Home NAS Advice

[jmgdotcom]

I have recently wired my house for LAN (gigabit) giving me 2 LAN sockets in every room. The goal was to network all PC's together and have one central storage solution which could be accessed locally and remotely. I would like to say now 8TB (JBOD, not RAID 0 or 1) of storage is what is needed, not for now but future proofing.

I am having a some trouble finding a NAS enclosure that will suit my requirements that is not a ridiculous sum of money (budget £500 max)

Synology enclosures seem perfect and reliable but with added HDD's they end up being very expensive and more than I am willing to pay.

The best option I have came up with is a Buffalo LinkStation 421DE (dabs) with two WD Red 4Tb drives. In total costing £350.00. The trouble is I can't find very many reviews on any Buffalo NAS enclosures and its putting me off ordering it somewhat.

Any advice on the Buffalo NAS or NAS solutions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Why not build your own? Get a dual core and some EEC memory and you're away. Software wise go for freenas.

 

[jmgdotcom]

Nas

I did build a test PC out of parts I had lying around and installed freenas onto it, the PC ran well but freenas was so unreliable and sporadic. I lost all faith in it, I couldn't put all my data on something that was so temperamental.

I also experimented with my raspberry pi but again it was inconsistent and temperamental.

 

[Master&Puppet]

I haven't had many issues but you could use something else, even a server edition OS? Lots of options. I'm all for building your own for the same reasons as building your own gaming rig. Price, quality assurance and control. I haven't had any experience with bought systems.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Just a normal PC with 7 would be fine - eventually youll want to get a decent raid card because the drives will be slower than the network max. If you ever use Raid 5 or 6 youll 100% need a raid card for speed.

My home network both ways is 118MB/s - if you have 2 ports everywhere and you got a decent managed switch plus an epic network card in the server you could have that at 200MB/s with a bit of work.....

 

[jmgdotcom]

OK I had a phenom ii 1055t + 4GB sitting around doing nothing so I installed freenas on a 16gb usb and stuck in 2 500gb HDDs (just a test rig to prove the concept).

Set up my volume, users and CIFS, all seems to be working very well, getting 90-100Mb/s! I now agree that this is the best option, I will keep this setup for a few weeks to ensure it does everything I want. just need to check my m/b supports 4TB drives and il order two WD Reds.

How would you suggest accessing freenas remotely?

Thanks for the replies

 

[Master&Puppet]

Have you checked out the user guide? Lots of good info there.

http://doc.freenas.org

When you boot FreeNAS with a keyboard and monitor attached you will get to the console ui. Now during the boot process freenas will automatically try to connect to the DHCP server and should automatically receive an IP address which you can use to connect remotely from any device through a webUI using the user credentials you create. If you haven't crested any before this point then it will prompt you to create a root password.

Once you've identified the IP for your freenas box don't forgot to reserve it in you router's ui so that it doesn't change.

 

[NeverBackDown]

OK I had a phenom ii 1055t + 4GB sitting around doing nothing so I installed freenas on a 16gb usb and stuck in 2 500gb HDDs (just a test rig to prove the concept).

Set up my volume, users and CIFS, all seems to be working very well, getting 90-100Mb/s! I now agree that this is the best option, I will keep this setup for a few weeks to ensure it does everything I want. just need to check my m/b supports 4TB drives and il order two WD Reds.

How would you suggest accessing freenas remotely?

Thanks for the replies

Generally speaking if your motherboard has a UEFI bios it'll support drives greater than 3TBs. After that you may have to do a trick or two to get it work on older boards.