build your own network attached storage device
AnandTech has some insight into Seagate’s new 2.5″ drive lineup, with sizes up to 5 TB.
The BarraCuda 2.5”/15 mm drives for external storage solutions will be used inside Seagate’s own DAS devices such as the Backup Plus Portable Drive and the Expansion Portable Hard Drive products. The Seagate Backup Plus Plus Portable Drive 5 TB (STDR5000100) is due in early November and will cost around $150 – $160.
Source: AnandTech: Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity
Ars Technica walks through building a Windows NAS:
At this point, I had a couple of options. I could spend more money on a better, faster NAS, one that wouldn’t disappoint me with its performance. Or… I could go ahead and build my own, which would give me the flexibility to build basically whatever box I wanted. Inspired by our recent articles on building a living room gaming PC and a DIY router, I decided to take the more Ars option.
Source: The ins and outs of planning and building your own home NAS | Ars Technica
Backblaze’s latest drive reliability stats are out.
we are publishing data on 49,056 hard drives spread across 26 different models, varying from 1.0TB to 8.0TB in size.
Source: Backblaze: Hard Drive Failure: Analysis of 49,056 Hard Drives
AnandTech reviews the 6 TB Western Digital Red Pro hard drive.
The WD Red Pro is meant for rackmount units up to 16 bays, but is not intended to be a replacement for drives such as the WD Re.
Source: WD Red Pro 6 TB Review – High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump
TechSpot combines some popular NAS components, a Silverstone DS380 case, Asrock C2750D4I motherboard, and FreeNAS.
Assembling your own NAS would net more performance as well because you’d be using a Celeron or Pentium over the Atom or other SoCs, while power shouldn’t be a concern with Haswell using less than 30 watts at idle. As the cherry on top, open source software such as FreeNAS and enclosures like Silverstone’s DS380 should make it less daunting to get started with your homebrewed eight-bay NAS server.
via TechSpot.
Backblaze is back with a new version of their Storage Pod. The major change is that they got rid of their port multiplier backplanes, and instead are going with drives directly attached to two expensive 40-port SATA cards.
The port multipliers have always been a negative aspect of their build to me, as I can see them causing problems, slowing down performance, and being difficult to integrate into a standard PC case. Their replacement is two $700 40-port SATA cards. The downside to these is price, and while I’d love to have one of these cards in my 20-drive file server, it’s out of my budget.
I guess I’ll keep waiting for an affordable, high-port count SATA card.
For the first time since the original Storage Pod, Backblaze is announcing a completely redesigned approach with the introduction of the first “direct wire” Storage Pod. This new Storage Pod performs four times faster, is simpler to assemble, and delivers our lowest cost per gigabyte of data storage yet. And, once again, it’s open source.
via Backblaze Blog
Backblaze looks at drive failures in their company and discovers little difference in failure rates of enterprise vs consumer drives.
AnandTech reviews and benchmarks the Western Digital Red, Seagate NAS HDD, Western Digital SE, and Western Digital RE 4 TB NAS hard drives.
The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating four different hard drives targeting the NAS market:
via AnandTech | Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off.
Western Digital today released a 4 TB 3.5″ Red NAS drive, along with expanding the Red line to include 2.5 inch drives in 750 GB and 1 TB configurations. Storage Review has already published benchmarks for the 4 TB drive and the 1 TB 2.5″ drive.
User mzepan wrote in with a DIY NAS running FreeNAS and sporting a custom case. Check it out here.
Hack a Day brings us a low powered OpenWRT NAS in a tin box.
New features include a faster processor and an optional SSD cache.
Read more about it at Ars Technica and Drobo.com.
Western Digital released a hard drive aimed directly at home NAS users. It should also work great for home file servers, and any server where a 5400 RPM SATA drive is appropriate.
WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them).
A detailed blog post which covers hardware and software choices.
For the hardware, I ended up with a fanless MiniITX motherboard Intel D510MO, which has a Atom processor, Gigabit ethernet (all my home network is Gigabit, so it does make a difference). I am also using a 2GB 800Mhz Kingston RAM memory, and both two SATA connectors. The MOBO has up to seven 2.0 USB and one mini PCI Express, in case I want to add more SATA drives in the future.
A quick review with a few benchmarks.
Thecus is the first dual-bay NAS box manufacturer we’ve seen to ditch the usual ARM or Marvell processors found in mainstream models in favour of a fully fledged 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 CPU.
via bit-tech.net