Quest for the NAS appliance of low power
This is Part Deux of my low power appliance network quest of extra-ordinary magnitude.
You may recall from Part Un of our grand adventure we replaced the power hungry and quite possibly mad p233 with a new firewall / router / wireless access point / low power appliance with custom firmware.
Where next does our quest lead? I tell you, dear reader, it leads to an even bigger and louder loutish brute—or brutish lout as the case may be: the file server.
Despite having 3 hard drives in it my file server has a mere 17g of space. It’s This is just barely enough space for one iMovie project from one MiniDV tape of home movies. And I have 8 tapes.
Not only that, it’s loud and power hungry. So here the goal is to replace the frankenfileserver with a NAS.
A NAS (network attached storage) is not to be confused with a SAN (storage area network). One is a fancy name for storage accessed across a network with network protocols and one is a fancier name which commands a heftier price—but boy does that storage look local.
So here are the decisions to be made:
- BYOD or disk(s) included?
- How many disks?
- if disks > 1 then JBOD or RAID?
- How much total storage?
- Do we want to hack the firmware and add new features?
All this of course factors in to price. I’m trying to do this on a budget so bad-ass NASes such as the ReadyNAS NV+ are out.
So far the contenders are (in no particular order):
- LaCie Ethernet Big Disk
- Storage: 2×7200rpm 500G JBOD
- Pros:
- very cheap (see also cons) 1 TB.
- does AFP.
- Shiny.
- Cons:
- No fault tolerance
- No firmware hacking community fun that I’ve found.
- Though the list price is cheap I can’t find it in stock and the price seems to wildly fluctuate from site to site.
- D-Link DNS-323
- Storage: 2 x SATA BYOD
- Pros:
- There is a community around extending the Debian linux on this box, without even having to reflash the firmware.
- Does Raid 0 or 1
- Drives slide in and out without tools.
- USB Printer port
- Cons:
- I’m biased against D-Link and I’m not even sure why.
- No AFP out of the box.
- Linksys NSLU2
- Storage: 2x USB 2.0
- Pros:
- Community with tons of cool hacks and such.
- Cons:
- Drives must connect USB
- Ugly. Like a slug.
- Kurobox
- Storage: 1x PATA BYOD
- Pros:
- Built by the manufacturer specifically for the hacking community, which is cool in and of itself besides the stuff possible with some linux knowledge. It’s basically a Buffalo Linkstation without a HD and with less polished firmware.
- Cons:
- No fault tolerance
- For experts: manuals and menus come in Japanese (can download and install English web interface)
Still doing research, more later.
