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looking for a NAS box

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Simon:
I'm looking for a NAS box to act as my main storage to access at home and outside. Any suggestions?

Alternatively I have my own VPS but cPanel webdisk is a joke and owncloud requires a dedicated server so is a no-no.

amspire:
I am a big fan of the dedicated NAS boxes. I am currently using the Netgear RN10200 (which unfortunately is no longer available). If you can find used RN10200's on ebay, they are great as they use BTRFS for the disk and they are basically a Debian computer system. They tend to be very reliable. I have a second NAS running as a virtual machine on a PC I run at home, but the Netgear NAS boxes run at a fraction of the power. The RN10200 use about 17 watts.

Don't touch the older versions of Netgear NAS's that do not run Netgear ReadyNAS 6.x. You want to look for numbers like RN102 (for a 2 disk mirrored NAS) or RN10200, RN104(4 drive), RN212, RN312, RN412, RN414, etc. Numbers like that. The ads sometimes have the extra 00 on the end and sometimes not.

There are lots of other good brands. Synergy are superb, but last time I looked, the budget models were a different OS and I would not use them. I think the good Synergy models can run BTRFS.

The other big brands I am sure are also excellent.

You want a NAS that has a file system with a genuine snapshot ability, and redundancy in the drives. BTRFS allows you to scrub the drives regularly that basically checks every bit of data on all the physical drives is correct. I have had BTRFS NAS's save a client from cryptoviruses a few times now. When I set up NAS boxes for companies as a backup, I turn off windows networking and use rsync for all the synching from workstations and servers. Rsync does run well on Windows and it is completely free - you just have to know how to pinch it along with the few DLL's it needs from a cygwin installation to get the latest rsync in a portable form.
 
Raid has been the main weakness of BTRFS, and Netgear uses the venerable Linux mdadm RAID system instead and runs BTRFS on top effectively as a single disk drive. This arrangement seems to be rock solid.

One NAS is not a backup. Ideally you want the NAS contents synched to an offline location - like the cloud, relative's house, etc. I use rsync to provide the synching. Quite often, I am synching terabytes of data over a humble ADSL line.

Richard.

Simon:
Western digital have a nice looking one that does not have great reviews. I nearly bought it thinking surely they know what they are doing but lots of reviews say they bought it as an automatic upgrade to a previous well known model and have been disappointed which is why I am edgy about what to buy.

Currently, I carry around an encrypted hard drive but it's becoming too much of a nuisance.

borjam:
I have two HP Microserver Gen 8 servers and they are great.

I run FreeNAS on one of them and FreeBSD on the other one. Moreover, if you need more CPU muscle compatible low power Xeons are cheap now.

legacy:

--- Quote from: amspire on September 11, 2019, 07:32:17 am ---You want a NAS that has a file system with a genuine snapshot ability, and redundancy in the drives. BTRFS allows you to scrub the drives regularly that basically checks every bit of data on all the physical drives is correct. I have had BTRFS NAS's save a client from cryptoviruses a few times now.

--- End quote ---

For a similar problem, I have created a utility that gets the SHA256 hash of each file in the volume when you archive a file into a snapshot, and then it randomly checks if the calculated SHA256 hash matches the archived one. This stuff uses a b+tree algorithm as a database engine, and process up to 8 files in parallel. So you know if a file has got corrupted or modified.

Snapshots passing the check also go burned into MO, DVDram, and DLT tapes.

This stuff works on ext3 filesystem, and the reason is ... we have an older kernel 2.6.39, we cannot upgrade the kernel, so we cannot use btrfs because it was not stable on kernel 2.6

What do you think?

p.s. from which kernel version have you started trusting btrfs?

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