Ask HN: what do you use for a home NAS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: what do you use for a home NAS?

4 pointsniels_olson14 comments

I'd write a poll, but I don't know enough of the brands. Joe Armstrong apparently uses a Synology. FreeNAS obviously supports iXsystems. Personally, I use hand-me-down Dell towers with SuSE because the upfront cost is $0 and YaST over SSH is good enough for NFS.

I recently got bit by my set-up though when I finally figured out that a disk that chronically drops out had a bad cable, not a bad disk.

So, between that and Armstrong's usesthis post, I wanted to ask HNers: what do you use? And why?

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I've got a NetGear ReadyNas Pro with 6 drive bays each containing a 2Tb seagate low power drive for 12Tb of usable space. It allows me to rip dvds in pretty much raw form to the nas and then transcode them (using http://handbrake.fr) to whatever format I want. My wife wants to watch some RomCom on her phone/android tablet during a long plane ride? No problem! Get it at RedBox for $1.20, rip it, and transcode it to the proper size and format. The resulting file is only 300-450Mb, so her phone and tablet can hold gobs of them. Also, netgear has some pretty decent forums.

As a Linux guy, massive bonus points that the ReadyNas boxes are just modified Debian and they will let you get root on them. http://www.readynas.com/forum

I'm a HUGE fan. You can get a diskless 6 drive bay one for: http://www.amazon.com/Readynas-Pro-6-Unified-Nas/dp/B004S9JX...

It is also a great time machine backup for my wife's crackbook pro lappy.

I didn't know the NetGear was that hackable. Cool.

Have you ever had to do a network install of, say, OS X? Yardie reports he was able to do that with Synology (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4340947)

Also, any experience with AeroFS?

A network install is just a PXE for any operating system. It would be pretty trivial to setup tftp on the readynas. If it isn't builtin already, Id be surprised if there wasn't a community extension to do it on the forums already.

This looks really good, but two things would be helpful to know before splashing out. Can any amount of hacking get it to do full disk encryption (without losing redundancy), and is it sufficiently fool proof for my non-tech-savvy 80-year-old parents who use only windows?

I just bought a Mac Mini and attached some external drives. I run PS3 Media Server for Mac to stream content to my PS3 and app enabled TV.

It's not super slick or cool but I don't care. I spend at least 8 hours a day at a Linux or Solaris terminal. When I'm ready to relax, I want everything to just work.

Do you remotely access your mini at all? Like with AeroFS?

Just SSH and the built in screen sharing app since it's headless and just sits on a shelf.

Admittedly my needs are easily met. I really just wanted the following

* stream downloaded content to PS3

* host virtual machines for testing (I use Parallels)

* run Jenkins for building projects and running tests to keep it off my laptop

* download torrents

* host local backup

I'm sure there are better solutions but I don't feel like it's worth investigating for myself.

I could never afford a real NAS, and I've used many DIY setups (linux boxes, mac boxes, with software raid) but I've settled on a WD MyBook for its pure simplicity. If you just need a file server and don't need tons of space (2TB is plenty for me) I'd definitely recommend it.

A HP Proliant Microserver. Has room for four disks, but I've only got two in there atm. It runs Debian with Samba for network file access. I intend to configure up NFS but haven't got around to it yet.

^ this

Plus besides using the Proliant as a NAS, it doubles as a great mediacenter & is super quite.

Got an Acer Homeserver on eBay for $100. Installed Ubuntu server 12.10 on a USB drive, picked up 4 2TB Seagate drive on black friday for $80 each. Have 3 in Raidz and one as a hotspare. This acts as my Time machine server, torrent box and media server. Running Plex on it, but Plex insists on transcoding everything, which the Atom isn't really powerful enough for.

How is your RAiD set up? Mine is just RAID 0, because that's what philg said to use. Hadn't thought of Acer

Just for posterity, let me note I meant that to read RAID 1.

I use a netgear readynas nv+. It's their consumer model, but it does the job for me. It's not the fastest, but has good features and support from the community. You can even easily upgrade the memory ( voids the warranty I believe).

Only issue is if you only put 1 disk in (of 4 potential slots) the fan goes nuts. Runs full speed off and on.

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