NAS Recommendations

Any recommendations/experiences with NAS devices for a home network ?
Looking for around 500GB - RAID type functionality not required
My network is peer-to-peer, combination of wired 10/100 and wireless, and
comprises a couple of laptops, one running XP Home, the other XP Pro, one
desktop running XP Home and one desktop running W2K Pro

 

Qnap 109. Fanless, well-built and more functions than you can wave a
stick at. Built-in Twonky makes it a very good media server and
Slimserver can be installed if wanted - I uninstalled mine as it was
stopping the disk spinning down. It's in a different league to the
landisk NAS I had before.

http://www.qnap.co.uk/

Very pleased with mine and a fairly active forum at:

http://forum.qnap.com/phpbb2/index.php

although it seems to be off-line today.

John

 

I have a Freecom 500Gb NAS (cost just under 100 pounds).

It's OK but is rather Windows-centric, you can connect to it using FTP
or SMB/CIFS over the network, or directly using USB.

Using USB you can only use Windows.

The SMB/CIFS implementation is rather old, in fact it is SMB rather
than CIFS so if your Linux box has mount.cifs rather than smbmount
there are some problems with getting connected (but it can be done).

 

How well does it work on a Linux network? E.g. how do you connect to
it as a network drive from a Linux system?

 

Thanks for that - had just found some reviews of the Freecom units and they
looked quite promising - and relatively inexpensive.

I'm Windows only and would be using it via the LAN interface

Chris

 

It's basically OK then but not particularly fast, there's quite an
active user forum at http://forum.freecompromo.com/. The Freecom
units are certainly very reasonably priced and mine has been reliable
so far.

 

I've seen a couple of issues referred to - one about max file size of 4GB as
it only supports FAT32 when using the LAN interface (are there any other
limitations associated with that?), and apparently there is no file locking
so potentially multiple users could be updating the same file. Are these
both correct ?
Neither should be too much of an issue for me as I don't envisage huge file
sizes and I need it primarily as a backup store
You say it's not particularly fast - is that down to the limit of the LAN
interface or the drive itself ?

Thanks - Chris

 

I have a 320GB version.
Quite ok, but rather slow and at times XP loses it completely and
cannot be found by either ip number or mapped drive.

Lnz

[L.]

 

I don't think the FAT32 file system has any other effects.

Yes, as I understand it, you can only use NTFS when you use the device
as an actual USB drive connected directly to a Windows box.

I think it's the LAN and SAMBA used.

 

It runs on an embedded Linux system using a 500mhz cpu and 128mb DDRII
memory. Although it has a web interface you can telnet into it or use
Putty to have command-line access. I can boot into Ubuntu but it is
not my main os - however it seems straightforward to access the 109
from that and I can browse files ok.

Network settings web control for TCP/IP, Microsoft networking, Apple
Networking, NFS, FTP, Web Server, DDNS, MySQL server etc. The 109 pro
comes with NFS and active directory support but my non-pro came with
these functions (I think this was a mistake - many others found the
same around the same time so looks as if a batch got through wrongly
boxed). There are also remote replication and incremental back-up
functions plus a pseudo raid 1 mirroring for plugged in usb or esata
drives.

All the features are described for each line at qnap.co.uk

John

 

OK, thank you, looks good.