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- shifty2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+33more like TeraStation PR0N
- xaaronreevesx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16im in your LAN storin ur filez
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I like Buffalo products. For someone that needs a quick solution for a NAS... I think the TeraStation Pro series are great. However, I build my own boxes because I like to and it gives me a greater degree of freedom in choosing my parts.
If your like me and build your own stuff and want to build your own NAS.
Checkout http://www.openfiler.com/about/ and http://www.freenas.org/ - nahteecirp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Why can't Windows use the SI definition of GB, or why can't the HD companies use the Windows definition of GB. From my calculations you only get 3725 "effective" GB. Thats a 275 GB inconsistency. That's ridiculous. I shouldn't have to do math to find out how big it really is compared to how big my files are (as reported by Windows)
- DoctaStooge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+73 TB = 3,000 GB in SI terms, which Hard Drive Manufacturers use.
3 TB = 3,074 GB in Computer Science Terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
* 1,000,000,000 bytes or 109 bytes is the decimal definition used in telecommunications (such as network speeds) and most computer storage manufacturers (such as hard disks and flash drives). This usage is compatible with SI. Quotes from Seagate: "The storage industry standard is to display capacity in decimal"[1], and "One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity"[2], and similar quotes are found on the websites of other storage manufacturers.
* 1,073,741,824 bytes, equal to 10243, or 230 bytes. This is the definition used for computer memory sizes, and most often used in computer engineering, computer science, and most aspects of computer operating systems. The IEC recommends that this unit should instead be called a gibibyte (abbreviated GiB), as it conflicts with SI units used for bus speeds and the like. HP states that Microsoft normally adheres to this definition [3] - bjeanes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8that is so incorrect on so many levels, dusanmal.
MS did NOT follow scientific definition nor did any other OS. SI is the correct definition (which is what manufacturers use). It's just a case of semantics really. in computers, KB (_Kilo_byte) = 1024 Bytes, in SI it correctly equals 1000 bytes because Kilo means one thousand. Just like kilogram, or kilolitre. the correct *scientific* name for what is called a KB in the computer industry is actually kibibyte. It's all here in this table at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Quantities_of_bytes. Sure jump at me for citing wikipedia, but that table is right.
Sure, manufactures *may* have recognized this as a sales maneuver, but they are still completely correct in the way they calculate their capacities, if you want to be truly accurate. The ideal solution would be for manufacturers (and ultimately the OSes) to use kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte, pebibyte, exbibyte, zebibyte, and yobibyte on the spec sheets. That way the important part (the actual numbers) would have to be accurate.
In any case complaining that it is scientifically inaccurate is just obsurd. since SI ... *is* the preferred scientific method of calculating anything. - yipeyipe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6A courtionary tale. I bought a buffalo 2TB terastation and had nothing but trouble with it... and I'm a software engineer. Mac support was barely there. The AFP server was worthless, the SMB server was painfully slow and of course didn't support UTF8, long character names, or files over 2GB (or was it 4GB?), and I don't want to live on an FTP file system. The only way to resolve the issues with the SMB implementation was to install a custom firmware that let me telnet in and install nfs... which of course bricked the terastation. The firmware flasher is Windows only and was very flaky. To unbrick it I had to tear apart the device (something like 40+ screws), boot up under linux on my main machine, and plug in each drive to an ATA-USB bridge and repair the xfs partitions on the command line (after hours of researching online). After that I got it working again (without nfs) and attemped a different nfs implementation (userland vs. kernel implementation). The firmware update to the FACTORY DEFAULT firmware failed the first time, bricking the machine before i even put telnet or nfs on it. After finally getting the new working nfs implementation on there I found it to be painfully slow (~1MB/sec - and the box should be able to easily handle 40-70MB/sec without breaking a sweat). To make things worse, the box would totally freeze after a few minutes of transfers if I turned on jumbo ethernet packets to speed things up - which it didn't really help with anyways. After the freeze it would have to do a 15 hour raid check before being usasble. Totally unbelievably useless. A huge waste of money. I plan on harvesting the 4 500GB drives from it and later migrating to some other enclosure. I've heard good things from friends about the Infrant NV+, but I've never used one. I finally settled with the far more expensive but freakin' amazing Lacie Biggest-FW800 2TB.
Of course, YMMV :) - Thung3000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4While this might be a convenient turnkey solution to increasing the total storage space on a corporate network, the same capacity or greater can be created by any mildly competent computer hobbyist with off the shelf components for far less expense.
For kicks, I browsed around a few popular websites to check current prices for components.
Two high end 4port SataII controller cards, $115.00
Seven 500Gb SataII hds, at $133 apiece $931.00
Computer case and 5.25 3.5” drive conversion kits, $55.00
Old 2.0Ghz Cpu, Mobo w/lan & 512Mb ddr $65.00
Two 120 mm cooling fans $6.50
Two cool flame racing stripes (to make it go faster) $4.25
Wallpaper of Linux duck crapping on MS logo Priceless.
----
4.5 Tb of network storage in a mid-sized case for $1,176.75
The 4.2tb buffalo storage starts at $2,312.00
/ $1,176.75
= Build two!
I currently have 4.2 Tb of storage on my main pc, and 5.8 Tb on my secondary pc (networked via 400mb firewire) via a mix of 160, 250 and 500 gig drives. Both are graphic render stations creating some of the cornball HD commercials of tomorrow. - YourTechSupport, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I know I'll be adding that extra 'n' to the tag when I get it.
- jpop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hrm, darn, my comment seems to have disappeared, and it was a nice one too.
Anyway, to recap.
1) You're a bit off on your math for the drives, 7*500 = 3.5TB, not 4.5TB. I'm going to assume you want 8 drives to get an even 4TB raw storage. After Raid 5 (which is the point here), you're going to have roughly 3TB of useable storage. Add $133. If I read the article correctly, it was saying the 3TB BuffaloStation was $2.3k, not the 4.2tb one. So this is more apples to apples anyway.
2) You need to add a beefier quality powersupply for (8) drives. The one that comes with the case ain't gonna cut it. Add $150-$200.
3) You will probably need to get a cheapo gigabit network card. That old MB probably has 100Mb on it. Add $25.
4) Add time to order (incidentally, I'm not adding separate shipping charges here), set up, configure Linux, Raid, etc. Diagnose problems. Perhaps you are a linux guru with experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it. I am not, so I'd probably take double to triple the time you would to figure it out and set it up. Nebulous, but worth more to me than the $600 or so difference. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting stuff I'll probably learn in my copious spare time. But not something I want to do right now.
Your mileage may vary of course, but people planning on building themselves need to remember to factor in the time issue. - Quintios, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why not build a cheap computer with a RAID card? NAS always seems EXTREMELY overpriced for the storage you get.
- clm100, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ugh, it's a shame their products suck. We had nothing but issues when trying to use one for backups.
- culbeda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"I like Buffalo products. For someone that needs a quick solution for a NAS... I think the TeraStation Pro series are great."
I hear nothing but great things about the Buffalo network products, but after having used about 8 of the Terastation and Terastation Pro boxes for work, I cannot recommend them to any power users. Their performance is horrid, even compared to other units in their class. (See Infrant) They don't handle jumbo frames particularly well and in rare cases, I've even had them lock up. (Although I believe most of these issues were resolved with firmware updates.
If you need tons of slow storage on the cheap and don't care about performance, this is a fine option. If you want something that has better performance and flexibility, I HIGHLY recommend that people buy an Infrant ReadyNAS or build their own. - CraigB12, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2www.cooldrives.com is a good site for raid enclosures, but instead of buying this thing why wouldn't just get some drives mount them in something get a power supply and a raid card? Thats going to be far less expensive than 2.5 g's
- VeganG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Agreed. We have two Buffalo Terastations here at work. They are noticeably slower than even a WinXP computer with RAID, connected to the network. Now we just use the Terastations for backup storage.
- cjpro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Am I the only one or does saying 3TB sound more impressive than saying 3,000 GB? (or 3,072 GB, I forget what it is).
- fox, on 04/11/2009, -0/+2yea, i have a couple macs on the network and they all use the same itunes library - playlists and all.
just copy it all over to the nas, then make an alias of the "itunes library" and the itunes xml files on the nas and put those in the local music>itunes folder.
then in itunes, preferences, advanced tab, change the location of the itunes folder to the one on the nas.
and u can sync at any mac because they all use the same library - EmperorAwesome, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Mmmm... buffalo terasticles.
- idiggeverything, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I use the 1TB works good.
- realize, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My 2TB Terastation Pro is now approximately 2 weeks old.
Thankfully my firmware update went by with no problems and I could ssh in and get access to the system, but the end results are not any better.
Using userspace nfs its slow but consistent. Using SMB is moderately faster but it jumps around. Neither gets more than 5MB/sec writes.
creating files locally on the system gives a maximum write speed of just under 20MB/sec , but i still cant get more than 5 over the network.
So yeah its delegated to backup purposes only, and even thats pretty crappy. Our normal 2am full backup used to run until 3:20 am, and now it takes a bit over 9 hours so I think im going to have to come at it from another angle.
I could not be more disapointed with it yet actually still have it turn on. The storage is ok if you are just putting files you dont really use much onto it, but it gets really cpu bound from what seems having to do both network sharing and software raid at the same time on what looks to be something like a 233 mhz processor.
Before you buy one, go check out the Infrant devices first. There is nothing you can do to a terastation to improve its performance in any major way. - SystemsGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've got an Infrant NV+ with 4 x Seagate 750's in it (1gb RAM version). The box works a treat, but even with an optimized gigabit network, I've never seen more than 18MB/s on writes and a bit over 20MB/s on reads. This is not shabby by any means; the box is very well built with an very good web management interface. Tech support is awesome (I wanted clarification on some drive specs before I purchased it..), and so far I've had zero problems with it.
As nearly as I can tell, the box simply runs out of CPU - which is a problem with the TerraStation as well. Ascetically, the box fits in quite nicely in a home setting, and is just about silent most of the time.
At the end of the day, you can put together a "FreeNAS" server for cheaper and get better performance; I think you would be challenged to do it in as small or as quite a footprint. - flashboy131, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1cooldrives.com
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dsn989 said:
>>"Does anyone know if you can buy a simple little 2 drive bay raid 1 NAS box without drives?"
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101143 - Dsn989, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Does anyone know if you can buy a simple little 2 drive bay raid 1 NAS box without drives? (if so, names, where to buy, etc.)
Even an external drive enclosure without the NAS would be worth looking in to, but it's the raid that I'm really looking for. - FunkyWitDaSysTm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2hot
- nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The older terrastations were really slow - in the order of 10mb/sec or so. Newer units with faster CPUs typically manage anywhere from 30-50MB/sec. I just did a test, and copying a single 4GB file to my Thecus 5200R over gig ethernet takes about 3 min.
- vermicin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not everyone wants the whole computer. The idea of a VERY SMALL BOX with huge amounts of storage is the idea. If i wanted a giant server case that would first as many drives as something the size of a few soda cans, sure, build your own. But it's hard to find a small, quiet system that's maintenance free. That's what NAS boxes try to offer
- Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Formatted its only 2632GB, or something like that
- whisperedlie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i have the NV. it's a good unit but it was extremely picky about the switches its plugged into. that and it's a bit slow.
- jpop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Incidentally, in re. that 24 port SATA-II card. Daaaaammmnnn.... I'd hate to see the case and cooling you'd need for that many drives... lol...
- jpop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Or the Thecus N5200 box. Firmware not so good, but performance looks very nice.
- Geeshboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the Adaptec Snap Server. Not as cheap as the Buffalo boxes, but extremely fast. http://www.snapserver.com/Products/210.shtml.
- reallyoldwoman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I just got 4 TeraStation 2TB drives, and contrary to your experience, these things fly. Using one as a backup, I'm able to do rsync backups at a steady 25-38MB/sec over GigE using SMB. They are not bad at all.
Also, LOTS of blinking lights, which is a major plus in my book. Just imagine 4 of these things, each with 11 LED's on them, getting pounded on the network! It's a sight. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Uh yeah... you can make one yourself for a fraction of the cost.
- cam0man, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1too bad they make a horrible product and fail all the time. I used to work for a data storage company and everyone of our new customers who was changing from a cheaper solution was switching from a broke Buffalo Technologies product. Just grab a couple of drives and build a serve for your house with some redundancy.
- gigarizil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Don't buy Buffalo Tech if you value your data! They have unapplogetically screwed me and made my worst nightmare a reality.
I had one of their RAID 5 TerraStations fail on me. I was using RAID 5 a backup since any one drive can die and your data survives I had too much data and not enough money for more than one of these drives. I had 10 years of professional photography on that drive. When I called Buffalo support the tech told me that the drives were fine but there was some problem w/ the server chip running on the Terra Station. I told him I had critical data and wanted to remove the drives before sending it in. He responded that I could not because it would void my warranty and that they were the only ones who could repair the device and that they wouldn't format the drives. I waited several months and called everyplace I could think of, sure enough no one else repaired their server. Finally reluctantly I sent in my drive, made sure that the ticket Buffalo had said do not format, wrote a letter explaining there was irreplaceable data. and then covered the drive with stickers that said in large letters "DO NOT FORMAT!"
Guess what they did. Yes, they destroyed everything. They don't even have an internal tracking system and lost the drive immediately after receiving it. The support is incompetent and the product is unreliable, buyer beware. - groverblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1infrant.com has nice stuff
- nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You do realize that most of these servers use celeron-class CPUs, and they also are doing the RAID in software as opposed to dedicated hardware.
You're comparing apples and oranges if you're putting a desktop PC with a single regular HD up against a journalled RAID-5 array done in software on a low-power CPU (around 1Ghz or less).
There are certainly ways of making a cheap system yourself, however fully integrated units like this are extremely handy and aside from plugging in HDs, require little setup (and in my case, I wrote the entire thing off as a business expense, so it didn't cost me much at all :). - jpop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> 7x 500 and one 750($180) for 4.25 tb
How the heck are you RAID'ing that then? If you use the 750 with the 500's, you'll lose 250GB. If you have it by itself, it's not redundant so something happens to it, all the data on it is toast. Or am I missing something there.
>>FYI, standard 7200 rpm drives consume approximately 15 watts during the most intensive write patterns.
Ah, gotcha. Still, I think they spike a smidgeon over that on boot up. Do SATA controllers usually stagger the drives on bootup so you don't get a larger spike from all the drives spinning up at once?
Either way, I still wouldn't trust some generic power supply to power it. It says 250/350 watts on it, but does it really provide that? You got 3-4TB of data in the machine, you want it as safe as you can get it because you really take a hit if it goes down due to the power supply frying. Let's assume $100 at least there.
Re. the motherboards, you indicated an old board, I was guesstimateing no gigabit support (I've got 3 computers, only 1 board has gigabit support. It turned out to be crappy compatibilitywise and I had to get a PCI gigabit card to get any performance on my network and still do P2P). A gigabit card's not really that big a deal either way (like I said, 20 bucks).
re. Shipping, I was really considering it a wash (shipping for misc items vs shipping for the NAS), that's why I didn't include it.
re. Timewise, to be honest, I think you are underestimating it by 2 to 3 times. Or are you including researching the devices and support in that 5 hours? You can buy cheap drives/controllers/MB's and all, but you need to research whatever NAS software you get to make sure it is compatible. Otherwise you might get something without drivers or having problems with linux for whatever NAS variant you go down (ie. you don't want to start off in a situation where those cheapie PCI SATA cards don't work with FreeBSD and you don't find out until you've got everything plugged in and it is dieing in the middle of initializing the drives).
You *seem* to be assuming that you just go to a website and get the cheapest stuff, plug it all in and everything's almost hunky dory (an hour to unwrap, to put it all together, 4 hours to install/test/etc). Maybe you're right here and it does go that smoothly. However, you've obviously put together enough systems to know that it doesn't always go that way. - nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yup, I've got a 2.5TB Thecus 5200R in a Raid-5 config. The firmware was pretty rough, but it's getting better. They do a firmware release every 1-2 months right now. It still has bugs, but they've quashed most of the major ones (original firmware release on mine was .03, and they're up to .07 now). It's also very fast, which is nice.
- Thung3000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0jpop>
Yeah, screwed the math there. In my defense, I was distracted by all of the shiny electronics that I was pouring over in other windows. I was going to say 7x 500 and one 750($180) for 4.25 tb, but well, the shiny things called me. such as this 24 port sata II raid card..-->> Http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816151004 Woof.
FYI, standard 7200 rpm drives consume approximately 15 watts during the most intensive write patterns.(10,000 rpm are another story)
Ten hdd, when all concurrently writing, such as occurs in massive raid arrays, will only use approx 150 watts. Add a DVD burner, and you top out at 170W.
CPU is about 75 watts, 8 - 30 watts for the motherboard. Lets say a max of about 275 watts. Its hard to find a non mini-ATX Power Supply that puts out less than 300. 350watt is almost standard. Tons of motherboards have gigabit onboard lan. Most of the latter soyos, for instance, which can be picked up for a song. 90% of the items I picked out had free shipping, but even if you paid full shipping costs, it wouldn't add more than $100 to the total. Wth the 750 gig hd and shipping, roughly a $1,456.75 total. That is a screw job, but still $855 less than the buffalo, (assuming they have free shipping & insurance for their item. Think they do?)
There are several free linux disk images for NAS (network storage) available on the internet, just search google for "linux NAS disk image opensource" and you'll find a few dozen. pretty simple and even fairly user friendly stuff out there. Lets say it takes a fairly inexperienced user a whopping 5 hours to assemble and set up. $855 / 5 = $171 For every hour of work, you just saved yourself $171 bucks. Ten hours? You save $85 per hour of your effort.. Not too many people make excess of $171 a hour to be able to just throw money away.
Anyway, moral of the story, Its better to be intelligent than wealthy;Intelligence can lead to wealth but wealth without intelligence just gets you mugged. : ) - bhirt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I completely agree. I had a buffalostation and it was horrible. Pretty much all the same problems listed above. I returned it after a week and bought the Infrant ReadyNAS. I've been really happy with the Infrant product, though i wish it performed faster.
- tylerni7, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Yea you can't blame the OS. Computers have to use binary instead of decimal so 10^12 Bytes, a terabyte, is less than 2^40, also a terabyte. I don't know if hard drive manufacturers have any reason for using base 10 apart from making the drives seem larger
I have 4 400GB hard drives, so that means I lost around 100GB because of differences in measurement. - EvilTesdall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If this is anything like the buffalo 1tb station its slow as hell...Other comments around the net back me up, that they have the storage space, but its slow over 1gig network. It took me 2hours to backup about 5 gigs of stuff over a 1gig network.
we are using it at my place of business for forensics. - dusanmal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2This is one of the rare cases where MS actually followed scientific definition of what MB,GB,... is. As most other OS's do. Problem are disk manufacturers who chose to alter definition on their own, for obvious marketing reasons. Hence the difference. Rare case of the problem that Govt. should be able to resolve (GB is a measuring unit and should be regulated and standardized in a same manner as inch or meter,...)
- bradleyland, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"The ideal solution would be for manufacturers (and ultimately the OSes) to use kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte, pebibyte, exbibyte, zebibyte, and yobibyte on the spec sheets."
Did you just come back from the dentist by chance? - indraneel24, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2can you still sync an ipod (or whatever player you have)
- zeronitro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+038MB/s? did i read that right?
is that sustained transfer? and that's over firewire right? cause USB2 can sustain that much for more then say... half a second or so. and over gigabit ethernet? really? reeeaaaaally?
my internal 7200rpm sata can sustain more then 50MB/sec, so i hope that's a typo.
that is horribly slow, even for a RAID5 config and they should be ashamed of themselves. dear god... with gigabit ethernet it should at the very least be killing that entire pipe at around 100MB/sec.
at least offer Firewire 800 and external-SATA if you wanna do it right.
oh, and build it yourself for less then half the cost. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Just 3000GB? Its 3072 gigabytes
- kylej608, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0i agree with you 100% there
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