Shopping for a NAS
 

Does anyone know of a NAS on the market that has an opensource firmware (kinda like WRT's have) and does mirrored drives? I have a Coolmax CN-550 which is Great, don't get me wrong, however it has some limitations:

• As a NAS it uses a FAT32 filesystem, so large file storage is out of the question.
  
• It only allows one drive, so there is no real data protection.

Recently the drive I had in it started throwing SMART errors. The drive came out of a Lacie usb enclosure and would fail all the time because of heat issues. I bought the Coolmax because it could be connected via USB and Ethernet. AND it had a thermostatically controlled cooling fan.

Please don't suggest FreeNAS, it's not what I'm looking for.

Thanks!

We have a NAS that has embedded Linux behind the scenes (and a web interface for administration).

Ironically enough it is used as storage for some Windoze servers so I don't know a lot about its capabilities since I don't have much need to look at it.

Details of vendor/model:

Snap Appliance, Inc.
691 South Milpitas Blvd
Milpitas, CA 95035
(888) 343-SNAP
http://www.snapappliance.com


Model Software Hardware Server # BIOS
410 GuardianOS 4.3.007 7.7.0 2254902 WAV30303

P.S. At a prior job (4 years ago) we used NetApp Filers as storage for Linux.

Well, that's a little out of my price range. But thanks. I've found info about NLSU2 and NAS200, but the reviews say they are slow. Other suggestions welcome.

Well if you really want to go cheap why not just build a Linux server and do NFS shares from it (or even Samba shares if you need Windoze access)?

That's what NAS does in essence. Other bells and whistles include things like snapshots for backups but if you're looking for inexpensive chances are you're not going to get some of those bells and whistles anyway.

Power and space constraints. It'd also cost me more than to just buy a hardware unit. Between the Raid controller, the CPU, mobo, RAM, OS drive, case, power-supply, etc....

I picked up (2) ST3500320AS SATA-300, 500GB drives to mirror. Now for the Rest.

I missed something. If you just wanted information on how to add drives to an existing system why ask about NAS at all? A NAS device IS separate hardware dedicated to providing the shares.

There's never been anything prohibiting you from sharing filesystems between existing systems. NFS is native to Linux and UNIX. Samba allows you to create or mount Windoze SMB shares and Windoze allows you to share out so you don't need a NAS at all.

The benefit to the NAS device is that it has its own disks, processors and memory so you're not using your system resources for anything other than I/O across the network. Also you're more likely to need to reboot a given system than you are a centralized storage device.

Not saying you should use NAS - just wondering about your responses as they seem to indicate you specifically did NOT want a NAS.

You can use an old machine to make the NAS. The only real added expenses are a GigE nic, the raid card, and drives. If you are not running a GigE network you will not really need to use raid (100mbit is usually 9.5MB/sec, most modern drives are 70 MB/sec).