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Cheap NAS solution
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Cheap NAS solution

I need some ideas for a proper NAS setup. The idea was to have some external storage which we can use to store pictures, backups and other stuff we want to share with anyone in the house. At the same time I also want to use the NAS to store movies which everyone in the house can watch with their XBMC client and a torrent client to download the non-copyrighted movies (controllable through a web-app).

I was thinking about the Banana Pi with a SATA connected drive, but I'm not sure the Banana Pi has enough power to do all this. I know there's plenty ready to use NAS solutions around, but these are usually expensive or you don't have full control about the software on it.

Let me know what NAS solution you are using for similar tasks.

Comments

  • heachhogheachhog Member
    edited February 2015

    Personally, I have a Synology DS213j running at home and couldn't be happier. Lots of ready-made packages for media, file sharing, mail, Dropbox-like cloud sync, basically anything that you'd like. If you would really like to have some redundancy e.g. RAID 1 setup, I'd suggest opting for a commercial NAS.

    In case you would like to play around with making your own NAS at home, have a look at FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/)

    EDIT: For FreeNAS, you will need a slightly more powerful machine with 8GB RAM, so might not be the best choice.

  • run x86 and install windows server 2012 with dedup :)

  • +1 for a Synology box. Tons of plugins to do whatever you want to do.

  • I really love my HP N40L running Ubuntu 14.04, the box is 64bit so you can run Windows if you like.

    It has four disk bays but you can grab a sata cable for the disk drive and have another small form factor up in the disk tray area.

    I upgraded the RAM to 4GB and had a WinXP KVM VM running for a while when I was screwing around, nothing stopping you from having HyperVM or Solus running though.

  • dragon2611dragon2611 Member
    edited February 2015

    @TarZZ92 said:
    run x86 and install windows server 2012 with dedup :)

    But probably worth excluding the media folders unless you have multiple copies of the same media, as it's not really worthwhile.

    Same goes for VM's that you actually use, Virtual machine images get a lovely de-dupe rate but the I/O hit presumably due to the random reads/fragmentation seemed to be quite heavy.

    I have a cubbietruck running debian and it usually seems to manage about 30MByte/s over samba when not doing other things.

    Gets about 10MB/s using Btsync, also you'll need to feed it enough power to run both itself and the hdd, I ended up using the PSU from a PSP as I had that kicking about. I'd imagine the Banana Pi would be similar as I believe it's the same CPU but only 1Gb ram instead of the 2Gb on the cubbietruck.

  • cassacassa Member
    edited February 2015
  • dragon2611 said: Same goes for VM's that you actually use, Virtual machine images get a lovely de-dupe rate but the I/O hit presumably due to the random reads/fragmentation seemed to be quite heavy.

    not really seen a huge drop. maybe 5-10% max.

  • DennisDDennisD Member
    edited February 2015

    What about hardware? I'd like something not too expensive and a bit power efficient. I have been looking into Synology and ZyXEL, QNAP seems a bit above my budget.

  • @DennisD said:
    What about hardware? I'd like something not too expensive and a bit power efficient. I have been looking into Synology and ZyXEL, QNAP seems a bit above my budget.

    All depends what you are going to use it for. If it will be just a file/media dump with media streaming, you don't need a high-end model, 2-bays would be a good choice. I am biased to tell go for Synology :) What would be worth is checking the web interfaces & features of both Synology and ZyXEL, they should have demos on their webisites

  • @TarZZ92 I suspect the machine that I was playing with de-dupe on had far to little ram ;-)

  • @heachhog said:

    I've explained in the first post what I want to use the NAS for.

  • You can go for a Banana Pro since it has 1gb ethernet port.
    Or an Odroid C1 if you need usb 3 as well.

    But since with the case, cables, power etc. all in all they're twice their price tag you may want to add a little more and go for a mini pc.

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