build your own network attached storage device
Super Talent released a value line of SATA SSDs that start at 8GB, which is enough space to install Linux or BSD comfortably.
SSDs are available now from Super Talent resellers worldwide at street prices ranging from about $65 for the 8GB model to around $175 for the 64GB model.
via Legit Reviews.
An older post, but still good, Systm walks through installing FreeNAS:
If you’re just itching for an excuse to reuse that retired desktop PC or laptop sitting in your closet there here’s your chance. Today we’ll be looking at the basics of installing FreeNAS, an open-source DIY NAS. So instead of spending money on off the shelf options why not save yourself some cash and make use of the stuff you already have and get a super customizable network storage device to boot.
The Drobo FS is one of the first entry-level NAS systems to include 5-bays, most products in this class only support 4-bays. This means that the maximum capacity of the Drobo FS is 10TB, compared to 8TB in four-bay NAS units.
via StorageReview.com.
Robin Harris over at the Storage Bits blog goes over a new UW-M paper analyzing the fault tolerance claims of ZFS.
File systems guard all the data in your computer, but most are based on 20-30 year old architectures that put your data at risk with every I/O. The open source ZFS from Sun Oracle claims high data integrity – and now that claim has been tested.
Learn FreeNAS has posted a list of major features expected to appear in the 0.8 release of FreeNAS. Included are a base on FreeBSD 8 or 8.1, an interface built on Django, AHCI SATA drivers, UFS2 journaling, and more.
Learn FreeNAS posted news that FreeNAS is no longer dropping FreeBSD for Debian, but will add a Debian based version of FreeNAS called OpenMediaVault.
DailyTech reports on the SATA update. Included with the new connectors are updates to NCQ which benefit desktop and laptop systems.
The latest SATA revision 2.6 adds new physical and performance features to the previous SATA revision 2.5, also referred to as SATA 3.0Gbps, specification.
The New York Times takes a look at the hard drive market.
Strong demand for external hard drives was one of the highlights in consumer electronics last year. Americans spent $600 million on external hard drives in 2006, an increase of 53 percent over 2005, according to NPD, a market research firm. Put another way, consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year, more than 11 times as much as they did in 2003.
Tom’s Hardware goes into Ontrack and reports on the world of data recover. Lots of good information on data recovery and costs. Recovering data from “RAID systems can reach the five-digit zone rather quickly”, so it’s definitely worth investing in a good backup mechanism before disaster occurs.
Hard drive failure is especially disastrous for smaller companies working with a single server and a single disk, if they do not have a complete and working data backup at hand. The whole situation is even more complicated if the broken hard drive is a member of a RAID array. Neither hard drive failure in RAID 1 nor RAID 5 will result in data loss, since this scenario has been taken care of by the choice of these RAID levels in advance. But the risk of human error increases: self-made data loss occurs if you accidentally substitute the wrong drive in a degraded RAID 5 array (one with a failed hard drive).
Engadget is reporting that Western Digital has added NAS to some of their My Book external USB/Firewire drives.
Welcome to Do It Yourself – Network Attached Storage! DIY NAS will hold news, content, reviews and help for those rolling their own network attached storage devices. Whether it is a Linux box holding dozens of hard drives, a Mac Mini stacked on a mountain of firewire devices, or a Linksys NSLU2 with a USB drive, DIY NAS will eventually have some kind of information about it.