NAS and OS/2?

[mwizard]

Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?

Security:
Does everyone think those NAS enclosures have or maintain good security?  I would think that NAS systems based on a linux distribution would have regular security updates & fixes.  How does that compare/contrast to the NAS enclosures approach?

[ivan]

Again speaking from my experience with D-Link NAS boxes.  We have mostly used standard SATA 2TB disks in all our NAS boxes mainly because we got the boxes well before 'special' drives were made available.  It is very much a case of you pay your money for the choice you make.

Regarding security, most of the 'off the shelf' boxes use ARM processors with the operating system being based on Linux and can be setup reasonably secure from the start.  You do have to use common sense when setting them up but since they are usually behind a firewall there isn't much to worry about.  Yes, some people use them to stream torrents which can leave the box open to outside access but then again everything else can, and should, be password protected.  Password can be given to individual users or groups of users to limit exactly what they can access and what they can do with it (read only or read/write).

If the NAS box is onlt available on the local network you have the added security of the modem/router setup, as does the rest of the internal network.  If you want the NAS to be available from the WAN then you need to take more care with how the modem/router is setup and exactly what services you open to the public.

In all the years that we have been using the NAS boxes we have not had one case of them being breached and that is not for the want of trying as our firewall logs show.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?
...

Great question Mark.

I've got the NSA325 V2 box coming to me...$100 is getting me a brand new one, which I think is a pretty good buy.

As I'm getting ready to stuff some hard-drives into this thing I've been thinking of doing a 2x2T setup, for a total of 4T storage. This should last plenty of time, just a straight forward JBOD setup, no RAID.

I like the WD stuff, have had great luck with their VelociRaptor drives. Bought a BLACK unit for kid's PC and given the on-line tech reviews I'm seeing in general drives with more cache are being recommended for NAS boxes. I've decided to splurge the extra for a 7200 RPM drive.

At the end of the day, it all really depends on how many concurrent clients are hitting the NAS and how much of that is continuous data streaming.

What have you been looking at?

[Doug Bissett]

I'm seeing in general drives with more cache are being recommended for NAS boxes. I've decided to splurge the extra for a 7200 RPM drive.

It seems to me, that disk speed (including cache) is a non issue. The 1 Gbps network interface is very much slower than any hard disk, and that will be the limiting factor for speed. It doesn't matter how many clients you use, the limit is still 1 Gbps. All that happens, is that each client slows down since they need to wait their turn for network access. I suppose that a second (third etc.) NIC might speed things up, if you configured the network properly.

FWIW, I built my own NAS box, using an old Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, in an old case (it has a 1 Gbps NVIDIA NIC that works great with the Multimac NVIDIA driver). It is running eCS 2.1 for an OS, with SAMBA, RSYNC, WEB/2, Peter Moylan's FTP server and weasel mail server (including IMAP), and PMVNC for remote control. The most expensive part was a 1 TB Seagate disk to add to what the original system had. The main "problem" is that it is physically pretty big, but that could be solved by using one of those small box computers. In my case, I don't care.

There is no magic in a NAS box. I can use my setup with windows (XP and 7, specifically), and Linux, as well as with eCS (it should work with any system that uses standard TCP/IP software). Linux gets a bit complicated because of the, so called, "security" features, but it can be made to work.

I could, if I wanted to, add a second 1 TB disk drive, then use RSYNC to sync the two. Not quite a RAID setup, but almost as good, for what I would need.

[Michaelhz]

Finally! Someone is using os/2 as NAS Server. I run nearly same setup as Doug, samba is running as a PDC, virtual box provides a winXP  terminal-server for this domain, cups provides printing service and mediatomb for video streaming. All in 24/7 operation, very solid.

If I would have some more time, I should mention this in the wiki here...

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

I'm seeing in general drives with more cache are being recommended for NAS boxes. I've decided to splurge the extra for a 7200 RPM drive.

It seems to me, that disk speed (including cache) is a non issue. The 1 Gbps network interface is very much slower than any hard disk, and that will be the limiting factor for speed. It doesn't matter how many clients you use, the limit is still 1 Gbps. All that happens, is that each client slows down since they need to wait their turn for network access. I suppose that a second (third etc.) NIC might speed things up, if you configured the network properly...

Doug,

Worst case scenario is that I have my 1Gig pathway saturated with multiple clients all looking for a different piece of data...if that is the case I want to be able to put a HD in that NAS enclosure that will not have a hard time getting the data the client needs, 7200 is faster then 5400, heck, 10K is even better...and SDD is simply awesome.

Here are some benchmarks (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31906-zyxel-nsa325-2-bay-power-plus-media-server-reviewed?start=4) on the NSa325 unit, as you can tell, the sustained xfer rate is pretty high in a number of test cases, we are talking > 75MB/s...so if the network supports this throughput (yes, I agree, we have some challenges in OS/2) I want the storage media to handle multiple requests.

[Doug Bissett]

Worst case scenario is that I have my 1Gig pathway saturated with multiple clients all looking for a different piece of data...if that is the case I want to be able to put a HD in that NAS enclosure that will not have a hard time getting the data the client needs, 7200 is faster then 5400, heck, 10K is even better...and SDD is simply awesome.

Well, to put it in perspective: Your 100 Mbs network is like a motorized wheel chair. A 1 Gbs network is about like a 10 speed bicycle. A 5400 rpm disk is about like a standard 6 cylinder car. The 7200 rpm disk is about like a standard high performance street legal sports car. The 10000 rpm disk is like a low end race car. The SDD is like a high end race car. Any one of the disks will be around the block, many times, before the bicycle makes it around once.

One thing that you may want to do, is be sure that you can move the disk(s) into your main box. It would take me about a day to do a complete restore over the network. I figure that I will just move the disk into my main box, and it should only take about 4 hours to do a complete restore, if I ever need to do it. Smaller pieces are okay over the network, and I use RSYNC to do the backups, so that doesn't take very long. I use the same approach for my USB disks, which are only a little slower.

[Paul Smedley]

Hey Mark,

Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?

Security:
Does everyone think those NAS enclosures have or maintain good security?  I would think that NAS systems based on a linux distribution would have regular security updates & fixes.  How does that compare/contrast to the NAS enclosures approach?

I'm using Western Digital Red drivers here. I agree that for security, a system based on a linux system like freenas or ubuntu server is the best option. I used to run a Qnap NAS and they were VERY slow to release security updates, and even updates of core applications like samba, etc.

[karotlopj]

Personally I would recommend setting up a FreeNAS box

http://www.freenas.org/

It's based on FreeBSD and is extremely scalable. Works well with my OS/2 boxes.

You can set up CIFS (Samba) shares quite easily via the web interface and connect using 'net use'

[Olafur Gunnlaugsson]

Any opinions on choice of disks for these systems?

Green drives for saving money?
Black drives for performance?
Red NAS drives for some other reason?

What makes a good drive for a NAS application?

Normal 3TB Toshiba drives 7200rpm drives, a number of online hosting companies have come up with data that suggests these are by far the most reliable drives on the market, the 1, 2 and 4 TB versions from the same company have a much better than average reliability, on par with the best WD drives and a class above Seagate.

According to the data 3TB Tosh have around 1+% failure rates over the course of two years constant use (online 24/7), other Tosh drives around 2+%, WD around 2 to 5% depending on model and Segate 5 to 11%, ditto.

As I run OS/2 and Win 2011 HS (for XP compatibility that is not available for newer Win servers) I have bought 2TB version as the OS/2 server cannot use anything bigger and the WHS needs quite a lot of manual work to use the 3TB ones so I have stuck with the 2TB ones, four in each server, one has developed a minor fault after about 14 months that the company swapped out for me even though it was out of warranty.

These replaced a host of drives bought in the period between 2009 and 2011, two Hitachi (Now Toshiba), two Samsung, two WD and about six Seagate drives, all the drives except one Hitachi drive developed some errors during their livetime, the Samsungs and the WD's could be re-used after a low-level format and have been re-purposed for my PC's, the Hitachi could not be fixed as WD (Who owned the Hitachi factory at the time) stopped supplying disk repair software that worked with that specific model but otherwise that drive only had surface errors so should have been recoverable, and it and all the Seagate drives have been thrown away. The only working Seagate drive left in the house is a 35 year old 506 .... so you can guess which drive manufacturer I am not recommending.