NAS box or not?

[Wasted]

My current media PC does not have enough hard drive slots to continue being useful and adding an external drive imo defeats the point of having all the goings on in one box so i need help deciding to go for a NAS box and bin the media PC or change the case on my media PC to something with more space.

I want to be able to access everything on it from the internet i.e play music when at a freinds barbeque or let them have access to my library, it needs to run eMule and Outpost too. Not having any experience of it i am not sure of the capabilities of a NAS box or even if they are just a small form computer with external HDD bays.

All opinions, advice and help appreciated and thanks in advance.

[Wasted]

Pretty sure the best way forward is keep the PC, upgrade the case and fill it with hot swap bays.

Antec 900 Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamer Case (Black) (0761345-08009-5) - dabs.com

StarTech.com 5.25" Trayless SATA Bay (HSB100SATBK) - dabs.com

Thinking that case and those bays. Still open to suggestions though, i rushed into the media PC when i did it and here i am upgrading it 6 months later..

[stroyal]

How many drives are you running and planning on running?

Do you need hot swap?

I've only window shopped, but it seems to me, it is way cheaper to go with a bigger case.
A case is going to hold more drives than the consumer level NASs, that I have seen, and be cheaper.

There might be the advantage of a computer, doesn't have to be running all the time.

[stroyal]

Oh I don't have any external drives at the moment, but if you dedicate it to 1 machine, it becomes part of that computer, and If you have the shelf space,1 USB port and a few hubs can run dozens of drives. 122 in theory, I think.

Edit
127devices, including hubs.
Universal Serial Bus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Wasted]

No specific number for the amount of drives i want future proofed. So the Antec allows me to do 9 and then hot swap when that becomes lacking. Although thinking about it now i am not sure there is a point for hot swapping. I do like the look of them though especially the LED screen ones just for aesthetic purposes.. The computer will probably be running all the time.

I'll need some software for it too. No clue what to look for there either.

[stroyal]

That's a very nice case, but it is not really hot swap, it is just front loading.
Newegg.com - Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case with Upgraded USB 3.0

I thing all SATA is hot swap, I just think of a hot swap as a carrier that plugs in and out as a unit.

It has 9 bays in all, if you use adapters, in the 5.25 bays.
You will need at least 1 of those for you CD.

[Wasted]

Yup it isn't made for it but it looks nice and should be capable of it. Have a BD player to put in it so 8 bays with 3 TB hard drives, should keep me going for a while

[stroyal]

Yeah, but what about this.

Newegg.com - Antec Twelve Hundred V3 Black Steel ATX Full Tower Unbeatable Gaming Case

[Wasted]

The same but bigger, sounds like a plan

[stroyal]

I like your style.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Just jumping in as the thread is on the Recent Discussions box, but I presume you've got a good backup strategy set up for this.........unless your data isn't important....

[Wasted]

Good point, now that you have brought it up i would think all drives in RAID 1 would do it..

[GroundZero3]

So how many drives are you wanting to put in there? For a raid 1, you would need the drive to house the data and a second drive to back the drive up too (assuming you have enough ports on your raid controller to do this with multiple drives)

What I used to do was setup a raid with my data, then I had one large drive to back everything up to. Of course if the raid and the backup drive failed then I lost everything but I was poor back then (lol)

I actually got tired of having some busted old machine laying around so I bought a Cisco small business NAS (4TB I think) that runs the Qnap software which has a lot of different services you can run. This however might be out of your price range.

[Wasted]

I am planning to fill it eventually and i'll add RAID controllers and drives as and when though if there is a better way i am keen to hear about it since this is what it's about. I don't have much experience with this side just gaming rigs. What's the advantage of using a small business 4TB NAS, can't i just buy a 2 bay or whatever NAS or does this do something cool. Basically looking to have a machine filled with files i can access from anywhere including on my Plasma/stereo/gaming rig at home. Cost is relative to the gains, if i really want it i'll get it or something that will do the job although i would rather build it myself for the adventure, such as it is.

[Wasted]

So is there no advantage to a NAS over a complete purpose built system?

[stroyal]

Hey, I came across this the other day, when looking at cases.
Newegg.com - XION Predator Gaming Series AXP 970-001BK Mid Tower PC Case w/ Hot-Swap Enabled Front Loading Trays for SATA HDD

It has 2 hot swap bays, and I think that is one of the advantages of a NAS.

I know you don't have New Egg, it's just an example.

As far as I know the advantages of a NAS, are it doesn't use a computers CPU, but with a quad core, that isn't the problem it use to be. Good controllers don't use CPUs much either.

I would think most are hot swap.

Once you get into a network with several active computers, or a lot of network traffic,I'm sure a NAS is a no brainier.

With 1 computer, it is just not cost effective.
I'm pretty sure you can do everything a NAS dose with the right RAID card, and a hot swap case.

[stroyal]

Another advantage, is heat with a lot of mechanical drives.

It won't hurt the drives, but heats up the computer.

[Bizkitkid2001]

The biggest benefit of a NAS box is simplicity. I use to do exactly what you are wanting to do with a big case + lots of drives. I went the cheap route and used motherboards with Intel Matrix RAID chips on it as that was the best software RAID solution I could afford. This setup worked for me for several years, but it was not headache free.

Intel Matrix had a problem of reporting false positives on healthy drives, saying that they were failing and need to be replaced. I would have this issue show up about once a month, and it was a pain for 2-3 days whenever this happened as I would have to scan the drive with a HD diagnostic tool, reinitialize the drive once the diagnostic tool showed the drive was healthy, and then rebuild the RAID which would take up to 48 hours. (I had a large RAID 5 setup) Having to do this once a month was a pain. This was a known problem with Intel Matrix RAID that never seemed to get fixed by the time I got my RAID box as it was still doing it when I upgraded my motherboard to support the new I7 processor in December 2008, and the new Intel Matrix controller on that motherboard did the same thing as my old socket 775 motherboard. Also, if I ever had an issue with my desktop (Like getting a virus, or failing memory, or leaky capacitors) that required my computer to be off while I diagnose and fix the problem, I had no access to my files. With a seperate NAS, even if my desktop is down, I can access all of my files with another computer, a laptop, my ipad, or my android phone.

Also, while the computer was rebuilding the RAID array, it was basically useless because of how slow it went (The downside of a software raid controller) which meant that I couldn't use my computer to do anything more than basic email and web browsing for those 48 hours.

Another benefit of my NAS is how easy it is to set it up to do all kinds of different things. (Media Server, torrent server, email server, survelliance server, and much more) All of those things are built into my NAS, and with the recent update users are now able to install third party programs onto their NAS boxes to do even more things. (Less than a dozen 3rd party apps so far, but this feature is also less than 2 months old)

I have a Synology DS410 that I paid about $500 for off of Newegg a couple of years ago, and at the time spent $500 on hard drives and filled it with 4 2tb hard drives. (6tb available in RAID 5, 4tb available in RAID 1) Not once have I received a false positive on my drives, and whenever the system has had to do a data integrity check (Like from an improper shutdown, or a power outage) it only takes about 10 minutes to complete, a process that would take almost 6 hours with my old setup. I have not had to do a rebuild yet so I do not know how long that would take, but from reading the synology forums the DS410 completely filled with 2tb drives takes other people around 6 hours to rebuild a RAID 5 array, much quicker than 48 hours.

There are things that I can do with my NAS that I was not able to do so easily with my old setup. One of the features I use is the survelience station. I have security cameras that are set to record only when motion is detected (You can also set it to record continuosly, on a schedule, or by an alarm, or a mix of any of the settings) I can even access my cameras and their recording from my ipad and android phone. I can control everything on my NAS using just my phone if I wanted to. (And I have if I am away from home) I also use the medai server function a lot. My NAS has no problems streaming 1080p High Profile bluray rips of my bluray movies to my PS3. My aunt also watches my movies on her PS3, and the NAS has no issue streaming two seperate 1080p bluray movies to two different PS3s. I still however use my desktop and PS3 Media server to transcode and stream my anime collection as my NAS is limited in what file types it can stream.

For future expansion, Synology makes that very easy. If I ever want to replace the hard drives in my NAS with bigger drives, I would just have to swap them out one by one. Take out one drive, replace it with the new drive, let the system rebuild, and then repeat those steps for the remaining drives. The diskstation would automatically expand the size of the RAID as I added larger drives. That was something that could not be done with Intel's Matrix RAID solution. (I would have to make a complete backup on a set of completely different drives, manually create a new RAID partition, and then copy the data back onto the raid whenever I wanted to expand the size of the array by replacing a drive with a bigger one) You can also purchase expansion boxes (Non-NAS boxes, but just an external RAID housing, and it doesn't even have to be one from Synology, there is a list of support external RAID boxes) You just plug it into the eSATA port and the Synology diskstation will automatically add the new drives into the RAID array without the need for a rebuild. (With my Diskstation, I can add up to 18 more hard drives)

In the end, I spent more money, but it was well worth it in my book just for the ease of use, the extra features that Synology provides, and the convenience of being able to access my files without the need of a dedicated desktop computer. I have had my NAS for over 2 years now and have not had a single problem with it. And it will chug along without needing a reboot for a very long time. In fact, the only times I ever rebooted it are if there is an update for the NAS, or there is a power failure. The longest uptime on my NAS was 4 months, and the only reason it didn't last longer was because of a power outage.

Synology Network Attached Storage - NEW NAS Experience

[Bizkitkid2001]

As far as I know the advantages of a NAS, are it doesn't use a computers CPU, but with a quad core, that isn't the problem it use to be. Good controllers don't use CPUs much either.

You are right when it comes to everyday usage, a software raid controller on a motherboard does not use a lot of CPU. Even when I just had a dual core Core 2 Duo my CPU usage never went above 10% when reading or writing a lot of files to my RAID array. But when it comes to reinitalizing, data integrity scans, or rebuiling the array, that is when the system goes to a crawl. NAS boxes still use software raid, but with it being a seperate system, you don't notice the slow down as it doesn't effect your computer. You can still continue to play games while the NAS rebuilds, where as if you are rebuilding an array on a desktop system, it will bring it to a crawl, even if you have a fast quad core like an I7 (Personal experience here).

[stroyal]

Yeah, I didn't know it would use all 4 cores.
I wonder how a separate controller would work, but the cost starts to escalate anyway, then,

I guess, cost effective isn't the right term, in this case.

It is a large cost, for the small user, but it is effective.

I only backup, so it would just be a luxury, for me.