So I'm in need of a small NAS (1TB'ish) to store my Music, Movies and misc files on a 6 computer home network (all WinXP Pro/OSX Tiger) (2 desktops, 3 laptops, 1 macbook). I've been looking at either the WD My Book World II 1TB or the Synology DS-207 but wondered if anyone had any experiance with either/both? Please bare in mind I did have a 1.5TB homebuilt NAS running eBox Debian Linux but I'm looking for something smaller and more power efficient as it's going to run 24/7.
eBox link is the same as the second link. I run a mini-itx board and freenas which could do with being lower power as well tbh, but don't you want some form of data security? TR has the WD 1TB disk in atm, but it's the Firewire 800 version not the NAS, but the internal principle is similar - you can set it to RAID 0, 1, or JBOD. That synologic disk looks might cool though - particularly the downloading, GbE and printer server option.
eBox link sorted. Both those devices support RAID 1 as you stated which is what I wanted. RAID 5/10 would be great except those units go far far over my budget of £200'ish. I just need some redundancy, reliability from a unit that is both small and power efficient. I too am tempted by the DS-207, but the My Book comes with HDDs for the same money
I have the WD Mybook World II. I got it from Scan, with free delivery thanks to Bit. It works well - if a little noisely. The fan in it is supposed to be quiet, but I ended up voiding my warranty and replaced it for a quieter one. It's still noticable, as the drives never spin down and thus stay hot, so the fan is on all the time - but not at full speed. It's not annoying - though maybe if it's in the same room as you sleep. Mine isn't, so it's not an issue. The anywhere access is universally regarded as crap, so don't bother installing the software that comes with the drive (it's not OSX compatible anyway). Set it up via the web based admin page and turn of the WD Anywhere setting. Apart from that, it works as advertised. I have it set up as a 500Gb drive in raid 1, and have my Mac Mini and Powerbooks back up to it over the net on a regular basis using a fab little back up called Synk.
I'd quite like to have a Drobo - http://www.drobo.com/ - but there doesn't seem to be many UK distributers.
Thanks for the info GreatOldone and thank you for that great find Peterh! Just ordered a Drobo after watching this u-tube video UK Drobo Distributer Had to borrow money to afford the thing though
Let us know how you get on with it Koola. I would get one but can't justify it right now as I've already spent over £1000 this month on a new system. I'm also trying to cut down on my impulsive gadget buys ... Drobo is a great idea though. When you get it you can just plug in any old disks you have spare (unlike raid 5 the disks don't need to be identical). As time goes on and you use more space you can just buy a bigger disk and pop it in. You'll be able to keep on doing that and it should last a long time and keep your data safe.
After speaking with one of the sales reps on the phone, I decided not to get this as it runs off USB II and is deffo NOT a NAS. It's more of a backup solution than file storage they said. Great idea, shame it's not a NAS Looking at buying the My Book now.
I've got myself the 1TB MyBook World II which is very nice. I've already voided my warranty and got ssh and ftp up and running as this device runs on ARM Linux. A whole new range of possibilites have opened up now and I'm glad I got it. For anyone that wants to void their warranty too: http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/start
Why is drobo not a NAS?? I oggled over a MyBook II for while but really I just want a very small case for a mini-itx mobo and two hard drives
It is a shame that such a great device only has USB however there are ways round that. - http://www.drobospace.com/article/10425/Share-Drobo-on-a-Network--Apple-Airport-Extreme/ If you didn't want to get an airport extreme you could always just set it up and share it via your main machine, but that isn't the most ideal solution.
It's not a NAS as the unit doesn't have any network capability alone. As peterh has shown with the article, you need to purchase additional equipment or plug it into your comp and share it that way, This totally defeats my goal of a standalone unit having good power management. I was gutted when the sales rep said it doesn't plug into the network, it plugs into your computer I'll wait until they release a network version
Because they screwed up bigtime. I'd have bought one almost immediately if they would have managed to stick on a gigabit port, but no.... now I'm thinking about getting a rackmount four-drive system, but that's almost twice the cost of a Drobo before disks. Even a toaster box like that would still cost me an extra two hundred bucks or so if I want something with good performance and features. At the very least they could have put Firewire on it, but I don't want to have to keep another machine on just to share the thing - that's why I want a NAS box in the first place!
Yea, if the Drobo isn't one unit I'm just not interested. It's super-expensive too, which is more understandable though. But the fact it's USB for crying out loud means it'll be super-slow
It's no more expensive than any other four-disk solution I've seen out there - cheaper than most, in fact. A proper 4-disk NAS with good performance seems to run around $650, and the Drobo is only $500 (yeah, "only" for some power plugs, some silicon, and a shiny case). But I still can't understand what they were thinking not making it a proper NAS. I suppose they want to be able to blame poor performance on the interface rather than their software (did I mention that even those $650 boxes tend to not see more than 20MB/s on gig-e, from what I've read?), or were just too lazy to tweak a stripped-down linux install like a useful device would. Nope, easier to just make the computer do all the work and then still let users have stupid problems with cross-platform filesystems and other such nonsense. *bitter* My current solution (XP box stuck in the closet with some big drives) has all of the stupid limitations of NTFS - so, for example, I can't properly back up my iPhoto or Aperture libraries to it (partly Apple's fault for deciding they needed to use "@" in half the folders). I've seen very poor performance with FreeNAS when I was playing around with it, and odd things with how disk size was being reported as well. A dedicated box is expensive and still not that great performance from what I've read (my current system seems to be generally limited by the HD speed - very rough testing is showing ~40-50MB/s write performance, again vs about half that)
