[Houdini]

Hit me w/ your recommendations for external hard drives, budget options plus what you would go for if $ was plentiful; & Ext HD horror stories etc..


Looking for a minimum of 1TB, maybe more.  I'm concerned w/ the increasing cheapness of these units and what that may mean for longevity. 

There's a new Acer 1TB & 2TB unit w/ 4 removable drives I like the look of very much, a serious back-up solution (but the cost is whack @ > 800 quid).

And then there are NAS units ... Of which I know jack.

[butters]

Hit me w/ your recommendations for external hard drives, budget options plus what you would go for if $ was plentiful; & Ext HD horror stories etc..


Looking for a minimum of 1TB, maybe more.  I'm concerned w/ the increasing cheapness of these units and what that may mean for longevity.  

There's a new Acer 1TB & 2TB unit w/ 4 removable drives I like the look of very much, a serious back-up solution (but the cost is whack @ > 800 quid).

And then there are NAS units ... Of which I know jack.

NAS or Network Attached Storage according to wiki - not something you need at a guess.

As for external HDD's they are getting cheaper simply because it is getting cheaper to make them - if you are worried about the longevity then simply buy two and have a backup of the backup (which opens a whole new problem with keeping both drives synchronised).

bluebrad

[Jim]

what are you using it for?
maybe the best solution is to get a NAS caddy and buy as many samsung spinpoint F1 drives as you need, these are generally regarded as the best. they cost about £60.
It all depends on what you have already and what your going to be using it for

[Bubba]

I looked into this recently and this Icy Box seemed quite cool and not too pricey.

It's (as Jim suggests) a NAS caddy that will hold two sata drives. So you buy this and two of them disks Jim recommends and you've got 2TB (or 1TB mirrored) NAS which is future proof for around £220.

[Falling Down]

I did a bit of research last year on these 'cos I wanted a very quiet one to sit in our lounge under the tele as a media drive.  I ended up getting a Freecom 500Gig NAS drive and it's been on for over 12 months now, is really quiet, doesn't get hot and is accessible from anywhere on our wireless network and over the internet. A great piece of kit..

[slackline]

If you can get them the Linksys NSLU2 (or slugs as they are affectionatly known) are excellent solutions.  One little box that you can plug two USB drives/pens into.

I've got one and have installed an alternative OS on it that runs a uPNP media server that servers up music, images and videos on my network that I can then view/playback on my PS3 seamlessly over the wireless.  I've also installed a web server (lighttpd) along with a wiki that I use for making geeky notes

Very cheap and highly flexible solution since you can just swap over the USB drive when you've filled it up.  More info on alternative OS's for it here (note it runs linux anyway as the OS, because of this Linksys were obliged to release the source code which others have taken and built upon and improved to whats available at the above site).

[Houdini]

The priorities are protecting music data from HD failure.  I've many unique or unreleased FLAC from small-fry producers, some of which are already unreplacable (due to HD failure or deliberate deletion by the person who gave them) & are unlikely to see general release, not to mention safeguarding the files I buy - which are around €2 per FLAC / WAV - puts the value of my laptops' drive far beyond the cost of the PC.

In 2009 there should be a more reliable (and elegant) solution than buying two identical Ext HD's.  Also, toying w/ the idea of starting a netlabel, so the NAS path is attractive.

[butters]

The NAS will still be local to you - if you start a net label then it would make more sense to host the files on the host providers network servers as your connection would take one hell of a battering otherwise. If you are that worried about the potential failure of the external HDD then you will want to be looking at some sort of mirroring (RAID1) solution like that suggested by Bubba or if you are really worried then a RAID5 solution but this would be overkill IMO.

bluebrad

[Jim]

If its only for back up then you don't really need a external HD or a NAS unless of course your using a laptop or a small form factor PC

[underground]

I was using MS Synctoy to backup across a couple of external drives and it fucked the backup once, lost me a good 400 photos, so I binned it - got the phoos back off the formatted drive and now I have them on Amazon S3 and use Jungledisk as the client.

Took ages to do the first backup but now it's over in minutes without me having to touch owt. And it's seen in My Computer as a virtual disk so it's easy to see what's there.

Might get expensive with masses of data though, see what the math says...

[Bubba]

Finally saved my pennies (well t-shirt sales, thanks all  ) and got myself an Icy Box Nas 4220.

Can't afford the drives yet and those ones that Jim recommended don't work well with this unit so am waiting to find two cheap Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives.

This will give me 2TB storage - I'm not going to RAID them, rather use the test & replace method instead. Been doing quite a lot of reading and it seems that most hard drives either fail very soon (due to manufacturing issues) or after a long period; 3 years seems to be a good replacement frequency. Regular S.M.A.R.T. testing will hopefully catch any errors before they become terminal.

The idea is then to hide the unit somewhere out of site relative to the rest of my computers. That means if we get burgled and I lose my PCs they should overlook the NAS and all my important stuff.

When I get it up and running I'll do a report on how good it is.

[dobbin]

I am after a qnap one because it has a bittorrent client.

[slackline]

I am after a qnap one because it has a bittorrent client.

Get a NSLU2 ditch the Linksys firmware in favour of SlugOS on an external HD (say two 1Tb drives) and then install Transmission.  I can now control my torrents from my phone with port-forwarding on my router 

Plus you can install all sorts of other things, mail servers, uPnP servers (for streaming media to PS3 etc. although it struggles with video), web-servers (e.g. Apache although I plumped for lighttpd), PHP/Perl and wiki's.  They're brilliant little boxes and the SlugOS is really good, and continually expanding (although you could install a full-blown ARM based Debian install and have >20000 packages at your disposal).

Most NAS run some sort of Linux variant (including Western Digital's MyBook, viable option, have installed transmission on a neighbours one of these, see here and here for details on hacking these), the downside is that whilst their all supposed to be GPL'd and have everything available there aren't really enough people to hack each and every model/version and the firmware that comes with them will invariably only have half the things you actually want.

I'd say get an NSLU2 or a MyBook and start hacking yourself, you already use Xubuntu so should find it fairly straight-forward (although there are no GUI's you have to ssh in and do everything at the command line, but it ain't rocket science and the documentation is good).

[slackline]

That Icybox is likely running a Linux variant too, if it were native windows it wouldn't need Samba (which serves *NIX systems up to windows clients).  Bit crap the uPnP is only a trial version, you might want to try the afforementioned Mediatomb or possibly a Java based uPnP server called PS3mediaserver which should be using uPnP and therefore be independent of the client (as I think you've an Xbox haven't you Bubba).  There are other uPnP servers out there too like Fuppes, see  here for a more complete list.

[Bubba]

I am after a qnap one because it has a bittorrent client.

So does the Icy Box

[Bubba]

Sorted the Icy Box out with 2x1TB Seagate Barracudas which were very cheap indeed from Lambda Tek

The default BT client isn't accepted by most of the trackers I'm with, so installed a version of Optware with the Transmission BT client (see Slack--Lines link above) built in.

All seems great - I can SSH to the NAS using Putty and once I'd messed with port-forwarding in my router Transmission works fine.

The only problem with Transmission is that all torrents get saved to the same location which is pants, but apparently per-torrent save location is an upcoming feature so I'll stick with it.

The NAS runs almost silently and seems to stay super-cool - i've not noticed the fan kicking in once yet. Power consumption is about 25W with the discs running dropping to 10W when idle so way more efficient than leaving a PC on.

It was also really simple to set it up to act as a printer server.

All in all I'm very impressed with this box.

[slackline]

The only problem with Transmission is that all torrents get saved to the same location which is pants, but apparently per-torrent save location is an upcoming feature so I'll stick with it.

At the moment all you can do is have currently dowloading torrents and completed downloaded torrents in separate places.  My tweet was simply that it might be in the feature request and/or in the pipeline for developers to add (quick look didn't reveal it had been requested there, so perhaps worth sticking one in).  I've a vague recollection that the GTK+ standalone client that you might run on say GNU/Linux or OSX had the ability to save individual torrents to specific locations, so the functionality is there, its just that its not bee added to the WebUI yet.

Good to hear it plays with Optware though, I've been apprehensive over getting a new NAS because I've seen few that allow you to completely replace the stock firmware with your own OS (as I've done on the NSLU2 with SlugOS and then using Optware feeds under that).

[Bubba]

I can't find the topic now but I read a post on the Transmission forums where a dev seemed to imply that the per-torrent save location thingy "might happen very soon" or words to that effect.

It's not a major issue tbh - with 2TB I can leave active torrents seeding in the public share as well as archiving them elsewhere on the NAS for the sake of keeping things neat.

Trackers like what.cd / waffles.fm / bitme.org / stmusic.org  are very fussy about which clients you can use but luckily Transmission is one of them so it'll do just fine for now

TBH I don't fully understand the firmware & architecture of the NAS and was just following instructions re Optware, etc but if a Linux n00b like me can do it then anyone can.

Actually, as an aside, I'm almost certainly going to convert the (very) old PC on my network to a native Linux box soon. I'll prob. go with Ubuntu as that's what the ukb servers are sitting on unless there's a much better alternative now?

[slackline]

Might take a while to filter through to the Optware feeds even after its done, but its usually within a month or so.

What do you intend to do with the box in the living room?

These days you find that distros are quite speicifc in how they manage things, eg. Ubuntu uses the Synaptics package manager (GUI) to update and install things, although you can still use the Debian 'apt-get' CLI method (as Ubuntu is based on Debian).

Others force you to roll up your sleeves and get down with the CLI (e.g. Slackware/Gentoo).  I really like Gentoo (can you tell) as I never once have had the circular dependency hell I had with Red Hat 7.3.

If its a "learning" box and you want to get more au fait with the CLI then I'd say Ubuntu would be a poor choice as its geared towards GUI & Wizards to hold you hand through everything.  If you want to do everything from scratch the Linux From Scratch or ArchLinux may be good choices.

Of course I'd highly recommend Gentoo, its documentation is by far the best, clearest and most accurate out there, forums are very helpful too and the Wiki is getting back to being very comprehensive and useful after the db was lost.

[Bubba]

What do you intend to do with the box in the living room?

It's not really meant to be a living room box - it's purely for low-power/noise file-sharing and a backup in case my PC drives die. Currently sitting upstairs with the rest of the PCs - idea is to secure it out of sight to make my storage burglar-proof.

I've got an old original xbox which will probably end up as the living room file server if I can ever get round to installing XBMC


Hmm. I do quite like the ease of Ubuntu's apt-get, etc as it's what I'm used to on the web-servers so am tempted. You've got to remember I'm coming from XP so not sure I want the hassle of anything too hardcore. That said, I might give Gentoo a go first just to see how I get on with it. I'm a geek at heart so will probably warm to it once my sleeves are rolled up.

[slackline]

Hmm. I do quite like the ease of Ubuntu's apt-get, etc as it's what I'm used to on the web-servers so am tempted. You've got to remember I'm coming from XP so not sure I want the hassle of anything too hardcore. That said, I might give Gentoo a go first just to see how I get on with it. I'm a geek at heart so will probably warm to it once my sleeves are rolled up.

Portage isn't that dissimilar to apt-get, say you want to install transmission, portage will work out what you want and install all dependencies...

Code: [Select]

emerge -av transmission
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild  N    ] net-p2p/transmission-1.72  USE="gtk libnotify" 4,698 kB

Total: 1 package (1 new), Size of downloads: 4,698 kB

The USE bit above are the flags you want to build it with, so if you were say building a headless server you wouldn't want to have gtk included as you'd be using the WebUI, so you control whether the package is built with this.  This is something that doesn't exist under binary based distros such as Debian and Ubuntu where generic versions with virtually all possible options are compiled by the maintainers and then made available to users who update the binaries installed on their system.  Its minor but say not having KDE support built in will save a ton of space on your HD (as no libraries are required) and leave the programs with a slightly smaller memory footprint.  Its hard to explain how flexible and useful this is until you've got a system up and running really, but its simple to set USE flags globally or individually for specific packages.


Installation requires you to use fdisk (or cfdisk) to partition the disks instead of having a LiveCD and gui up and running to do this from.  There are a few other minor tweaks to get a base install (which doesn't include X or desktop) up and running, but its not too bad.  Have a read through of the handbook I suspect it may well make sense straight off anyway.  There is also a lot of other documentation that is really well written.

[Bubba]

Thanks

The Handbook looks like a fantastic bit of documentation and would be enough for me to go from I reckon....

[slackline]

Had a thought over the weekend.  If you don't want the hassle of compiling everything from source (which is where the "power" and flexibility of Gentoo stems from, but may be a ball-ache if its an old-ish spec computer) then you could try the alternative Funtoo which is maintained by Daniel Robins (the founder of Gentoo), but is processor optimized pre-compiled binaries.

[slackline]

Good deal on NAS/Media-hub from eBuyer if anyones in the market...

Linksys 305 Media Hub with 2 x 500Gb HD's included (i.e. 1Tb, normally comes with 500Gb and a spare slot).  Currently £50 of RRP.

[BB]

I got a 1TB USB one from play.com for £70 mius 6% quidco. It powers upo and down with the PC and has a powersave mode. Flawless service so far.