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Comment by fijter | Hacker News Reader

The design is nice, but why buy this thing for €429 excl. disks if you can buy a Synology DS211 with 2x2GB for the same price including the great diskstation software? Ok, the design is nice, but hey, it's a NAS, you can just go ahead and hide it somewhere, there's no real need for it to be on a desk or in a living room.

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I stopped being interested when I came across the price. I'm running two Intel SS4200's with FreeNAS x64. Cost of each was 129.99 last year (closeout price) + ~30ish bucks for 2GB DDR2 mem (they charge more for last-gen mem) + ~20ish for a usb serial adapter + cabling ==> roughly 180 for a DIY server. Only other things needed are a 4gig flash drive for the OS, and hard drives.

The drives can be swapped without any tools. My only regret was the 2GB ram limit due to the outdated chipset -- it scares me a little that i'm running ZFS with less than the 6GB recommended minimum FreeNAS recommends, but I'd rather use ZFS than worry about RAID bitrot/etc.

I'm with you. Infrant ReadyNAS, LaCie 4big Quadra, etc., there are a lot of really reliable and known high performance (needed for high volumes of DSLR images or 1080P video) chassis designs out there in the 430 Euro USD 600 price range.

Yes, and many of those devices come setup with very reliable RAID without any special configuration by the user. Running 5 1TB disks with no redundancy on standard Ubuntu ext4 is like pleading for data loss.

With the Evercube, I pay double for 2.5" storage and have no redundancy? 5TB of storage but only 512MB for the OS? At those prices the OS storage should be at least 1GB so that users have more options. Standard Ubuntu Minimal requires a lot of manual configuration (no room for GUI in 512MB), especially if you want network sharing and RAID. Then, because it's Ubuntu I can guarantee that there will be major changes in the configuration process at the next version upgrade.

Compare this with ZFS on BSD/Solaris which exports NFS shares with a single command. Upgrade process is predictable and requires little intervention.

Or compare with my setup: Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure. And just the Evercube shell without drives costs much more than my setup!

Whoever buys the Evercube will be looking for a pretty solution instead of a technically solid one. Ubuntu 9.04 is outdated and no longer supported. To spend this money and go this far on design on hardware, and then fall so flat on software is really disappointing.

"Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure."

Uhh, 4 x 2TB raidz2 will give you 3.6TB of storage...

You probably meant 2x2TB, but yeah, Synology, QNAP, etc come with great software including iTunes sharing, DLNA, Time Machine, etc.

About the only issue with NAS devices is disk encryption, but at that point, you probably require a NetApp box or similar.

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