Installed and setup my first ever Home / Small Office NAS device this weekend...

Terrence Miao - 2012-08-19 23:08:14+1000 - Updated: 2012-08-20 22:45:31+1000

Installed and setup my first ever Home / Small Office NAS device this weekend.

Connected with three PCs, via wireless Network 300MB. Two WD Green 1TB hard disks have been configured as RAID-1 (mirrored). Performance for read and write is good and solid.

NAS is not a PC. It's much smaller and quieter and less electricity consumed. It also supports slow spin after a few minutes inactivity, and wake up on LAN features, or totally power off it in cron setting.

However, NAS is not a private cloud. It doesn't have application layer on the top. Though, it can installed added-on application like streaming, photo sharing, and pre-installed a torrent client, 256MB memory and a less powerful processor is not good enough for intensive cloud computing.

I used to have hard disk enclosure connected to PC via USB port and shared on the network. The problem is USB device can't have multiple simultaneously access, and burning a 200W power consumed PC is horrendous just for file sharing.

Now the money invested:

• Netgear RND 2000: $215
• Two WD 1TB hard disks: $174

Less than $400 you can have a NAS solution at home / small office is unbelievable. Think about several years ago, NAS solution is only available for big corporates with the price tag around one hundred thousands dollars. New technology changes quality of the life you and me.

RND2000

Alex Megremis - 2012-08-20 03:03:31+1000

How hacker friendly is this?

I've been running a WD World 1TB for years. You can get SSH into it (I think it's TinyLinux), and I've had it running Transmission.
However, it has had stability issues, so I've wondered about other, lower watt, cheap, hacker friendly solutions.

Dean Budd - 2012-08-20 10:36:15+1000

Synology FTW : goo.gl/BcL15

Dean Budd - 2012-08-20 10:37:52+1000

This is the model I've been extremely happy with for a long time : goo.gl/D9wif

Kieran Simpson - 2012-08-20 17:17:58+1000

+Dean Budd A 2 bay drive would mean at best a RAID 1 setup. Most NAS uses should be at least a RAID 5 for trade offs between speed and redundancy. So you want a 3 bay drive, (or 4 for RAID 6).

Kieran Simpson - 2012-08-20 17:18:48+1000

+Terrence Miao 60W is very cheap!!

Dean Budd - 2012-08-20 18:25:10+1000 - Updated: 2012-08-20 18:44:33+1000

+Kieran Simpson Yeah, thing is, I've only got this thing serving media. I'm not really concerned about losing a bunch of movies I've already seen before. However, if I had such a fine collection of rare vintage pr0n as yourself, I'd certainly understand the need for data redundancy... :P

Michael Poloni - 2012-08-20 18:59:50+1000 - Updated: 2012-08-20 19:00:16+1000

Why only go with 1TB disks? What sort of filesystems does it support / have you used?

Kieran Simpson - 2012-08-20 22:11:08+1000

+Dean Budd LOL. A minimal RAID 5 also doubles your capacity while giving redundancy.

Terrence Miao - 2012-08-20 22:49:22+1000

+Alex Megremis I hope it is a device with embedded open source Linux run inside it. But don't think manufacturer will open the hardware spec and interface for hacking activities.

Terrence Miao - 2012-08-20 23:01:34+1000 - Updated: 2012-08-20 23:07:46+1000

+Michael Poloni No idea. Maybe it's proprietary filesystem owned by Netgear, i.e., a heavy customised Linux kernel :-) Offering SMB/CIFS for Windows, and AFP for Apple access.

Why 1TB disks, money mate!

Terrence Miao - 2012-08-20 23:14:20+1000 - Updated: 2012-08-20 23:15:37+1000

I have thought about it afterward maybe, for small business, there is no need to have a centralised, powerful server in the data center room. PCs connect and run office tool and email in the cloud. A local network NAS for file sharing (speed and performance), and backup. That's almost all.

Michael Poloni - 2012-08-21 19:55:39+1000

+Terrence Miao It depends on what your data is, and whether you can trust those cloud providers. You need to weigh up the issues of privacy (in the cloud, can you control who has access to it?) and security (in the cloud, can you ensure your competitors don't steal it?), first and foremost.

Terrence Miao - 2012-08-21 23:17:54+1000

+Michael Poloni The "private" data put in cloud I reckon should be important, but not life-threaten critical. That mean FBI and MI5 could find a long list of girls you dated with, but they never could find out your bank accounts in tax avoid heaven Bahamas. In ensure your competitors never can steal, the only place I trust is a sealed pocket in my undies ...

Bryan Murphy - 2012-08-21 23:21:12+1000

I have had trouble with WD Green 1 TB drives. I spent months trying to diagnose why Windows 7 would frequently freeze up on my new quad core system and it turned out to be the WD drives. Might be just a windows only thing though.

Kieran Simpson - 2012-08-21 23:25:17+1000

+Bryan Murphy From the absolute dredges of my memory, the problem was because because the power saving feature that WD baked in was not playing nicely with the OS. When I was looking into HDs for my HTPC I passed the Greens because of kernel issues. Then again I only care about Linux, so don't know if it's a Windows problem too. :)

Michael Poloni - 2012-08-22 18:32:38+1000

+Kieran Simpson I have bought a few 3TB WD greens for the purpose of data storage & backup, not as the primary OS & scratch disks (for those I'm still with Seagate 7200 RPMs).

I have two of the 3TB disks portable, with the intention of one for off-site backup (family videos, photos, etc). The 3rd is in my recently setup "server" PC. On that I store media that needs to be accessed semi-regularly. Thus far (Ubuntu 12.04) I've not experienced any problems; touch wood!

Kieran Simpson - 2012-08-22 21:25:14+1000

+Michael Poloni That's good. I knew that when I was looking (a few years ago) there was a fix in the works for Linux.