Joining the club
Have 2 Nas (kind of). First one is a Western Digital World II 2x 1TB done in RAID1 configuration. Used for my media files
The second one is my old PC which I dual boot either in Linux or Windows. 4x 1TB HDD, used to torrent (using Web UI) + store my important files.

Currently looking for a UPS for the PC Nas.

currently eyeing on Synology 212J....

hi , what is the price of this 2-bay Nas now in M'sia?

If not mistaken, last I saw, it was about 1k

ohh..will it worth getting it from Amazon? it cost lower (w/o shipping cost)
http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation..._pr_product_top

does FreeNas support sharing files between pc and mac? ty

If not mistaken, they do not deliver to Malaysia. Unless you use a non Malaysian address

Yes

Is there a good processor that can operate 24/7? Atom? Pentium 4 ?

guys, considering your NAS is connected 24/7 to the internet what security precaution are you guys utilising? anybody using a separate built just for a IDS implementation?


Edit: I am a newbie in network security so be kind

This post has been edited by CocoMonGo: Jan 8 2012, 02:57 PM

The NAS OS have built in security. For synology or Qnap.

Yeah but those are usually just a basic firewall where we usually depend on the built-in features (stateful packet inspection) or at the most iptables (or their equal).

I was reading this article regarding IDS hardware when the author said he realised how many probes he was getting on his system and this made him worried. I run comodo on my com and with it some sort of intrusion protection system. I too notice the high number of probes to my laptop. So arent you guys worried about the possible data compromise?

Article on IDS built here


BTW ozak, maybe I missed it, but what are the security features of QNAP and synology that you mentioned? I couldnt find a difinitive answer on their website

just a question as I am damn new to NAS..

was eyeing on synology, dlink and buffalo,

synology having the more expensive price, whereas dlink and buffalo are having also the same price...

synology 1 bay already cost RM500, but dlink and buffalo 2bay is less than RM300

my question is, I planned to have a NAS server to help me download torrent, and it come to attention that buffalo torrent is running on UTorrent interface..

need advise which so i get and why?

It come with the OS NAS run on linux. But I have no idea what security feature it have. I m not much worried about it. I have running it 24/7 for 2yrs without any problem with the security.

I bought a WD MyBook Live 2TB NAS a few days ago. Worst investment I ever made. It takes 2 days to transfer my photography collection (45GB in all) from my notebook to the HDD, both attached to the same home LAN.

The device is running the latest firmware some more.

I found that if you back up a single file, its fast enough. However if your files are in nested folders say 3 or 4 levels, you die standing. Just to delete one single zero-byte file using Windows explorer or OS X Finder can take you *hours,* and the file explorer freezes while it tries to figure out how to delete one file.

I scanned through WD's customer support website for help. Seems that lots of ppl have similar complaints and strangely enough, the company has been unresponsive to the angry posts. Biggest letdown I ever had. (Now my WD Live has become more of an expensive paperweight than anything.)

need some advise on xtream etrayz....

any pro mind give some good opinion?

any user of Dlink DNS-320?

what OS is it running btw.? any chance to reformat the HDD and run a different OS and see..

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Added on January 17, 2012, 11:43 pmyeah i wanted to know too if any forummer here using it currently...share with us your experience..what's the performance like etc.

This post has been edited by numbertwo: Jan 17 2012, 11:43 PM

I'm accessing the WD MyBook Live from 3 machines at home running OS X Lion, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. I get the same slow NAS performance from each one, ruling out an OS issue. The NAS itself runs its own OS independent of the other machines on the LAN so I'm not sure if reformatting it will make a difference. Its brand new anyway, not even 6 days old, so I am hesitant to do any tinkering on it just yet.

I read somewhere that if you transfer files to the NAS over wi-fi (802.11n), it will be slow. My router is the standard Unifi D-Link router (orange one) which only has 100base-T ports, definitely not gigabit ethernet. The article said if you use a wired connection instead of wi-fi, it will speed up the transfer and so I tried. Result: Absolutely NO DIFFERENCE whether I used wi-fi and wired connection to the router. The transfer speed to the NAS was the same, ~250kBps. That's 2 days to transfer 45GB.

I read a bunch of reviews before I bought this product and was impressed to see some reviewers claim 45.5MBps read/write speeds. In reality I only got 0.25Mbps on a standard home Unifi setup. That's almost 200 times slower than advertised!

If you'd like to find out how other non-Unifi WD MyBook Live users are suffering, Google up "wd mybook live slow" and see for yourself.

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A sidenote. Buying a NAS is like buying a Ferrari. They'll tell you what its capable of on a race track. If you buy one and drive it on a kampung road, you'll be disappointed. So before you commit on the numbers, make sure you've got the same racetrack at home the testers have (like a gigabit ethernet setup) and not a 2-lane road. Lesson learned.

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Added on January 19, 2012, 1:40 amStill on the topic of slow WD MyBook Live (MBL) NAS, I have found couple of workarounds which can save you many hours of transfer time. These are the methods I have tried.

Option 1
Zip everything up into one zip file, then transfer it over to the NAS. I was able to transfer a zip file containing 400-files in under a minute. This would have easily taken about 15-20 minutes if I were to use the normal drag-and-drop method for 400 individual files of ~300kb each.

You can unzip the file once its copied to the NAS. This will take time as the actual decompression is still done by your PC's CPU but for some strange reason, it is still faster than transferring uncompressed files to the NAS. At least that's my experience when I tried it for the 400-file zip.

The reason why zipping is faster, I suspect, is because MBL only needs to handle one incoming file header (the .zip file) rather than hundreds. If your unit can spend up to 2 minutes thinking for every incoming header as mine did, it makes a huge difference.


Option 2
If you'd rather not zip your files, try transferring them uncompressed in batches of 20 or 30 files. The MBL's CPU struggles if you try to copy and paste 100's of files at once, as I tried with my mp3 collection. It'll freeze for 15 minutes to figure out how much space to reserve, spends 15 mins writing zero-byte files, takes 15 more minutes to write actual data, and then take another 5-10 more minutes to finish up. The more files there are in your destination folder, the worse it gets.


Option 3
Use ssh to transfer your files to your MBL. Transfers are lightning fast when you do it via command line BUT DON'T TRY THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW LINUX. If you do, you can Google up how to do it.


But if you are a normal user, try to limit the no of files per folder to less than a thousand, and limit nested folders to no more than 3 or 4 levels deep. Otherwise be prepared to spend hours waiting just to transfer or delete a few files.

The more I think about it, the more its starting to look like the MBL is suffering from a file management problem than a network bottleneck. This likely points to a firmware issue and/or the MBL's 800Mhz CPU, which is slower than its direct competitor, Buffalo Linkstation Pro's 1.6GHz CPU. Can't think of any other reason why my old Ubuntu notebook performs up to 50x faster as a file server on the same LAN compared to the MBL.

You might have a better experience with WD's MyBook Live that's plugged into a Unifi router than I have and if you do, please share your setup. Its entirely possible I may have put it together wrong.

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Added on January 19, 2012, 12:14 pmUsing WD MyBook Live as a Time Machine (for Mac users)

Performance is decent. My MacBook typically transfers around 50GB of data to the Time Machine (located on the NAS) during every backup. So far this process has taken no more than 3-4 hours to complete which is bearable.

This is in stark contrast to having to take 2 days to transfer the same amount of data if you used the file explorer drag-and-drop technique from PC to MyBook Live. Why the speed difference? I can only suspect its because Apple Time Machine takes control of file management, again reinforcing my suspicion that its WD's poor file management that's killing the MBL's performance and not the network.

This post has been edited by thumbwrap: Jan 19 2012, 12:14 PM

@thumbwrap

or you can get a REAL NAS NAS eg mid range qnap and synology comes to mind.. cost more.. higher performance..

you pay for what u get