Posts tagged NAS
PogoPlug – A Tech Review
Jul 27th
After seeing various reviews littered about the web and watching video’s of people using and unboxing a pogoplug, there was not enough detailed write up about how it works on a day to day unit rather than just something to shares your files across the internet. I had spotted this device in a local store for £79, the retail price was £99, so a saving of £20 to be had. Was this a cheap NAS box that could suit my needs or would it turn out to be something slow and unusable.
Icy Box Dual Disk RAID Gigabit NAS IB-NAS3221-B
Jul 11th
I have been looking into NAS and this one device I have seen which interests me. The website is HERE and we shall go through what it is, what it does and why you might want one (or something similar). First of all let us explain that NAS is Network attached Storage and this allows a box dedicated to sharing space across the network so that any computer can get at the information stored. Some boxes just share the drives but some come with a whole range of extras such as Web Server, Torrent client and iTunes Server.
Acer Aspire E700 NAS Box
Jul 4th
As per my other post abut NAS Drives – yesterday I took it upon myself to build a NAS box from parts I already had and thus save myself spending any money. The goal if you recall was to have a system that was able to be upgraded in space later such as adding 1TB or larger Harddrives as needs arose. This journey took a while to get everything ready and was the end result worth the effort involved?
Network Attached Storage – DIY or PreBuilt?
Jun 26th
If you own more than one computer, you may find that some items would just work better if they were held in one central location and each computer could access these files no matter which computer was on – such as your MP3 Collection for example. This can take the form of dedicating one computer as a server if you like and left on 24/7, you could build your own NAS box or buy one of the many off the shelf – all are good but have a downside normally. I plan on jotting down my thoughts to give each idea a good going over and seeing how it look at the end – join me on my journey into NAS.
Multi Computer organisation
Feb 23rd
I am going to try and explain what I have learned over the many years of using many computers – to try and present what I feel is a good layout for your media so that you stop loosing important files by silly mistakes. While this is not the be all and end all of how to use a computer, it will help you stop having duplicates, needing to keep backing up multiple times and pay for services online.
Sarotech Gigabit Raid Network Drive 2000GB 2TB
Sep 17th
This is the ultimate network hard drive. Simply connect the unit to your PC via USB or directly to your router, switch or hub via Ethernet and you’ve got plenty of room to back up and save your valuable data, music, photos and movies and instantly share them with everyone else on the network.
As well as FTP and Samba, the drive can act as your iTunes server – this way you do not need a computer to server your music to iTunes compatible devices. Add to that the ability to use it as a BitTorrent client to download your torrents without the need of a computer and the Print server to share your USB printer with anyone on the network and you end up with a very complete and stable must have network drive.
Furthermore with the built in Raid, setting up the drive as a safe mirrored data vault or a performance file server is entirely your choice making this one of the most versatile stand alone network storage appliance.
Darkstar USB-to-NAS Bit Torrent Magic Single Port
Mar 30th
I spotted this device on ARIA and the idea sounds good, it allows you to plug in a USB Hard drive at one end, A Network lead on the other (which would go to your router let us say) and now you have a NAS box but also combined with this is a Bitorrent client which is on 24/7 and allows you to queue up and download torrents to the attached HD. The Price is: £32.14 inc. VAT- seems cheap enough right?
Belkin Network USB Hub
Mar 28th
I spotted this device while out some time ago and the idea looked good, plug in various USB Devices such as Hard Drives, Printers and the like and have them shared out across the network. I choose not to buy this device at the time even if it sounded like what I needed as I like to make sure the device does what I think it should do.
Build your own NAS Server.
Aug 4th
What is a NAS anyway??
NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage” and its basically a harddrive but on a network, this allows for many computers to access this instead of only one if you had USB / Firewire. A NAS unit is essentially a self-contained computer connected to a network, with the sole purpose of supplying file-based data storage services to other devices on the network.
Off the Shelf Solutions
You can buy either pre-configured NAS Boxes or an empty case which you supply your own drive. Some come with just file sharing while others come with web servers and various other bolt ons. The good side of these devices is the noise level and physical size but the bad side always is the cost.
Build your own
If you have an old computer lying about along with some harddrives, then you can indeed make your own NAS Box. For the purposes of this post, I will use the Dell GX620 USFF as the box to use.
The machine itself is very quiet and very small – it is fitted with a P4 3.2GHz and 1 GIG ram – more then enough for this project – you could get away with 256MB ram and a P4 1.7 as it is only serving files. It can only hold ONE SATA2 Drive – so we need this to be as big as possible – fitting a 1TB drive would be the best option here. We can now also plug in various USB External Drives to boost that capacity, in this case we can use 500GIG, 320 and 320 drives to push the figure closer to 2TB.
FREENAS/OPENFILER
Openfiler – http://www.openfiler.com/
Freenas – http://www.freenas.org/
They are both Free and based off Linux, they do not have a GUI or any other services that are not required. Basically you download the ISO, Boot and install and then do the rest from a web browser which means no need for Monitor, Keyboard or Mouse. Once installed – you can set up the shares etc via a browser, I must point out that if you bunch all the drives as one visible drive – then one drive failure means you have lost everything.
Basically the entire point of following this set up is to re-use older hardware and present a shared networked drive that all computers can see.
