Technobabble

Home NAS – How Big is Big Enough?

Posted by on Feb 16, 2007 | 6 Comments

I’ve been beating the home NAS (network attached storage) drum for what seems like eons now. But do I have a NAS in my own home yet? Of course not! Aside from being flat broke at the moment, I just can’t decide which type and size of NAS I want to buy. Spending the company’s bread is one thing … spending your own is something else altogether.

I’ve given thought to taking a number of directions with my home NAS. One of my first ideas was to take a Mac mini and add a couple of external Firewire drives … not a true NAS, nor the cheapest route, but easy enough to implement.

Because the unit will be a media server, feeding multiple clients, I’d like it to be reasonably fast. Now when I say reasonably, I really mean affordably. A SATA RAID seems like it would fit the bill, keeping in mind that the “I” in RAID stands for Inexpensive.

Ranchero Indebto needs the digital space, pronto. I have music files from four computers, not to mention stacks of CDs waiting to be ripped. And I’ve put off a lot of video production due to the lack of space on my primary video-editing platform.

Of the turnkey devices, the new 3TB Buffalo TeraStation Pro is perhaps most intriguing, if a bit out of my price range. While two grand or so isn’t that outrageous for that much storage, it’s not in my cards at the moment.

I still might roll my own with FreeNAS. Ideally, I’d like to start relatively small and upgrade the drives as needs dictate and fund permit.

[tags]NAS, network attached storage, RAID[/tags]

  • Gavin

    I currently have a fastora raid 300 setup with 3×200 gig drives in it. But my computer room is a little too loud with that and the computer running at the same time. My motherboard supports raid mirroring with sata drives so I’m gonna drop some money on 2 500 gig drives and put it in there as my home nas server. Its kind of nice having a computer setup as your nas as you can remote control it and run other server things on it while your other computers are shut down. My server does thigns like record radio shows, run bit torrent downloads, update my podcasts while I am away.

  • John

    I’ve been pondering the same thing, both for myself, and a couple of friends with families. A couple of more Linux-aware friends have recommended NASLite. The basic version is free, but even the one with all the bells and whistles is only $29. If you’ve already got a box that can be re-purposed, all that you’d be “out” is the cost of whatever drives you feel you’d need to add to provide sufficient storage space. You could then move all the video clips and music files to the server and off the individual machines. Add big enough drives and you could also implement workstation imaging of the individual machines back to the server so that no one in the house has to remember to backup. It’d be done automagically.

  • Mike

    I recently purchased an Infrant ReadyNAS and a single 500GB drive. The ReadyNAS will dynamically expand the RAID as drives are added. This way I didn’t have to spend as much to get started since I can add drives one at a time. So far it is a very nice unit and easy to use. Now I just need a gigabit network for high speed data transfers.

  • Ancient Mariner

    Have you looked at Windows Home Server? You can start small and add more storage as necessary plus it will do duplicate copies of data.

  • http://nasdrives.net Mark Speener

    For the price the Lacie is pretty decent. I think if some genius made something that sync’d with Tivo as well as did UPnP it’d be hot. I have a Windows box doing all that stuff now but I’d gladly offload uploading and downloading to the Tivo. The Linksys NSLU2 might do it after it was Unslung but that thing is soooooo sloooooow it’s probably not worth it.

  • http://www.christoney.org Reboots DaMachina

    I’ve been using a Lacie 320gb Ethernet Mini for the past 6 months and I am very happy with it. It has a logical heavy box, a great sturdy base, enough drive space for a typical non-video using home network and it’s cheap! Just like me! Do a search for Lacie products and you will find it easy enough….