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Can someone recommend a good home NAS?

 
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thegman
Guest
PostPosted: Fri May 11, 2007 5:37 pm    Post subject: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
Hi,
I'm looking to get an inexpensive home NAS, something like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-500GB-Gigabit-Ethernet/dp/B000MSVNM4/ref=pd_bbs_2/203-7571549-6542309?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1178886915&sr=8-2

However, all the ones I've looked at seem not to support NFS, which
I'd really like, anyone know of a cheapish NAS which does support NFS?
Another requirement is that I'd like to use it on my Playstation 3
too, which means it needs to support connection via USB also. Ideally
I'd like to be quiet too.

Anyone know of a good device?

Cheers

Garry
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Huge
Guest
PostPosted: Fri May 11, 2007 6:39 pm    Post subject: Re: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
On 2007-05-11, thegman <taylor.garry@gmail.com> wrote:
Quote:
Hi,
I'm looking to get an inexpensive home NAS, something like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-500GB-Gigabit-Ethernet/dp/B000MSVNM4/ref=pd_bbs_2/203-7571549-6542309?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1178886915&sr=8-2

However, all the ones I've looked at seem not to support NFS, which
I'd really like, anyone know of a cheapish NAS which does support NFS?
Another requirement is that I'd like to use it on my Playstation 3
too, which means it needs to support connection via USB also. Ideally
I'd like to be quiet too.

Anyone know of a good device?

FreeNAS?

http://www.freenas.org/

--
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those
who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this
or that problem will never be solved by science.
[email me at huge {at} huge (dot) org <dot> uk]
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thegman
Guest
PostPosted: Fri May 11, 2007 9:08 pm    Post subject: Re: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
Quote:
FreeNAS?

http://www.freenas.org/

That looks good, but don't think it will support access via USB Mass
Storage, as required by the PS3. I'm probably more in the market for
an off-the-shelf device rather than try to build a cheap silent PC
myself.

Thanks

Garry
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Mikhail T.
Guest
PostPosted: Sat May 12, 2007 12:41 am    Post subject: Re: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
thegman wrote:
Quote:
FreeNAS?

http://www.freenas.org/

That looks good, but don't think it will support access via USB Mass
Storage, as required by the PS3.

Seems like you need a USB-slave device, which -- I think -- means, you
need a SAN. Your PS3 (USB-master) will need exclusive access to (its
portion) of the storage.

If that's correct, you'll be fine with any of the multitude of external
disks, as they all come with a USB connector these days.

NAS offers the same data to different clients, so some OS-based
intelligence needs to be applied to synchronize the access. SAN devices
don't need this and can thus be much simpler.

-mi
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thegman
Guest
PostPosted: Sat May 12, 2007 11:19 pm    Post subject: Re: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
Quote:
Seems like you need a USB-slave device, which -- I think -- means, you
need a SAN. Your PS3 (USB-master) will need exclusive access to (its
portion) of the storage.

If that's correct, you'll be fine with any of the multitude of external
disks, as they all come with a USB connector these days.

NAS offers the same data to different clients, so some OS-based
intelligence needs to be applied to synchronize the access. SAN devices
don't need this and can thus be much simpler.

Let me see if I've got this straight, you think the PS3 wants
exclusive access to the drive, so if get one of these standalone NAS
devices with USB and Ethernet, both my PS3 and the rest of the network
will be able to access it, but not at the same time?

That would be a bit of a pain, as I want to use the NAS to share media
files from my various computers on the network with the PS3, and I
don't want to always have to be unplugging things.

Can you recommend a good, cheap SAN device which can do this? Seems
finding a device which can do both USB and NFS are a bit thin on the
ground, I suppose because USB is considered a "home" thing, and NFS is
considered an "enterprise" thing, and seldom do they meet.

Cheers

Garry
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Tim Bradshaw
Guest
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2007 12:15 am    Post subject: Re: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
On 2007-05-12 19:19:40 +0100, thegman <taylor.garry@gmail.com> said:

Quote:
Let me see if I've got this straight, you think the PS3 wants
exclusive access to the drive, so if get one of these standalone NAS
devices with USB and Ethernet, both my PS3 and the rest of the network
will be able to access it, but not at the same time?

Chances are the PS3 will be doing block-level access rather than
speaking some (what?) filesystem protocol over USB. So to all intents
and purposes: yes, it will need exclusive access.


Quote:
That would be a bit of a pain, as I want to use the NAS to share media
files from my various computers on the network with the PS3, and I
don't want to always have to be unplugging things.

Can you recommend a good, cheap SAN device which can do this?

I suspect you don't realise what you're asking here. Think of it like
this: you have a SCSI disk which is being used by a machine to store a
filesystem. You now want to be able to connect another machine to that
disk and export the contents of the filesystem *while the first machine
is still using it*. I think it should be obvious that this is going to
be fairly hard, and probably will require a filesystem which has
special support for this as well as, probably, support for some kind of
notification protocol between the machines.

What SANs typically do is to allow multiple machines block-level access
to different logical volumes within the same pool of storage. Which is
a much easier task but does not help you.
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thegman
Guest
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2007 2:06 am    Post subject: Re: Can someone recommend a good home NAS? Reply with quote
Quote:
I suspect you don't realise what you're asking here. Think of it like
this: you have a SCSI disk which is being used by a machine to store a
filesystem. You now want to be able to connect another machine to that
disk and export the contents of the filesystem *while the first machine
is still using it*. I think it should be obvious that this is going to
be fairly hard, and probably will require a filesystem which has
special support for this as well as, probably, support for some kind of
notification protocol between the machines.

What SANs typically do is to allow multiple machines block-level access
to different logical volumes within the same pool of storage. Which is
a much easier task but does not help you.

I think I see now, I was under the impression that these NAS devices
which have Ethernet and USB would be able to serve both at the same
time. In the same way that Samba/NFS can have 100s of clients reading
off the same disk, I thought that maybe the NAS would kind of abstract
the USB Mass Storage to kind of say to the PS3 (or any other USB
client) "Yeah, sure, you've got exclusive access", but in fact it's
sharing access between many clients. I'm not familiar at all with USB
Mass Storage protocol, but I suppose I just assumed that at the end of
the day, the PS3 would request reads/writes over the USB cable, and
it's up to the NAS how that is done.

If that's not the case, then I'll have to figure out some other way of
sharing data between my network and PS3.

Cheers

Garry
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