Web site URL http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASPro/RNDP6350.aspx

I bought the drobo, and as long as you fill all the bays you should be fine. otherwise you will have a major performance hit.

It makes formatting and reinstalling Windows so much easier! All I have to do is clear files from the desktop, dir > print my PF so I remember what I’ve got installed, and copy My Documents to my iPod for the reinstall

The SS4200-E takes four hard drives, so the maximum usable volume would be 3TB. Once you get above 4-disk NAS units, they get very expensive and less mainstream. What I would do, if I needed an 8TB NAS, is simply build a computer! You can easily fit 15 hot-swappable disks in a Coolermaster Stacker 810 case, and using a 16 port 3Ware controller, you can have the same fault tolerance found in the NAS systems. The specs of the computer can be minimal — lowest end CPU, 1GB memory. Just make sure it has good Gigabit LAN! For best performance, you can even use a PCI-E LAN card from Intel. The main concern will be number of users — with Windows XP Pro, only 5 people can be connected at one time. If you need more than that, you’d either need to move to Windows Server (expensive) or Linux (not as intuitive).

Anyhow, that’s how I’d do it. We’d be happy to quote you a setup like that if you get in touch with our sales folks (sales@pugetsystems.com).

To answer your question about protection — RAID5 protects you from ONE disk failure. If two disks fail, you’ve lost data. RAID10 gets you less space, but you can lose as much as half your drives before you lose data (depending on which drives go). You can specify hot spare drives — so if you have a 15 disk RAID5 array, you can make a few of them hot spares. This means that they are not used until a disk fails, at which time they instantly step in as a replacement.

In the end, NAS units are just one step towards data protection. You could still have a power surge, theft, flood, virus….anything that could take out more than one disk at once. Personally, I only feel truly protected once I have two NAS units running, in separate locations, sync’ing each other’s content nightly.

Haven’t heard of DROBO, sorry!

One thing I forgot to ask about NAS and other RAID systems….

Is there a need to backup a NAS? In other words… if all the drives are in RAID 5 or 10, is the raided nature of the drives itself self-preserving? I’m a crazy nut who can’t sleep at night unless I know there is no way I can lose all my data.

Everyone always says that with RAID, you can lose one or maybe two drives and still be able to reindex after replacement. Is that guaranteed? And I would assume you could have a RAID controller go bad as well.

Have you see the DROBO? I’ve had a chance to use the DROBO and it worked extremely well… it’s big drawback though is it’s only USB interface. However, I believe they are offering DROBOSHARE, a networking device for their drives. They are 4 drive capacity.

Thanks Jon!

Kevin

Thanks so much for the great blog post about NAS. I purchased a Video Editing Workstation from you guys (best purchase I ever made), with 4 internal HD’s and I use two external drives totaling a combined 3 TB. Nearly half of that is backup of course… so really I’m 1.5 TB of working space right now, and I’m nearly filled up.

Because my company has migrated completely to HD video production, our demands on storage is great.

I would really like to learn more about these NAS systems such as the SS4200-E. Looking at the specs at Intel’s website, it seems that it only accepts 4 HD’s, so I would suspect the working space would be well under 4TB for a raid 5 or 10???

My concerns are that I need to have 8+ TB of space in a NAS, simply because of video storage.

Would Puget be able to offer a puget-fan such as myself some NAS options that are inline with the reliability, performance and feature-set of the SS4200-E but on a bit larger scale storage-wise? Or is there options for using multiple SS4200-E’s connected to one PC? I’d definitely be interested in getting started with a NAS system if it all was possible for our storage requirements!

Thanks again for the great blog. One of my favorite things about you guys is your depth of knowledge and willingness to share it!

Take care,
Kevin