Storage is cheap, or so we’re told. Amazon will sell me storage for $0.055/GB/month in the cloud
; 3.5″ hard drives are hovering around $0.06/GB. However, my laptop has a little 250GB SATA drive that is (a) slow and (b) getting full. So I desire to replace it with a fast little SSD. But that raises the question of what to do with my stuff. I’m asking you, Internet. Details below the fold.
Since my laptop spends all of its important time in my home, I’m looking at various network attached storage products. I’ve narrowed it down to two main options that do what I want (namely; running Time Machine backups on my laptop, and exposing a crapton of storage over a sane network protocol).
Option 1: NAS
A NAS box from someone like Netgear or Patriot is pretty much designed to do what I’m asking for here. You put in disks, and it exposes NFS or CIFS or AFS or whatever. If I were to go this route, I would probably go for the Patriot PCNASJV35S4 (newegg link; $339.99) combined with a few of Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX disks (newegg link; $129.99/ea). Total cost for 4TB of storage in RAID5: $729.96.
Pros
- Cheap
- Power-efficient
- Not a lot to manage
Cons
- Can’t do anything that the manufacturer didn’t make a button for in the web GUI
- Probably going to stop being supported at some point in the near future, at which point I’m screwed
- Limited to about 30MB/s throughput
Option 2: Small PC
Computers turn out to be pretty cheap to build now. A nice Mini-ITX case, H67-based motherboard, Core i5, decent power supply and 8GB of RAM can be assembled for about $599. Stick in the aforementioned drives, and you end up with a total cost for the desired amount of storage of $988.92 (newegg link for the whole system).
Pros
- I’ll run Debian on it, so I can have it do other stuff (offsite backups, network gateway, whatever)
- Substantially faster than the NAS option; should be able to saturate network
Cons
- Will use substantially more power
- I have to deal with maintaining and setting it up
- More expensive, although I could reduce the cost a lot by going to a last-gen CPU and motherboard.
- mdadm makes me sad
For completeness sake, what I’m doing now is backing up my laptop to a cheap-ass 1TB USB drive connected to my AirPort. It gets about 8MB/s and annoys the hell out of me — plus, that drive is SPOF and has no monitoring whatsoever, so I don’t really have any way of knowing if my backups will actually work when I need them.
Okay, lazyweb. What should I do?
Edit 2012-01-29 12:57 PST
Zeke convinced me that I couldn’t justify a Core i5; dropping down to a Core i3 2120T drops the price for the homebuilt system to $514 + drives and drops the power usage by about half.
Edit 2012-01-29 13:29 PST
And another few dollars saved by switching from an ASRock H67M-ITX/HT to an H67M-ITX. Current cost is $480 + drives, which is cheaper than the QNAP TS-419PII that some people have tried to sell me on, although not cheaper than its underpowered little brother, the QNAP TS-412.
Newegg wish list is updated.
I’ve been planning on putting together something along the lines of #2 for myself for a while now (right now my HTPC is doing double-duty as NAS with my 3tb external), mostly for the reasons outlined already. However one downside of #1 you didn’t completely cover is that if the NAS device in #1 dies, your data is dead unless you can get your hands on another of the same device, since many (most?) of them have their own storage formats that nothing else can read. Replacing individual failed components in a custom PC is easier and cheaper, and in a pinch you can hook the drives up to basically any linux machine and read them.
Incidentally, I solved the storage/ssd issue in my most recent laptop by just having both. My thinkpad X220 supports this new ssd form factor called mSata, which is basically a way of putting a sata bus into a mini-pcie slot. Thus I now have a nice 80gb ssd for my OS and small files, and also a standard 320gb spinning disk for bulk storage.
Good point about the repair-ability; I hadn’t considered that.
re: the msata thing, I could also achieve that in my laptop by using one of the many rail kits to install the 2.5″ HDD into the bay that currently contains the optical drive. I think I’m about ready for my old laptop to stop spinning for a while, though.
I’d go with the PC. It’s always nice to have a server around for random things; I run cacti on my file server so I can see my internet bandwidth usage. Have you considered btrfs instead of mdadm? I hear it’s reasonably stable these days; I’m planning on switching my file server to it once I upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 in a few months.
You could also get an external SATA RAID array and hook it to something like a fit-pc3. That would probably be lower power and still have the flexibility of a PC.
The last btrfs system I used irreparably ate the entire file system after a few weeks. That was last year, though.
Oh, and btrfs doesn’t support a RAID5 equivalent.
Somewhere in the middle, I’ve got a Synology DS410 that I’m quite happy with. I’ve modified mine to just run Debian instead of their DSM distro.
One advantage of dedicated NAS hardware that I’d note is that it’ll idle down to considerably lower power usage: the DS410 idles around 15W, it’s tough to get anything besides a really wimpy Atom box to do that.
On the other hand, I’ve been having bad thoughts about upgrading to something like a Silmech R513…