Home Servers, Network Storage and the Case House
by Loyd Case on December 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Here at the Case House, we’re pretty sophisticated home users, as you might imagine. Even if you ignore me, for a moment, there are my two daughters. Elizabeth (now at UCLA) and Emily (who is a sophomore in high school) are both tech savvy users. Elizabeth is best thought of as a power user, particularly when it comes to cell phones and laptops. She’s also a gifted digital photographer and expert Photoshop user (as it applies to photography.)
Emily is more of a power Internet user and gamer. Facebook is always open on her system, as is iTunes. She users her iPod Classic as much for games as for music, and she’s been known to boot up some pretty serious PC games – Titan Quest, Neverwinter Nights 2 and others.
My wife, on the other hand, will tell you she’s not particularly tech savvy. In one sense, she’s right. I had to set up Harmony One universal remote or she would have never figured out the home theater. She still looks to me for basic hardware support, like setting up her work laptop for dual displays whenever she disconnects and reconnects the laptop. In other ways, though, she’s a sophisticated user of tech, building web pages for her company, initiating and managing teleconferencing sites and designing corporate training curricula.
On top of that, we’re all multi-PC users. Elizabeth has both a full featured laptop and netbook. Emily can be found using the communal living room laptop for homework, sometimes more so than the desktop PC in her room.
As for me – I want access to media, music, benchmarking apps, game patches and other useful software from any location in the house. Keeping my PC on 24/7 really isn’t the right answer: network storage is.
What Do You Mean “Network Storage?”
The situation with network storage isn’t as simple as it should be. There exist a spectrum of choices, depending on what you actually need:
- Small, single drive systems that attach to your network and simply become another hard drive to your PC, albeit slower.
- Network attached storage (NAS) devices that offer additional flexibility, including automated backups, USB printer access through the network and some degree of user account control.
- Media savvy NAS boxes that build on basic NAS capability, then add plugin capability. For example, the ReadyNAS from Netgear offers the ability to run a Slimserver plugin, letting you access digital music stored on the server with Logitech SqueezeBox digital media adapters.
- Interesting convergence devices that are both NAS boxes and media servers, like the Mediagate line of hardware, or Western Digital’s WD TV.
- PC based servers. These can range from consumer oriented Windows Home Servers to full on multicore hardware running Windows Server 2003 or one of the many Linux
distros.
- The final solution is cloud storage – something that’s still new to a lot of home users, and exists in multiple implementations and at varying cost structures.
In an ideal world, you’d assess your needs and pick the network storage technology that suits your needs. In the Case House, most of our network storage needs have been ably handled by one of the original ReadyNAS 600 systems, built and sold by Infrant prior to its acquisition by Netgear. The system originally shipped with 1TB of storage (four 250GB drives), set up in RAID 5 mode.
After several years, the oddball paddlewheel cooling fan began to die, so I replaced both the fan and PSU, while simultaneously upgrading the hard drives to four 500GB drives (2TB total, about 1.6TB usable in RAID 5.) The ReadyNAS has since been working fine, humming quietly in the basement lab storage area, giving me no problems and doing its job.
So naturally, I wanted something different.
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webdawg77 - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
"so tossed a pair of 1GB Kingston Value RAM modules into the mix" for 2 GB total (table lists 2 GB of RAM twice). Unless, you indeed meant 2 x 2GB sticks (but different from the quote on the third page).Jaguar36 - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
I'd love to see some power measurements on this setup. I'm looking for something similar so I don't have to leave my power sucking desktop on all the time.piasabird - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
I like the idea of a networked applicance to store files you dont want to lose but many people may not have the funds for this kind of system. Seems like all a lot of people need is an extra PC like a cheap Dell Zion or $495 Dell Intel PC with a Celeron processor and a Drive or two (Depending how many files you actually use). I would find something on that order useful whether it is documents you need to store like Geneological (Family History) documents or Family photos. I cant imagine only having One computer and storing all my photos one one hard drive that could die any minute.I was just thinking of an alternative to this NAS concept. It would be an interesting idea to have a kind of family storage system that could store essential documents on multiple computers instead of having one central location to be used as a server. Then every time a computer would sign on to the network or once a day, each computer could sync up and copy the files back and forth. That way if you had say 2 computers they could share the shared files folders on both computers.
hnzw rui - Thursday, December 10, 2009 - link
You mean something like Dropbox?Devzero - Friday, December 4, 2009 - link
There is actually a lot of software on the marked that accomplishes this task. In my opinion they are dived into two categories.First of you have the sync tools that range from rsync command line like to allway sync GUI appz. These can keep your folders in sync between multiple machines more or less in real time. I've installed openVPN on my laptops so I even get syncing when I'm away from home.
The second tier of tools are more backup like tools like crashplan that you can set upp on multiple machines, and do backup between them. The pro of these kind of appz is that they can keep a backup all changes to a file, so if you should suffer a brain fart and do ctrl + a, del, ctrl + s, alt + f4 in your 2000 pages word document, you can always go back to the previous version.
The best combination of functionality and security in my opinion is to combine the two apps, use allway sync to sync your files between computers, then set up crashplan on one central, always on machine that does online backup.
HotFoot - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
If all you're really wanting is back-up on the cheap, but could care less about all the convenience features, then probably the most sensible (but not very sexy) solution is an external HDD that you plug into once every month or two and update. Less than $100 will buy you a great deal of backup space for anything precious or irreplaceable.I do like your concept of taking advantage of multiple computers on the home network to backup important files. That still comes down to added security against a drive failure, and isn't exploiting other potential benefits or features something more sophisticated could offer.
For myself, home servers or even network storage are as yet a solution without a problem. I do a mix of keeping important family photos and documents on a backup external drive and having duplication over a couple computers on my network. But then, I only have one HTPC. I could see wanting a server-based media storage solution if there was more than one entertainment centre where I'd want access to everything. For now, splitting front-end and back-end hasn't yet made sense for me. Of my friends looking at sophisticated home network storage/media server solutions, it almost seems like they are more looking to tinker than actually needing something. It's like their main desktop/gaming rig is as good as it's going to get and they want something new to play with.
mjfink - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
I agree with your first statement, external USB HDD (mirrored, if you really need that) are a great way to do backup. I also send my backups across the Internet for an offsite copy.However, I disagree with your 2nd statement. I'd be very upset if my server was removed tomorrow, and there's nothing that would easily replace it. I love not having to leave my main PC on for torrents, and having the reliability of a server to send out all the files/data that I keep on the network.
Most of all it's the networking flexiblity. Full private DNS, DFS for share virtualization (which I use all the time, I want to present a consolidated share with all my shows/movies/etc in it, rather than shares from 3 different computers), an AD domain (which makes life so much easier when accessing data between computers)... It's not that the server solves a problem that didn't exist; it's that most people either don't have these problems (don't have enough computers), or, more likely, don't know that a server would fix these problems for them.
Now, my quad core processor in my desktop rig? That's a solution for a problem that didn't exist. I can't choke that thing doing anything remotely productive; the newest processors are so fast that there's simply no application (besides games) that actually can take advantage of them!
kalster - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
For someone on a budget an Atom based system works well too. I built my system using the D945gclf2 (atom 330) and it works well. I haven't used it for any sort of media transcoding but for basic storage and streaming (without transcoding) the atom is a fine chip.Devzero - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
My experience with NAS boxes is that they are horrible performers, especial for simple transfers of big files (ie movies). I would love to know how a WHS server like this performs compared to a modern home NAS solution in terms of raw power.blaster5k - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
WHS can transfer files pretty much as fast as the hard drives on the machines involved in the transfer can handle. I've moved some big files at close to 100 MB/second. With a RAID/SSD configuration, you might saturate a gigabit connection.