EU/UK servers now and pay in £). Scaling up for all my photos it will cost a bit more. The only problem is getting the data up there in the first place, and you do pay for data transferred as well as storage.
 
deadkenny said:
If it's just storage, do you really need the availability?

I'd only consider RAID really for a 'live' server where I needed it to be up 24/7. For storage there are many hassles with RAID where it's easy to trash the whole set if you muck about to much, and if you corrupt something on one disc it will get replicated to the others also.
Click to expand...

indeedydoody.

i'll be RAID0'ing the NAS and backing it up to my current storage in my media center and hard drives at work. i prefer to be in control of my backups/sync'd data personally, then i know its working.

For backup, I'd consider off line storage. I use JungleDisk paired with Amazon cloud storage. The price is peanuts. Okay at the moment I only store about a gig, but it's like 10 cents a month (I'm on the US billing plan but you can use the EU/UK servers now and pay in £). Scaling up for all my photos it will cost a bit more. The only problem is getting the data up there in the first place, and you do pay for data transferred as well as storage.
Click to expand...

not for me personally, i dont have the internet connection to support TB's of data lol
 
I use the ReadyNas NV+ in RaidX configuration.

The ReadyNas site has lots of plugins which I haven't used (as yet).

I also backup to Carbonite, although this can take weeks initially, once you are up to date everything just ticks away in the background
 
neil_g said:
not for me personally, i dont have the internet connection to support TB's of data lol
Click to expand...
Or the 3 years to wait for it to upload :D

Fast broadband is all nice and fine, but the upload speeds still suck.

Was thinking that once I've got the bulk up there, I'd only be uploading a smaller batch periodically. Then again it would just take forever to upload them all.

Might still use it for backups of what I'm currently working on. In case I'm stuck somewhere in the world without a backup drive and need to backup from my netbook or restore to it.
 
deadkenny said:
Or the 3 years to wait for it to upload :D

Fast broadband is all nice and fine, but the upload speeds still suck.

Was thinking that once I've got the bulk up there, I'd only be uploading a smaller batch periodically. Then again it would just take forever to upload them all.

Might still use it for backups of what I'm currently working on. In case I'm stuck somewhere in the world without a backup drive and need to backup from my netbook or restore to it.
Click to expand...

true. and a lot of internet connections are still capped.. i wonder how many people have worked out how long it would take to download the entire backup with caps in place..
 
deadkenny said:
If it's just storage, do you really need the availability?
Click to expand...

With my luck? A flat yes. I once had 3 drives die within as many days, one of which was the backup disk... Since then I've kept the important stuff on a RAID1 array along with a snatch out backup disk. I could replicate to two targets but as I use the array as an online archive, the added read speed is a nice bonus.

Different strokes for different folks, over the last 10 years I've been burned more ways than I care to remember, so I go with what works for me :)

Neil, how do you plan to connect to the NAS? Single channel gigabit only provides ~ 115MB/s transfer so I'm not clear on the benefit of RAID0 on the NAS unit, any clues?
 
RAID0 is extremely easy to mount and umount, stop and start, assemble/disassemble in linux. I initially went with LVM but found that it was tricky to start and stop for my backup drives. I'm doing the same as Neil - a pair of data drives in RAID0 for capacity, another pair for offsite storage. I, too, could not use online backup services for my data. Nor would I trust it.
 
The readynas are an excellent choice. They use very little power which is where they can be more cost effective than a PC.

They really work to their full potential when all bays are full. 8tb would give you 6gb of protected storage, whereas 4tb will only give you 2tb. Bite the bullet and buy two more while they are still matching.

Then you can use it as a media server as well. You can even access it over the internet from a remote location, so backup your files when on a shoot for example. It really is very flexible.

Graham
 
DigitalRelish said:
Please do :thumbs:
Click to expand...

hokey cokey..

might not be till monday night now though ive just powered it on at work and its started its initial default disk config which is going to take a while to run through (so cant take it home tonight, then im at the other halfs all weekend etc). which is a little annoying because its defaulted to mirroring which im going to have to scrub and resync as spanned (raid0) anyway lol
 
I got one of these when they where dirt cheap before xmas

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/11850963/Hewlett-Packard-EX490-1TB-MediaSmart-Media-Server-NAS-Network-Attached-Storage/Product.html?_$ja=tsid:11518%7Ccc:%7Cprd:11850963%7Ccat:Hard+Drives

and are very nifty bits of kit, really good for storage and backup with the agent that you install on the "client" computers and automates the backups, and it allows you to mirror key files across physical media for added protection.

that is a stonking price *** for such a decent NAS
 
blistering price.. thats 100 quid down on what i bought the first one for last week..

i promised a short review too, i'll knock something up in the morning for those that wanted it..
 
Well, the price of the ReadyNAS NV+ is back over £300 once more. Just as I was considering it!

I'm half torn between a NAS such as the NV+ and a DAS such as the Drobo.

My Macbook Pro is my main computer and although I've upgraded the hard drive to 500GB, it's simply not enough to hold everything. So, I need some form of external storage which is at least as fast as USB2 and on which I can store my Lightroom images. I'll also want to be able to back-up this file store onto a separate device which I can keep separately.

I'm not too concerned about having the file store on the network since I won't need to share it with anyone and especially because the router and my Macbook are at wirelessly connected across the length of the house.

So, I'm considering something I can just connect directly to my Mac such as a Drobo.
 
that was an odd blip of a price drop on the readynas then.. mines been despatched at that 258 price so im happy :)

thats what i was going to do.. a quick review of the readnas.. hold the line caller..
 
In the box



You get:
The NAS Unit
Software CD
Basic quick start guide
2m CAT5 cable (yellooow)
2x Kettle power lead (UK and Euro)

The Unit



It's definately a solid well built bit of kit, you get that just from the weight of the thing. Nicely styled, would be at home next to a Mac Pro in it's grey colour. On the front when powered on you are greeted with a nice bloo power LED and green drive status/activity LEDS, also a green backlit LCD panel displaying system status and/or unit IP address and name. The LCD backlight goes out after a period of time but can be woken using a single press of the power button.



The hard disk bays are nicely designed, press the button on the holder and the release handle springs open with a satisfying springyness.. pull the lever and it releases the drive from the unit. The hard drives fit to the holder with 4 X head screws, easy peasy.

On the front you get 1 USB port for connecting external drives, on the back you get another 2 USB (you can also connect a printer for network sharing) and the 1Gbps CAT5 socket.



Setting Up

Once the drives are installed (I used bays 1 and 2 and labelled my drive caddys accordingly, yes I am anal) and the CAT5 is connected to your network the device can then be powered on.

Initial set up is fairly easy, the unit is preconfigured to get network details using DHCP and if no automatic details can be obtained defaults to 192.168.168.1.

The unit defaults to RAID1 mirror and starts to create the volume... at this point I would come back the following day, mine took 10 hours to mirror 2 2TB drives. This was a little annoying as I would only delete the drive later and recreate as RAID0.

Once the volume is created setting up shares and permissions is dead easy via the web interface. The unit supports CIF and HFS to name a few, also iTunes, Squeezebox and PS3 services. I went through and disabled most of the services as I am only using mine for file hosting on a Windows platform.



You can also set up things like email alerting, backup jobs to other devices, backup jobs from other networked locations etc. It can also be used in conjunction with compatible UPS units.

In Use

Really easy to set up access to, if you create a user on the NAS with the same as your Windows logon then you're laughing.. set up a mapped drive to the NAS and off you go.



Like I say I have created a RAID0 volume, purely as I wanted a spanned disk giving me as much space as possible. Using 2 2TB drives this has given me 3.7TB after RAID overheads.

NOTE - I am only using RAID0 as I have other storage I am backing up to (but then this should be the case for ALL RAID including RAID1). However RAID0 is the quickest way to lose your data, when a single drive fails all data across all drives is lost.. be careful.

One thing I do not like so far is the noise. From what I have read Netgear recently implemented a fan speed increase in the firmware to improve PSU cooling and therefore life. Personally I would suggest not locating it near where you want some peace and quiet.

Performance wise I'm happy for a network device. I think it could be better but I need to go through and check my settings in Windows as I think Windows 7 is throttling my LAN to about 15% usage on a gigabit port.

While speaking of performance, the ReadyNAS ships with 256MB RAM which can be upgraded to 1GB (supported memory modules only) to improve performance.

Like I mentioned earlier I have ordered a 2nd unit which I am planning to sync up with the other using the RSYNC protocols on the device. One unit may even go off site, I'm yet to plan that far.

Overall

I'm happy, a nice well built bit of kit with a huge support community behind it. Like I say I need to do some more tweeks on network performance but I suspect this is down to Windows rather than the device.

Hope that's of some use.. Any questions please feel free, no doubt I've missed off loads of info..
 
i take back anything postive i ever said about netgear. i am now seriously concidering selling the kit on and buying another brand.

shocking shocking customer service.

the 2nd unit i bought developed a fault where the LEDs stopped functioning. at this point its worth mentioning that the unit is 40 days old. so i contacted negear support and logged a fault, they agreed straight away that the unit should be RMA'd. did this tuesday.

RMA unit arrived yesterday and i was shocked to discover that the unit was an old "infrant" (the company that owned the tech before netgear) unit and it was a) blatently a refurb and b) it was battered to hell

photos..
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4143/4792945703_555441f3e6_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4116/4793580090_8329ed9c52_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4097/4792946535_e3065c7b63_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4142/4793580976_f2c79fd1fe_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4136/4793581358_79fa852b85_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4074/4792947559_76cbacc0ea_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4142/4792947809_c38817eda9_b.jpg

so, contact netgear again. they agree that the unit that was sent was unacceptable and a RMA for the RMA is arranged. but i am told that i would only get a refurb as they dont replace with new units.

now this has not sat well with me at all. so i complained to customer services.. to which they have responded, one line has really angered me..

Netgear Customer Services said:
“whilst there are cosmetic checks done a unit would not be excluded based solely on scratches”
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so essentially my 40 day old MINT unit could get replaced with another worn unit.

i mean seriously if you purchased a car and it went back to the manufacturer regarding a fault you would not accept a different car that has done 20,000 extra miles that has had a service. it simply would not be acceptable.

so at the moment i am seriously concidering selling up my Netgear kit and replacing with an alternate brand.

*fuming*
 
update..

Netgear Customer Services said:
Unfortunately we cannot guarantee a &#8216;brand new unit&#8217; to any customer <snip> We do make it clear in our warranty terms that we do not guarantee new units although we do expect every unit we sent to be fully working as if it were a new one.

I appreciate that this is not the resolution you are seeking but unfortunately we will not be able to offer you a guaranteed new unit in this replacement.
Click to expand...

they can poke their kit up their behind.
 
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