I'm getting ready to add a third 3TB drive to my workstation/mythbackend, and I'm starting to think about getting a NAS box of some type and getting the drives out of my workstation. My question is whether there are any that allow me to have NFS access to individual drives. The 4-bay WD My Cloud (WDBWWD0000NBK) looks like it would fit my needs physically if it will work as just a plain Jane NFS server. Low price (OK, call me cheap) is a pretty important issue if there are any other viable options. I am running all Linux here.

Along with this question is the issue of Gigabit Ethernet switches. If I have two workstations hooked up at 1Gbit and my DSL at 100Mbit, will the DSL router pull the speed down for everyone to 100Mbit? I haven't yet made the switch to 1Gbit, but I think it's time I did.

Just answering your second q .. no, it won't. There's no point moving your DSL to Gb lan unless your internet connection exceeds 100Mb.

I have more than one computer, and was just wondering if the connection between 2 computers will be throttled by the DSL being on the switch.

No, the nature of a switch is that unicast packets are are only sent out the port that the destination machine is connected to.

I have a 4-bay Synology nas, exports with nfs everything I want, the interface it's obviously different from the WD ones, but they all work the same way. I set up a raid5, so i have just one share, but you are free to use disks in single mode (but without protections).

Check carefully if your disks support nas and raid (if you want to). I had a WD who, in a first time it should have had raid support, then it hadn't (firmware bug) and it broke after 3 months.

You have an all linux network like me, but for information smb and netatalk (mac) share protocols are present.

If your first question is can you just remove the drives from your workstation and just plug them into an off the shelf NAS I would assume no. A quick scan of the manual did not provide any information about drive initialization.

I also own a Synology NAS and they will erase any existing data when first initialized. I had thought about buying a WD NAS but their reviews were not very good.

Yeah, I've noticed a post that WD uses their own proprietary file-system in their box. So, has anyone hacked one of these NAS boxes and installed a generic Linux in place of what comes with it?

IF you have an old PC lying around you could build your own NAS and Install Openmediavault which is a Linux/Debian based distribution, so it would natively read whatever is already on your drives when you set up the shares Openmediavault support SMB,NFS,AFS and many more

http://www.openmediavault.org/



Good luck



Graeme

Sorry for the ambiguity. The goal isn't to create a NAS. The goal is to have smaller boxes. The thing that makes a NAS attractive is its small size. But another possibility arose. About 1/3 of existing storage contains cartoons for my granddaughter. I can just put the new drive in the box next to the TV and move all the cartoons onto that. I think I can fiddle with recording rules and groups so that all future cartoons go there, as well.