Hackit: Network Attached Storage?

Posted Jul 5th 2008 7:40PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: HackIt, daily

With each passing day the rate we acquire digital media increases (we don't even bother unpacking our CDs when we move anymore). Large publishers have started moving away from DRM, which means we'll be buying even more digital media in the future. Acquiring all of this nonphysical property puts importance on not just making it easily accessible, but also protecting it from destruction. Slashdot asked for reader suggestions of what NAS to buy; we've compiled some of the options below and want to know what you use.

For those willing to build machines themselves, there are several NAS focused distributions available. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and takes up less than 32MB even though it has a full featured web interface. Openfiler can be used for building full fledged NAS/SAN appliances. It can be deployed on bare metal or as a virtual machine and 2.3 has new features like bonding multiple NICs. CryptoNAS is a liveCD that helps you build a user friendly NAS device with full hard disk encryption.

Many consumer NAS devices have chosen to run Linux. This makes them good hacking targets for adding new functionality and we've covered many of them in the past. The Linksys NSLU2 "slug" has been very popular. Buffalo has sold many different devices: the Kurobox, Linkstation, and Terastation have a dedicated modification community. We've got a LaCie Ethernet Disk mini unopened in our office that was initially purchased because we knew they could be hacked. NAS-Central has a list of many of the other online communities dedicated to NAS devices.

Not that excited about administrating one more Linux box? When Apple released the Time Capsule earlier in the year it introduced the world to high capacity storage that "just works". Although not exactly server grade, it brought the idea of regular backups to the home user. 1TB is nice, but it's not upgradeable or easily replaceable; look to the Drobo for that. Drobo has built a fan base by making storage management easy for anyone. Just throw your commodity drives into the box and you're ready to go. Unfortunately, turning it into a NAS is a $200 addition. They've published an SDK, so you should see new applications coming for it soon.

All of these options are just for in house serving, but none of them are true backup solutions since your data still goes away when your house burns down. A couple years ago, [Jeremy Zawodny] looked into moving his backup servers to Amazon's S3 and compiled a list of tools that work with the service. Jungle Disk is probably the most user friendly. It's multiplatform and mounts as a local disk. There's an add-in for Windows Home Server too. If you're looking to set up a simple personal backup system, we highly recommend [jwz]'s advice for regular backups.

That's a fairly thorough rundown of hacker friendly backup options, but we want to know what you use. How do you store, serve, and protect your data? What custom features have you added to commercial NAS devices?

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. I use a POPcorn Hour Networkedmediatank
It has NAS capabilities - I can add HD via internal IDE or even with USB sata/IDE controllers - It also plays all my media as well.

Posted at 8:10PM on Jul 5th 2008 by 36chambers

2. I use my linux running Nslu2 (slug) combined with one of microsfot's power toys called synctoy. Keeps's important files in a folder updated weekly and a folder updated daily all on the 4 GB flashdrive plugged into my nslu2. I'm hoping soon to replace synctoy with software that runs off the nslu2 so only the pc's being backed up need to be on.

Posted at 8:40PM on Jul 5th 2008 by barrett

3. I use a very well done program called SyncBackSE. Every 24 hours (could be customizable to every 10 minutes, or every month) it backs up all files to a harddrive I have in a fireproof safe. Works great, I havn't used it to recover anything yet, but I sure will be happy I went out and bought a safe, and a 1/2 gig HD, if anything does happen.
I won't be upgrading it to anything as advanced as these for afew years most likely. That is, unless I fall into a truck made of Money. (Preferably not American though:))

Posted at 9:19PM on Jul 5th 2008 by Tenetri

4. I use Google. Gmail and Google Docs, mostly, if it's anything worth saving. That way, too, I can access it whether I'm at home, at school, or somewhere else that has internet access.

Of course, this wouldn't work for many people who back up more than email or documents, but for me, it works just fine.

Plus, I get a live Hack-a-Day feed on my home page... lol.

Skyler Orlando

Posted at 9:43PM on Jul 5th 2008 by Skyler Orlando

5. Not even a nod towards OpenSolaris and Sun Open Storage? Why not?

Posted at 10:05PM on Jul 5th 2008 by Brian Utterback

6. I would avoid getting the LaCie external hard drives. At the place where I work, I have 6 of them under my desk. Each one of them, within a year or two of operation died of hard drive failure. I opened one up and found that they use Maxtor hard drives, using some type hardware based raid controller. I believe that they failed mainly due to heat problems. The fan exhaust port is too small. It should be a wire grid to maximize air flow rather than small machined air slots and holes.
So far the one that I have had good luck with are the Seagate ext. hard drives. Physically they are pretty ugly but work well. I also use acronis and save the images to the external drives.

Posted at 11:08PM on Jul 5th 2008 by satow

7. Use explosives they work for everything, on that note i really don't do much with NAS thats more my brothers forte

Posted at 12:44AM on Jul 6th 2008 by A_Blind_Man

8. One thing that got left out was rolling out your own NAS by using Server-Grade OS like Linux or *BSD.
I have used freeNAS in the past and its great at doing what its meant to do, and while you think with its BSD-core it would be Hacker friendly but its not. Its setup so stripped down that I had a hard time getting any Bittorrent client to install properly and run.

I would have liked to check out OpenFiler had I heard about it, but I just gave up and install Ubuntu-Server. Using something like Webmin you get a decent web interface and since I am running this on a retired system (my old Gaming machine) I can use it too its full power. Almost like a NAS-plus. Some might scream bloody marry that you should never cross a NAS and data server but for home use its great. Only downside is keeping everything up with a custom built system like mine, in my case I know I have a fault SATA card that will for no reason cause the Server to lock up from time to time. But this is the cost you have to pay if you want to DIY.

Posted at 2:03AM on Jul 6th 2008 by Zuhaib

9. @8 - Linux is hardly server grade - however, bsd is. Be careful not to lump Linux in with more robust *NIXs...

Posted at 10:38AM on Jul 6th 2008 by Robert

10. freenas "just works", but is slow, openfiler is a pain in the ass to set up, and cryptonas just falls off the network for no reason.

Posted at 1:40PM on Jul 6th 2008 by barry99705

11. Indeed, Brian -- ZFS storage pools are incredibly easy to export as iSCSI volumes:

zfs set shareiscsi=on volume_name

One of my favorite blogs describes using iSCSI with Mac OS X Time Machine. This looks particularly interesting:

http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/zfs_and_mac_os_x

Regards,
Jeff

Posted at 5:33PM on Jul 6th 2008 by Jeff Baitis

12. My computer came with a SATA motherboard and an IDE 320GB drive. I bought a second hard drive of the same size, but SATA. I made an exact copy of the original drive using Norton Ghost, made that my main drive, cleaned off the IDE drive. Used Partition Magic to create a Backups partition on my main drive. Now to do backups I do two things:

1. Every weekend I drag the crucial stuff into a new dated folder in the Backups partition on my main drive. Takes two minutes maybe. Never found that troublesome enough to bother figuring out how to automate it. After a couple of months that gets bulky and I delete the oldest ones.

2. When I feel like it, (every month or so) I use Norton Ghost to make a new exact copy of my main SATA HDD onto the IDE one. That's bootable in case of HDD failure.

What this *doesn't* give me is off-site backup, so I'm gambling that, if the house burns down, I was able to run out with the computer (chopped-off cords a-danglin') before I pass out from smoke inhalation.

Posted at 6:52PM on Jul 6th 2008 by gyro_john

13. i'm using a RAID5 array of 4x400gb SATA drives.
unfortunatly the write speed to the nvidia chipset in RAID5 sucks. looking to upgrade to a Adaptec 5805 and maybe 4x1tb drives :-)

Posted at 7:57PM on Jul 6th 2008 by Dark_AvEnGer

14. I bought a Western Digital MyBook World edition (500GB), which to be honest, was total rubbish at first- apon routing around (mainly at http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/) i have disabled the rubbish software that is pre-installed, and now have it running as a media server for my PC's, PS3 and xbox360; sharing music, pics, and videos- as well as a web based torrent client, web server, and FTP server.
It's very flexible apon investigation and there's a solid community backing it too.
I would recommend it to anyone who is familiar with terminal based linux, or anyone willing to learn like myself!
For additional backup or speed, the 1TB version has two 500GB drives in raid (upgradable), and both models also allow for connecting additional external drives via USB for access!

Posted at 8:44AM on Jul 7th 2008 by FingAZ

15. Hey, who stole all the capital letters?

Posted at 1:20PM on Jul 7th 2008 by Mr Pedant

16. I use one of these very old IBM Netstation Thin Clients.
My dad and I hacked together an IDE interface for its motherboard (which was basically just soldering a new pinheader on), then made a frame for an off the shelf Samsung 400 GB IDE hdd and added a Molex connector from the power supply as well as two fans.

For the network, as we don't have Token Ring at home, we ripped out the PCI riser card to make place for the hdd and added a regular PCI network card to the now available single PCI slot on the mainboard. We had to cut a little bit off the PCB to make it fit but it works for alost a year and a half non-stop now.

On the OS side, we decided to use Debian (I can't really recall the version) and set up NFS and SMB access to the drive (350 GB of which are dedicated to user data) as well as a CUPS server for printer access.

Posted at 4:16PM on Jul 7th 2008 by Gregor Best

17. Here's a problem nobody seems to think of: Your primary disk becomes corrupt, or begins failing. Later that night, rsync runs automatically, where it happily overwrites your backup with corrupt data, and deletes any files on the destination that the source can't cough up. Congratulations, you're fucked.

Anyone have a way around this?! Wish rsync had an option to "rename deleted files to .filename and delete them after a week"...

Posted at 5:58PM on Jul 7th 2008 by joe

18. built my own file server with an old dell dimension 2400 (I think I bought it new for $100!) running Redhat Linux. got tired of having to be a sys admin at home and wanted RAID 5 support, so bought a QNAP box and installed 3 750-gb drives.

now everything is automated - raid support, multimedia streaming, ftp, web server, bit torrent client (encrypted even!), etc. and it runs cooler, quieter and using less energy than the dell

qnap came with its own backup software. it worked okay but i upgraded to something with more functionality: synbackse. i have a bunch of cron jobs set up to back up each of my home PC's every few days. i haven't done so yet, but will soon implement snapshots to i can roll back to different points in time.

Posted at 2:05AM on Jul 8th 2008 by pkway

19. Roll your own server (if you have the guts) :o) I had a LaCie Ethernetdisk lying around (yes, the rack mountable one) - originally it was running XP Embedded (total rubbish) - installed 1 GB RAM (only has 128 originally), kicked out the rubbish XP and installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server (Hardy Heron) instead. Now I have a fullblown LAMP to boot, running two Wordpress blogs, a gallery site, a site for my business and a DLNA UPnP media server. Everything on a Via C3 800 MHz CPU using under 50 Watts of power :o)

Posted at 5:47PM on Jul 9th 2008 by Thomas

20. thomas, i must agree. roll your own is the best solution, not dependent upon any particular platform or piece of hardware. i use a microatx board & case, e2140 cpu underclocked, 1gb ram and an external 5 drive sata hotswap enclosure. the machine is running ubuntu 8.04 server fitted with 4 x 320gb drives software raid 5 + 2 x 80gb (semi-mirrored) for the OS. i'm pretty happy with the performance and only pulling ~90w on my end.

Posted at 11:09PM on Jul 9th 2008 by anthony

Next 20 Comments

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.