Posts Tagged ‘nas’

Review of Lacie Bigdisc

January 22nd, 2011

In short:

Fail.
A storage device with 3 single point of failure is a no no.  Combine it with bad quality and it is a cheat.

Longer:

I cannot recall the exact name of the device but it was a 1TB NAS for about 300€ at the time, 3-4 years ago.

According to the specs it had an open source OS with two ordinary ext(2 or 3) discs.  That sounded good for me.  Open source OS meant that there was a possibility to tinker with it and knowledge out-in-the-world for discrepancies.  Further if the hardware would fail I could always dock the disks into *nix machine and if one disc failed I could always get half the data from the other.

This  was Totally wrong.

You see, Lacies support told me the OS was on one of the disks.  So if a disk failed, the machine wouldn’t start.  The machine was also setup in such a way that if the other disk failed nothing would start either.  Finally the setup of the discs was in such a way that if removed from the device the data couldn’t be understood, Ext2/3 or not.  To make the construction even worse, as if it wasn’t enough from the start, support told me that the disks and the OS and the machine was setup in the factory so there was no guaranteed way to get anything the disks runing in a new machine either.

I had it replaced with another unit that failed the same way.  Incidentally a friend of mine had one too.  It failed.  He had it replaced.  And the replacement failed again.

Having gotten 4 bad Lacie bigdiscs  is possible as sheer bad luck.  But the construction with 3 single point of failures is not coincidence.

Review of Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2110 1TB

January 16th, 2011

Just installed a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2110 1TB.

+ Small.

+ 2 disks with a variety of RAID.
– Unfortunately with a proprietary solution called Xraid which we know nothing about.  This is considered Not Good for a device that manges data.  What if a disk fails?  Is it readable again?  Noone knows since Xraid is proprietary.

+/- Outside transformator.  Make it easier to place but one more thing lying around.  For me it was good.

+ Easy to reach disc bays.

( – Noisy.
Noisy like a fan running at full speed.  Always.  Netgear themselves have written that the developers took the drive to the bedroom to make sure it was quiet.  My comment: 0ne developer was deaf and the other had the device turned off. It might be faulty unit I have.
UPDATE: replaced the unit without any problem and the new one was quieter.  There was some error where the machine didn’t recognise the fan. )  I won’t say it is quiet because it isn’t.  But it isn’t noisy.

– The hard drives that came with the machine has gotten louder.  Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of them and am too lazy to open up and check.

+ Dropped some movies into the folder called media.  Started an xbmc client on a laptop, browsed the LAN, chose, and the  movies streamed.

+ At first glance (I haven’t researched) the site/forum/users at readynas.com seems good.  Having a user base and a community is good.

+  Supports Time machine for Mac.  But it only supports 1 client since the user name is hard coded.

– Slow web admin interface.

– Crashes once in a while.

+ Supports dyndns but only with a 3 letter suffix.  E.g.: not myname.dyndns.info.  I guess it is the 3 letter suffix that is the culprit at least; I got …dyndns.com working.

+ It can report errors both through built in SMTP server and through logging in to gmail and send from there.

+ Easy to setup backup.  Just connect a drive to USB, or find a windows share or an FTP or some other endpoints I cannot remember now.  Choose weekdays to backup and which folders (has some choosings) and whether to backup all or inrementally (and overwrite once a week or so).  Seems a bit slow though.  Can report automatically both errors and success per email.