[?] NAS vs. Server

[M A V I C]

My Firewire enclosures keep giving me more grief. Now one of them wont daisy chain, though it works fine off of both ports. And my G5 only has two FW400 ports. The one in the back I use for a HD, external burner and scanner. The one in the front I use for my video camera. (I'm thinking maybe another solution would be a FW PCI card.)

I've been looking at NAS, but they seem really expensive for what you get. I could build a cheap PC for less than that.

I would be using this for my nightly and weekly backup, as well as general storage. A RAID1 would be nice, but not required. USB might come in handy if I connected some external drives to it, but that's not required either. 10/100 would be nice, though gig e even nicer. The only common thing I see in NAS that isn't acceptable, is a 250GB limit.

What are the main advantages of NAS over a standard server? Any suggestions on which NAS to get? TIA

[bryanus]

I would go the server route. For just file serving and backup, get any G4 that supports gigabit (Digital Audio 466 or Dual 450 or higher), install an ACard AEC-6880M RAID card (suports RAID 1 Mirror), then attach your drives to it. Mirrored performance off the card equals standard single drive setups and twice as fast as OSX's software RAID. Set the whole thing up with a Gigabit switch and connect remotely with Apple Remote Desktop and ditch the display altogether. This is how mine is set up.

[mattkime]

Daisy chaining firewire drives has never been a particularly good idea. Yes, its supposed to work but its never worked quite right.

What are your requirements exactly?

I'd avoid getting a NAS. I think people get them for their simplicity. With a little bit of digital handiness you're much better off with an old Mac running as a server.

[mattkime]

I don't see much of a benefit for RAID 1. RAID 1 is mainly for uptime - if a drive goes down your machine keep running. Otherwise you're a little bit better off with two backup drives for the money.

[M A V I C]

I currently have a 300GB HD in a FW enclosure that has two partitions. The first is just as an archive. I keep a lot of non-essential files on there. It was used more when I had smaller HDs in my main system.

The second partition is for weekly and nightly backups of my Users folder and of all of my working files.

Whatever I setup would be used to replace the above. Since I do keep some files on it that aren't backed up elsewhere, I'm thinking a RAID1 would be a good idea.

Something networked appeals to me because I am slowly taking over part of the garage for office expansion. This area is used for working on machines or other stuff that needs space but I don't want it to eat up space in my office.

[smacks]

I posted a topic a few weeks ago RE: this same issue, and as much as I thought a NAS box was the solution, mattkime and others convinced me to use my old G4 Sawtooth as a fileserver.

I added a cheap SATA controller, an inexpensive GigE card, 3 new SATA drives, and a copy of SuperDuper for easy drive-to-drive backups. For about $300 US , it just works flawlessly, and was far cheaper (and faster) than the most basic of NAS boxes—the "affordable" NAS devices didn't have GigE.

I think the only real advantages to a NAS device are power consumption, footprint, RAID 5 capability (Check out NAS Yellowmachine and Enfrant boxes...), and ease-of-setup for the less techno-centric. There are certainly not cheap.

Personally, I loved being being able to put this older machine into service, instead of the landfill...

Cheers, J

[M A V I C]

A friend of mine got this on sale for $300:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6822329001

That seems more reasonable to me. The only old macs I have around to do this with are beige non-G3's.

[smacks]

$300 is a steal for that machine... You'll have to add a few SATA drives, of course, but that should still keep the total cost around $500...

J

[dotman]

I'm sick of flacky firewire drives as well. I'm recoving another drive that was no longer recogniged by my g5 as we speak. 2nd time in less than two months. Is it the case? and don't get me started on daisy chaining. Not to hijack, but what would be a solid osx firewire card for my dual g5?

dot.

[M A V I C]

Mac method
G4 733 off ebay $150-200ish
SATA card $60

So I'm looking at a little bit less for a Mac and an expansion card. If I can get that NAS for $300 though... seems like a better deal in that it's more self contained and less to maintain.