Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the latter part here.
I have data that I never want to lose or have to recreate: photos, music, documents, and a wealth of other stuff. I’ve considered backing up to DVD but I’ve had so many back experiences with them (another CRC error, you say?), that it’s not an option. Instead a RAID array seemed like the obvious choice.
If you want a decent personal NAS solution, all roads lead to the Infrant NV+. It’s quiet, powerful, and has excellent RAID options. The proprietary X-RAID option gives hot-swapping and hot-expansion of the disk array, and provides single-disk failure at the cost of just one disk.
So if you start with 2 * 500Gb drives (as I did), you get 500Gb of effective storage and it doesn’t matter if one drive blows up. Want more room? Shove in another 500Gb drive without switching off, or any downtime for the array to rebuild, and it still doesn’t matter if one of them blows up. Upgrade the size of the drives one at a time, and you don’t have to rebuild the array from a remote source.
Other interesting features they keep quiet include the DAAP server (for iTunes compatible streaming music), the UPnP server (for different av streams), the rsync server (for anything else) and one-button backups to attachable storage.
My only grumbles are the NFS transfer speeds are a little low (being worked on, apparently), and no shell access (if I could put a torrent client on there, I’d be very happy).
All in all, a great piece of kit.