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
Seagate announced a new line of consumer NAS hard drives named IronWolf. They come in capacities up to 10 TB, are 7200 RPM, and include vibration sensors.
The IronWolf series is focused on hard drives for the NAS segment, currently served by vendors such as Synology and QNAP.
Source: AnandTech: Seagate’s New ‘Guardian Series’ Portfolio Brings 10TB Helium HDDs to Consumers
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
AnandTech reviews the 6 TB, 7200RPM Western Digital Red Pro NAS hard drive.
Western Digital was the first to introduce a 6 TB drive in the SOHO NAS drive space, but Seagate came back a few months later with a souped-up 6 TB Enterprise NAS HDD targeting the SMB / SME NAS units. Last month, Western Digital finally released the 6 TB version of the WD Red Pro for the SMB / SME NAS units.
Source: WD Red Pro 6 TB Review – High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump
The Mac-focused podcast talks about home storage.
Large-storage needs at home: NAS, Drobo, or external hard drives?
Source: Accidental Tech Podcast: 141: Chain-Link-Fenced Garden
AnandTech reviews the QNAP TS-451+ NAS.
A look at the specifications reveals that the core SoC and memory capacity seem to be similar to the TS-x53 Pro launched last year. However, while the TS-x53 Pro targets the mid-end SMB market, the focus of the TS-x51 is more towards the home consumer side.
Source: QNAP TS-451+ SOHO NAS Review
HGST aims to fill that space with the 6 TB Deskstar NAS. It falls in the same market category as the WD Red. However, the HGST Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD drives. In the remainder of the review, we will try to determine whether that is the case.
via AnandTech
Lifehacker goes over the pros and cons of building a NAS from an old PC or buying a prebuilt one.
Tweak Town reviews and benchmarks a Mini-ITX, passively cooled, 18 drive, 4 NIC, IPMI NAS motherboard by ASUS.
The unique feature of this platform is low power use or green design, which allows it to be run with a passive cooling system. This also offers low running cost with power saving features.
via Tweak Town
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.
AnandTech reviews and benchmarks a bunch of 4TB NAS and server hard drives.
Ars Technica takes a look at the most popular NAS distributions available for x86/x86-64 hardware.
Today, we’re going to look at two ready-to-rock ZFS-enabled network attached storage distributions: FreeNAS and NAS4Free.
via Ars Technica.
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
The DiskStation DS214se is Synology’s economical two-bay NAS with the capability to host, share, and protect data and is optimized to be an personal NAS server running the ever incomparable DiskStation Manager (DSM).
Backblaze looks at drive failures in their company and discovers little difference in failure rates of enterprise vs consumer drives.