How I learnt to stop worrying and love hate the NAS
Posted by Jaymz,
June 12th, 2007 in Hardware, Linux, Software, Tech, Windows
Okay.. nevermind. Everything I said that was bad about WHS? It’s worse on this thing. I don’t get the occasional pause or hiccup - I get complete loss of network connectivity whenever I use the thing. It seems that whenever I try access anything for extended periods of time, the NAS box just drops off the network for a few brief minutes. However, this makes backing up 1.2TB of data extremely difficult, when the files get corrupted on the other end, and the shitty software I use doesn’t realise it - causing me to have to hand-verify everything transferred across. So, I’ve gone back to the RC build of Windows Home Server, and shall see how that plays out. My hopes of using this thing as a potential remote site fileserver solution for work were also mercilessly dashed when I discovered that for Active Directory integration, it *REQUIRES* an account with domain admin rights to have its credentials saved on the box, with no form of encryption. - Essentially meaning that if some smartass found their way into the NAS box’s internal filesystem, they can obtain more than just a few word documents - they can own your entire network. So, it’s back to its role of weekly offsite backup device for me. Original posting is as follows.
Hi, I’m Jaymz! You might remember me from such blog posts like Drives Gone Wild, and WHS: Not just for Joe User. I’m here today to do what seems like a complete 180 and outline the things that WHS can’t do, in place of a good NAS.
So, this all came about due to the fact that I had a 2.9TB fileserver, and a good 1.2TB of precious, precious lolicon data that I wanted to secure - yet no financially viable backup solution for all this stuff existed. Hence, I threw away my old argument that “RAID is not a backup solution” and went to work building a redundant array of independent NAS boxes, otherwise known as RAIN - quite apt, because I’m literally pissing money away, here.
So anyway. WHS meets NAS. NAS stores all my… uh.. legitimate DVD backups and other associated anime files which are technically legal because they haven’t been licensed in the US yet. Now.. I have a big ass TV connected to my PC for the sole purpose of watching lolicon anime on, and I do so via Media Center. See my Vista guide on how I do that with today’s non-standard but popular formats. So anyways.. WHS has been great for centralizing all that data that I initially had spread across a ton of drives. However, there were still a few niggling issues I had with it. A couple were related to it just being beta software, and were forgivable, but the other I feel is a fundamental architectural flaw in its system which won’t go away easily: That issue is speed.
What am I on about? Well, for basic file transactions to and from WHS, it works fine. However, when trying to stream video from it under Media Center, it can take up to 10 minutes before a video starts playing, and although it happens rarely, it can even lose sync and cause the playback to stutter. At first, I thought this was a Media Center issue, but the introduction of my new NAS box confirmed it. Media Center plays back everything in my 1TB media store quickly and seamlessly.
Why would this be a fundamental issue? Well, because WHS spans its data across all the drives, and creates something like a virtual drive which links to the real data. With over a terabyte of storage, WHS tends to go nuts at balancing storage, and for me, seems to be doing it all the time. It’s forever shifting data around, seemingly trying to be more efficient with its space, which causes the occasional hiccup when attempting to stream videos from it using Media Center. To be fair, Media Player Classic doesn’t have this issue - so it’s probably due to poor programming on MCE’s part as well - but MCE is really the only solution I have in terms of being able to watch TV, my anime collection, and other assorted lolicon stuff using only the remote - and no, MediaPortal isn’t any kind of alternative solution. I prefer my HTPC interfaces to actually respond, have a consistent, good looking user interface, and not crash every minute.
So, as earlier inferred - all those speed issues go away when using my fancypants new NAS box. The Thecus N5200. It is a tiny, low-powered box of win and awesome, and currently holds 5 400GB Samsung SATA 2 drives (with 16MB of cache) in a RAID 5 configuration. This gives me 1.4TB of storage, and allows me to secure my lolicon keep a redundant copy of all my precious data, across the two systems. Eventually, I’ll purchase another one of these things and do something else with Heracles - possibly swap out the mainboard with something more power bill friendly, and demote it to being a backup/application server (it’s great as a remote uTorrent server). Who knows? I may have other plans.
So… what else can I piss my money away on?
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Hello and welcome to Respect Sakura, yet another shitty blog under the premise of being an animu blog, when it's really just about Jaymz's tech leanings, spending habits and crack-inspired ramblings on topics noone cares about. Oh, and that other guy posts stuff sometimes, too.
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Well, I was considering trying out the RC of WHS, but after hearing about the stuttering problems, I’ll probably just stick with my Linux setup.
Really, the only reason I’d want WHS is for the fancy pants interface. But past that, my Linux box currently does RAID 5 across 3 250Gb disks, with a couple of other single drives thrown in for good measure. It also does basic web and FTP serving for file transfer between my home and work networks, or in case I need to send someone a file without relying on the slow and nasty MSN file transfer or an e-mail attachment.
It also does music streaming via Icecast and Music Player Daemon to any ogg-capable player and shares its entire file storage with anyone connected to the network. Quite possibly my favourite thing about this is that I’ve forced Samba (the Windows file and printer sharing server for Linux) to just provide anyone who connects guest read-only access to the shares by default without prompting for a username or password, much like other Windows XP shares. But I can specify a username and password in the Users section of the XP control panel, it will give my PC write access to the shares. In fact, I just have them all mounted as network drives.
Until WHS can do proper software RAID (5, preferably) and volume spanning similar to LVM, I don’t think I’ll be touching it. Linux was a little bit more work to set up, sure, but once I got the configuration right (which wasn’t exactly hard thanks to the Gentoo Wiki giving walkthroughs for most of the apps) it’s just been a set-and-forget job.
Just another alternative to WHS or a dedicated NAS box. :)
The benefit of WHS is it’s easy to use, has redundancy methods other than RAID, it’s great for storage expansion in future, and has the best damn backup system I’ve ever seen in terms of restore capability, minimizing storage space, and the amount of time the backups take to do on the client. I wish Microsoft had a business/corporate version of this, because it’d shit all over our LiveState backups at work.
The builtin TS Gateway, and secure https access to your box at home is all manner of awwesome. My only problem is the slow media access in Media Center. As I said, it’s not an issue in other apps (but media access isn’t an issue in Media Center on my NAS). I’d heartily recommend it to anyone, and I’ll probably continue to run it myself.
However, my little NAS that could has so far been proven all manner of awesome. I guess the final decision comes tonight when I rebuild Heracles as a home server once more.
You know, it’s funny you mention those problems with your NAS. I’m just curious, have you tried it with Windows XP as well? Because a lot of these cheap NAS units actually just run an embedded version of Linux with Samba doing the file sharing duties. And as I just detailed on my own blog (shameless plugging!), Samba and Vista don’t play well. I don’t get any dropouts, but speed is capped at around 5Mb/s. On a gigabit network, that’s not so swell.
I’ve actually registered for the WHS test myself, because I may as well see what the other side of the fence is like. If it turns out to be as awesome as you say it is, I might stick with that and Vista, rather than having to go back to XP just because of slow file transfers.
Vista, Server 2003 and OS X 10.4.9. Not only does the Samba service drop out - the AFP server (for my Macs) does as well.
I’ve actually fixed it by manually setting its’ IP address, instead of using a DHCP reservation, and I haven’t had it drop out on me yet.