January 9, 200719 yr Ive recently been looking at NAS, for centralised storage..but am somewhat horrified to see that transfer speeds, even with GB lan, average around 12MBps.. surely the bottleneck should be the disks at around 50+MBps... why such a holdup...I noticed this when researching the synology 106e....http://www.synology.com/enu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=839In theory, is 1gbps, not 125megabytes ps...?? yet transare speeds are a tenth of this... I know in reality speeds are never that high, but surely they cant be as bad as that?? Is this just down to cheap hardware, memory controllers etc???Other than building a dedicated NAS pc, are there any other solutions...??
January 9, 200719 yr Something can save SATA2 HDs and Gigabit ethernet, but if it has a a stopwatch CPU... I've found most entry-level NAS to suck badly. Not just bad performance, but other limitations too (like what file systems can be used on the disks), and usually very limited scalability. Usually not worth the price IMO. 300$ for this thing? Any old computer (~free) running headless somewhere in a dark corner of the basement will do just fine, and usually expands quite well (plug in cheap PATA/SATA controllers as necessary, or using external USB enclosures or such). You use the file systems you want. No dinky CPUs. Runs the software you want. Cheap commodity parts (easy and cheap to fix). Upgradeable. Same old PC can be used for many tasks (like holding recordings of PVR software, running backup jobs & sync'ing, running P2P apps for large transfers, can be used as NAT/FW too, you name it!) For very little more, you'll be able to move on to using iSCSI or AoE (ATA over Ethernet) later on if you want to (or Fibre Channel if you prefer)You may also want to look into MS new offering: Windows Home Server, which does provide centralized storage (and backups) too.
January 9, 200719 yr could be that they are not using giga switches for test and the pc's nic cards could be set wrongly as throughput should be a lot more than statedi would do as crahak suggested, get on old pc and use headless.
January 9, 200719 yr Author Yeah.. think thats now the obvious solution... especially as i have an old socket a, and xpm2600, gig of ram kicking about collecting dust!!! Just need to find a nice case that will maybe support one of the hot swapable drive racks....Thanks!!
January 10, 200719 yr I was actually looking at getting an entry level NAS for my home network... data redundancy is my major purchasing reason... I looked at a few sites, and found http://www.smallnetbuilder.com has a NAS chart that compares a lot of different NAS boxes in different performance categories.http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29671/75/I was looking at D-Link's new NAS as my next purchase. 2x250GB RAID 1 would be a pretty good start.
January 10, 200719 yr I was looking at D-Link's new NAS as my next purchase. 2x250GB RAID 1 would be a pretty good start.230$ (+ drives) for a box that will already be full with those 2 HDs (not expandable at all), so ~400$ with drives, and a total of 250GB, or 1.60$/GB! Ouch. I buy my storage @ ~0.30$/GB. And cheapo software RAID cards under 50$ let you plug 4 extra HDs (add as many as you need). For ~400$ I'd buy four 320GB'ers, use 2 to hold data, and 2 as backups, leaving me with 640GB of usable space at the same price (0.60$/GB backed up, not bad at all). That's 2.5x the place, even keeping half the drives for backups. It'll let me use any file system I so please, RAID 'em or not, partition the way I want it, I'll have access to it in any way I please and such.Besides, I don't see much of a need for redundancy, as long as one has backups (mirroring is no substitute for backups!). I have no need for my data to stay "online" as one drive died, and rebuild the other meanwhile. I'd just replace the drive and restore the backup.And even if I didn't go the "homebrew NAS" way (or SAN), I'd likely go for WHS over a NAS. Not much more expensive (starts @ 500$ IIRC), but far nicer and much more useful IMO.
May 1, 200818 yr I have recently purchased my Giganit NAS box from www.egudo.com which can be another option for you to consider. It was easy to set up. hope this helps
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