Here you have the freedom of not beeing limited by CPU power or platform software restrictons.
A powerfull PC + a dumb eSata Tower-Jbod + Controller (i.e. (Nexenta comes with a 12tb limit, which should be ok for personal use).įor additional non storage features, which are actually fun to use i would go the media center way, as someone suggested before.
Openfiler or the community edition of Nexenta will allow you to simply install a real storage solution, wich can be managed by the GUI. You can install them on an Atom PC, and they will give you loads of storage features (SAN like), you will most likely see in storage solutions starting at 2000$. There you may have the problem to set all the stuff up all by yourself.Īlternative GUI driven software appliances are out there. The article at the following link describes a. Atom CPU/2GB) on the other hand running a stock Linux distribution do quite well. Guide: Installed OpenMediaVault on my old HP EX470 Mediasmart. The same Windows Home Server hardware or any other Nettop (i.e. WHS2 new hardware requirements will possible nullify this shortcomming. The current Windows Home Server Systems have a decent CPU and RAM, but the performance impact is huge by the trimmed down W2K3 server OS, so besides file sharing all the other features are not really fun to use. Synology and QNAP are quite nice, but only with a “real” CPU. Usually this results in very poor network performance and also all the fancy features and additional software are not much fun to “work” with.īigger NAS systems come with x86/Atom CPUs and give you a general decent performance but this comes along with a high price tag and you are getting close to a semi professional market. Almost all of these NAS systems are way underpowered, running ARM/PPC CPUs and come with minimal amounts of RAM. I would say, stay away from any 1/2/3 maybe 4 drive enclosures. So what’s new in the world of NAS? If I’m looking for a NAS, what am I looking for? What features are out there? What’s useful? What isn’t? What’s lousy? What’s awesome? What should I buy? Of course, for 8 disks you need a big case, which I use, but that works for me because the file server lives in a far away walk-in closet and talks to everything else via the wired network (using powerline ethernet and coax ethernet circuits). I’ve never used a dedicated NAS at home because as far as I have seen they have always been overpriced compared to just building a cheap low-power server system that you can jam like 8 inexpensive 3.5 inch HDDs into. You can get the same sort of thing from various BSD and Linux based OSS solutions, but WHS has some neat features like automatic backups of Windows systems on the LAN, etc, and a much nicer interface than any of the OSS solutions I’ve seen. Gives you a nice unified view of every disk you put into the system (so you can have one SMB share that spans across X number of physical disks) and has basic support for things like adding and removing drives from the pool as needed. I’ve been using a system built on Windows Home Server for a couple of years now to handle my LAN file sharing needs.