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Do you have any recommendations for a better similar product?


The impression iNAS (http://www.ajump.com) is a nice box, but a bit pricier. It does NFS properly, but they are also pretty noisy. There's really not a lot of options in the NAS+RAID arena, you can get a lot of single (and sometimes double) drive NAS solutions but just a standalone box with 4+ drives in it isn't very common.

The NSLU2 is a good product as well, but it's basically designed to serve up external USB drives via ethernet and isn't really a standalone NAS appliance. I can unplug my terastation, take it into work and plug it back in without having to cart around a bunch of crap *and* I have all the survivability of a full RAID 5 config. The NSLU2 is a great option for a standalone media server though, it's pretty hackable (and runs linux).

My complaints about the terastation might be considered nitpicky, but here's what they are:
  • can't configure the email alerter to use a secure smtp gateway (alternate port or password protected remailer)
  • SLOW network access via CIFS. Plenty fast enough to stream from it, but painfully slow when you're transferring ~200 gig of music and video data to load it up initially.
  • high traffic CIFS transfers (such when initially loading it) are pretty susceptible to I/O errors. I finally just gave up and loaded it via FTP.
  • no rsync access
  • no NFS, even though the product specs claim it (only on the 1 TB, others don't even claim it)
  • no large file support (individual files > 2 gig are truncated silently)
  • the ntp client has to use IP addresses, won't resolve hostnames (horks round robin NTP server schemes)
  • can't upgrade the firmware from linux, the upgrader is a windows executable. Might work with cedega, I just brought it into work and had a coworker upgrade it (I use linux at work too, heh).
  • no ssh access, can't hack it without soldering in a serial port and doing some serious voodoo.
  • the tech support guys I talked to weren't real friendly (I was going to say they were dicks but I figured that'd be kinda harsh).
  • The drives are a PITA to replace (definitely not hot swappable due to the sheer amount of disassembly required).

Some of the things I really appreciate about it:
  • simple to administer via the web interface
  • basically one-button config for raid 0, raid 1, or raid 5 (or even raid 0+1 with 2 disks in 2 arrays). Can also simply serve up 4 separate JOBD shares.
  • almost completely silent
  • quite small
  • trivial to set up SMB or Apple shares, trivial to set up print services
  • pretty damned cheap for a lot of storage. I can get a full terabyte out of it if I went with just spanning/RAID 0
  • runs linux (always a bonus). Even though it's a crippled, unaccessible and feature deficient install of linux.
  • really easy to just plug in additional USB drives for extra storage in a pinch. I don't know if you can RAID those external drives but if you can that'd give you the ability to hot swap.

-- Gary F.
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Eeyore, Original Owner -- Mk II 80 Gb, Blue S/N #090000803 Tigger, 2nd Owner -- Mk IIa, 80 Gb, Blue S/N #40103789