Do It Yourself NAS

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

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

Backblaze looks at drive failures in their company and discovers little difference in failure rates of enterprise vs consumer drives.

Via Backblaze Blog » Enterprise Drives: Fact or Fiction?

Ubuntu Server 13.10 is out, and with it comes the 3.11 kernel with production-ready Bcache and dm-cache SSD caching options. SSD caching can help speed up NAS devices significantly by allowing reads and writes to hit SSDs before slower rotational media.

Ubuntu 13.1o is considered a stable release, although it’s only supported for 9 months. The next release will be 14.04 LTS with 5 years of support.

Information about other server package updates in Ubuntu 13.10 can be found in the release notes.

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.

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).

via  StorageReview.com

A professional rackmount version of a DIY NAS, with link aggregation and redundant power:

The N8900 is based on a dual-core Intel Core i3-2120 processor with 8 GB of DDR3 memory and Thecus Dual DOM flash memory.

via SmallNetBuilder

According to iXsystems developer James T. Nixon III, FreeNAS 8.0 includes major architectural optimisations and is more modular than previous versions. It features a redesigned GUI, built using Python and the Django web framework, that is aimed at making the OS easier to use. ZFS and UFS2 file systems are both supported – ZFS is used as the primary file system.

via The H Open Source

Soon after it’s discovered that the next version of Windows Home Server will be dropping its drive extender feature, HP decided to drop its Windows Home Server products.

As you could probably surmise from the title above, the only notable difference in Data Robotics’ newest storage robot is the addition of USB 3.0, but the triple interface ensures that eSATA and FireWire 800 users are also taken care of.

via Engadget

Ars Technica covers the implications of Microsoft removing the Drive Extender feature from Windows Home Server.

Indeed, Drive Extender was fundamental to the home server concept. A home server as originally envisaged by the Windows Home Server team should have, in essence, infinite storage, and storage that should be transparently extensible.

Gizmodo has a summary of of Seagate’s new home NAS, the GoFlex Desk.

The NAS—they don’t want to call it a NAS—works just like most up-to-date NASes do: Time Machine support, streaming content to media players (Xbox 360, PS3) around your network, USB printer support, third-party real-time backup, remote access with your iPhone/iPad and smartphone as well as Facebook and Flickr integration.

via Gizmodo

Will Urbina has posted full build pics of a low power NAS using an Atom processor, HighPoint 8-port RAID card, and eight 2 TB SATA drives.

Black Dwarf