| George A. Theall on 6 Jan 2007 01:17:49 -0000 |
|
On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 11:09:58AM -0500, Jeff Watson wrote:
> I am planning on getting either a Network storage drive, or an external
> harddrive. Now I am certain I will be able to interface with the USB
> External Hard Drive but i have never connected to an Network Access
> Storage device via linux. Does anyone have any experience/specific
> models/ suggestions as to which option to persue?
Pros:
- external USB drives are DIRT CHEAP.
- you can move them from one computer to another as needed and
possibly even boot off them if set up correctly and the host
computer's BIOS supports it.
Cons:
- the machine it's attached to will always need to be on and
accessible from the network.
- slower access speed (480Mb/s for USB 2.0 vs 10/100/1000 Gb/s for
a NAS device).
- I don't think any offer support for RAID.
- I suspect it offers little or no control over the disk in
terms of DMA, write-caching, etc, but I'm not sure.
Buffalo Tech has a range of Linux-based NAS devices of varying degrees
of hackability; eg, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_network-attached_storage_series
I recently ordered a Kurobox ($149, http://www.kurobox.com/), an
embedded device targetted at Linux hackers. When it arrives next week,
I hope to stick an IDE drive in it, put Gentoo on it, and use it for
various services on my LAN. I expect you could easily run Samba or NFS
on it and turn it into a NAS device. You'd be limited to just one disk
(ie, no RAID), but given that you're considering an external USB drive
it sounds like that's not a concern for you.
George
--
theall@tifaware.com
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