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

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

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?

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.

More drive prices here. Prices are updated automatically from Amazon.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).

via  StorageReview.com

AnandTech takes the brand new 3.0 TB Western Digital internal hard drives for a spin.

Today, Western Digital takes it one step further and announces availability of the internal drive as well. The Caviar Green line is now home to a 2.5TB and a 3.0TB model, priced at $189 and $239 respectively.

bit-tech.net has a new article on building a FreeNAS box, including choosing hardware and installing the software.

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

The Tech Report reviews Western Digital’s latest in high performance spindle-based desktop storage.

can the new VelociRaptor compete in this rapidly evolving storage market, or has it become, well, a dinosaur?

via The Tech Report .

Backblaze details how they build a 67 TB 4U storage server for less than $8,000. C0T0D0S0 then takes a look at some of the trade offs of the device against much more expensive systems.

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.