[sclug] NAS

[Jonathan H N Chin]

haughtonomous wrote:
> Has anyone built themselves a low-power NAS?

The Synology DS411slim is very nice. 17W fully loaded.
About #230 bare (from ebuyer) so more than you want to pay.
It only takes 2.5" drives (x4). Very very cute though.

    http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS411slim

I've got the DS411j which takes 3.5" disks but, slightly
surprisingly, has less grunt and costs more (about #275).
Claimed 31W fully loaded. (Mine estimates it will run for
about half an hour off my 700VA UPS).

They can be configured to power up/down automatically
(so mine turns off overnight when I know I'll be in bed)
and you can make the disks spin down when they've been idle
for a while.

If you hang one off a supported UPS, it'll shut down cleanly
if there's an extended power failure and then restart when the
power comes back.

Some factors to consider:

    - size
    - power consumption
        - cost
        - heat, if you're sticking it in a closet
    - noise level
    - managability
    - easy of use
    - maintainability


For a cheap and cheerful build-your-own, I'd definitely recommend ZFS.
It's really really nice to manage. The linux zfs-fuse implementation
has some major shortcomings, but works okay. ZFS is also available in
freebsd and opensolaris, among others. Looks like freenas uses it too.

I use ZFS on my laptop (debian with zfs-fuse).

The internal SSD contains one zfs pool. I have two external USB drives
for backup, containing another pool. They can be used together as a
mirrored pair, or I can leave one in my safe, carry the other around
and do regular backups, and then resynchronise them when I get home.

Resynchronising is very efficient. Unlike an rsync, ZFS is able to
copy only the data that has actually changed (so, for example, moving
files around won't phase it - only the directory metadata will need
to be copied) and it doesn't need to compare file content to locate
changes since they are tracked explicitly.


-jonathan

-- 
Jonathan H N Chin
http://@jhnc.org;