Pete Lacey’s Weblog

If you’re not a geek, the title of this post refers to “small office/home office network attached storage.” It’s something I’ve been researching for about a year now, looking for just the right product. I think I may finally have found it, which is good, as I was this close to building one myself.

First, a NAS device is little more than a bunch of hard disks accessible from the network. In many ways it’s like having an external USB-based drive that can be more easily shared with others. If you’re in the market for a NAS box, and you run only Windows in your SOHO environment, then there’s a wealth of choices available to you. However, in this household there are two Macs, three Windows machines, and one Linux box, and that, well, that complicates things.

The reason for these complications is that (nearly?) all SOHO NAS devices offer only SMB/CIFS as the means of accessing the device and almost as many use FAT32 as the filesystem format.

Let me explain.

When a hard disk is made ready to use by an operating system it needs to have a filesystem layered on top of it as something to organize the contents of the disk. From a high-level perspective, it is the filesystem that allows for directories and files to exist at all. It’s also the filesystem that controls permissions (if any) on files and directories, that is, who can read/write/delete them. It’s the filesystem that dictates how files can be named, e.g., whether there can be spaces in a name, whether case is meaningful, the maximum length of a file name, whether non-ascii characters (like this ß) can be used, etc. The filesystem does much, much more, but that’s enough for now.

Turns out that FAT32, the filesystem in use for Windows 95, 98, ME, is not much of a filesystem.

In many ways, however, though not in my case, the filesystem in use on a NAS box is immaterial to the user as they never access it directly. Instead a layer of software is in place to export that filesystem onto the network. There are a number of different software products and standards that accomplish this task, each in their own way. One of these is called SMB/CIFS (SMB is the old name, CIFS is the new name). This is the protocol that Microsoft uses. It’s the software that makes “Network Neighborhood” work for you, and mapping remote drives to drive letters, and using printers installed on someone else’s machine or on the network directly.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with CIFS (well, I hear there is, but I don’t know things at that level), except for one important fact — it’s a very Windows-centric technology. While most other operating systems can make use of CIFS this is due solely to the programming and reverse engineering talents of a dedicated group of programmers who have created the open source Samba project. Now don’t get me wrong, Samba is a great piece of technology — some say better than Microsoft’s own implementation — but in the end, it’s not truly native to all of the OS’s I use, and that forces some compromises that I’d rather not need to make.

Other protocols for exposing remote filesystems on the network are:

• AFP: What Apple uses.
• NFS: What a lot of Unix-like systems use, including Linux.
• WebDAV: Using HTTP to expose the filesystem underlying the web server.
• FTP: A standard for reading from and writing too remote filesystems regardless of what type it is.

In my not-so-humble opinion, any NAS Box that claims to address a mixed OS environment needs to support at least CIFS, AFP, and NFS. It should also support WebDAV, FTP, and rsync. If it only supports CIFS, then it’s meant for Windows usage only. Trouble is, most NAS vendors proudly tout their support for OS X and Linux without ever stating that this support is through Samba only.

While having a single disk accessible on the network is good, having multiple disks is better. Why? Because with multiple disks it is possible to configure them as a RAID array. And for those who don’t know, RAID is a means of using multiple disks to speed up and/or make redundant the file write process. In particular, RAID Level 5, which requires three or more disks, provides both speedy writes (striping) and fault tolerance (you can lose a whole drive, slap in a new one, and all of your data will survive).

So here are the things that were important to me in a NAS device:

• Support for SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, WebDAV, and rsync
• Support for a non-FAT32 filesystem, preferably a journaling filesystem like ext3 or XFS.
• Support for RAID Level 5
• Copious amounts of storage
• Halfway decent documentation
• A responsive vendor
• Small footprint (not rack mounted)
• less than $1,000 US

Well, after a lot of trolling through this Interweb thingy, I found a device that meets all of the above requirements: the Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS X6 (site foolishly uses frames, this link goes directly to the product page), and so far so good. There’s a similar model, the ReadyNAS 600, that is really just as good. The primary difference is that the X6 uses a proprietary technology that allows you to add disks incrementally and have the device simply “do the right thing.”

I ordered my X6 from Eaegis.com. They’re obviously a small time operation, but their price was great and I’d read good things about them during my research. I want to stress here that those good things are true. The box was delivered in a timely enough fashion with all the drives pre-loaded. When I needed some tech support on a Friday evening, they contacted me right away and continued working with me through Saturday. Recommended.

The X6 supports gigabit Ethernet, which, while not on my “must have” list, is certainly nice to have. So I also picked up an SMC8508T 10/100/1000 Ethernet switch. I picked this product because it got better write-ups from end users than comparable switches and it supports jumbo frames (good for moving lots of data), which the X6 does as well. My old 4-port 10/100 Netgear hub went in the closet. Oh, and I got a 50 foot length of CAT 6 cable (CAT 6 to handle gigabit Ethernet), this allows me to periodically connect my GigE enabled PowerBook to the wired network and get blazingly fast performance.

Finally, at Infrant’s recommendation, I picked up a uninterruptible power supply, the APC Back-UPS ES 350. It’s pretty generic, but it’s all I need. It’ll provide about 50 minutes of power to the X6 should the power fail.

So is it all wine and roses? Not quite. I had a problem unrelated to the product. I ordered my device with four 250 MB Seagate ATA drives (about 650 GB of usable space after RAID formatting). However, one of the drive’s power cables came unseated during transport. Once corrected for and rebooting (and another few hours of RAID synchronization) all was well. Also, the ReadyNAS devices ship with a Java application called RAIDar. It’s supposed to work cross platform (and probably does) but I couldn’t install it on my Mac. Turns out that the “universal” installer in use (I forget which one) presents a very Windows-like installation scenario, and aftering answer all these un-Mac-like questions, it threw - of all things - a division by zero exception. No worries, though. RAIDar is handy, but not essential, and I installed it on Windows just fine.

The final problem I had concerned interaction with the UPS device. It seems that the air conditioner - in another room but on the same circuit - would draw enough power every time the compressor came on that it would cause the UPS to think that power had disappeared completely - however briefly. The UPS told the ReadyNAS, the ReadyNAS told me (via email), but the ReadyNAS never noticed the “power’s back on” signal, and eventually shut itself down - politely. I posted this issue to the active and helpful Infrant bulletin board (monitored by knowledgeable Infrant employees), and was quickly told to download the latest (beta) firmwaren, which indeed solved the problem. Four weeks later, and it just keeps on humming.

In short, if your looking for a truly cross-platform, RAID enabled, NAS device that doesn’t break the bank, take a look at Infrant’s products. As the Tom’s Hardware review says, they won’t win any beauty contests but they do work.

Next, configuring automatic backup for Windows and OS X.