NAS headache

[Rari]

After building a new workstation/gaming pc, I decided to use my old pc as a NAS. Bought four 1TB drives and a raid card, built a RAID5 and started installing FreeNAS on a USB key. Loved how smooth it all went and was really impressed with all the stuff I was reading I could do with it but ...I know nothing about FreeBSD and quickly got lost. After a week or so of playing around with it, reading what guides/manuals I could find, and trying to get the services running I wanted, the way I wanted, I gave up.

I then installed an old 120GB drive and put WHS on that. Typical Windows stuff... updates, blah blah blah... Profile and folder settings were very limited. Read/write times were slower than FreeNAS and available space was about 400GB less (after installing an additional 120gb!?) than FreeNAS too.

I just want my NAS to be simple and straight forward to use for storing and streaming media*, simple back ups, and have decent control over the directories (better if able to hide them from people trying to map to it). Torrenting and remoting would be nice but not needed.

I have an old xp64 3400+ on a MSI board w/ 1.5GB ddr333, four or five 40-160GB hdd's, and now 4 1TB hdd's. Is Openfiler worth checking out? Is there a good know-all-tell-all FreeNAS guide? (Everything I found was in bits and pieces)? Would I be better off buckling down and buying a four bay hdd'less NAS? I'm currently using a 500GB Maxtor SharedStorage w/ two externals for a total of 1TB. Maxtor's GUI has severed me well. But I know others can do the same and more. I have the pieces. But no picture to look out to figure this puzzle out.


* still deciding what end result I want, a HTPC, PS3, XBOX360, or bridge.

 

[Princemercury]

I -hate- hardware RAID for arrays with less than 7 disks.

And a RAID 5 array with 4 x 1TB disks is not, recommended. If one disk fails it would take you almost a year (sarcasm, downtime) to restore data using the parity checks on the other 3 disks. (Which is why RAID 5 is very quickly becoming obsolete).

If you add a 120GB disk to a 4 x 1TB array under RAID 5 you would only get;

Total disks - 1 * Total space (120GB * 5(disks)) = 480 GB. How are you getting 2.6 TB with that array? Unless you're created a whole new array under WHS with 4x1TB and something went horribly wrong lol.

I don't know about lix buffs out there but I prefer Win2k3 or 2k8, it does everything you need and it's very simple. Even basic editions allow up to 10 clients to connect to your NAS. Or check out WSS 03/08 for a more easier to use inline / wizard type solution... (You said nice and simple).

 

[Rari]

No no no... the RAID5 was built in the controller's BIOS. WHS pooled the single drive and the RAID5. AND! was saying I had less space, altogether, than what FreeNAS said I had w/o the fifth drive. There was no array built using the 120GB drive or WHS.

I've always been under the impression that hardware raid, regardless of number of disks, out performs soft raid. The dedicated controller handles the read/write processes and frees up CPU. Whereas, soft raid is limited to whatever resources the OS will give it.

I went with RAID5, instead of 1+0, because I thought it was the better trade off for speed, size, and redundancy. If one drive fails, I can still access the partition with reduced space. Should that happen, my concern would be with accessing the data and not rebuilding the array immediately.

But, I'm mostly looking for a NAS (OS) solution here.

When I wrote nice and simple, I didn't mean so simple it'd be suited for the BestBuy crowd. WHS had slower write times than FreeNAS. Required another drive (more power used) and doesn't have all the bells 'n whistles FreeNAS does out of the box, per se.

For FreeNAS, I was booting from a 125mb thumb drive. (Entire OS is only 32mb) It's free. It's extremely flexible. But that flexibility can be an extreme headache as there's a lot of stuff to weed through while learning to set it up and I could not find a straightforward guide. XD (I don't mind if there's a 100 steps... just tell me each one sequentially and let me skip to only the parts I need!)

I was running the trial version of WHS and after using it, can't justify spending the extra $100 for it. 2k3 would set me back $250 for 5 clients. That's in the ball park of a disk-less enclosure. Would Server2k3 out weigh the pros/cons of an enclosure? An enclosure would consume less power, for sure, and have the basics for running a NAS covered.

Aside from those four options, there's still Openfiler and NasLite. Does anyone have experience with either?

 

[Rari]

Necro updating:

Broke down and bought a Synology DS409 ....and LOVING IT!!! Sold a few spares to make up for the price, but well worth it. Does everything I wanted and more. Now have to find a good (media) sorting software I like... and more media.

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS409/index.php

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30838/75/

For anyone considering network attached storage, do your homework. There are lots of options out there. (For me it was between Synology and Qnap.)