Nas newbie advice

[dilly1066]

Hi guys, debating which route to go down, been thinking of a nas drive for a while now, wanting to back up my pc,s and laptops and my xtreamer ultra with all movies and tv shows on, plus with movies etc been on nas drive anyone in house can watch what ever when ever,
Then i seen the deal on the hp microserver n54l which basically costs 100 110 quid after cashback, which im believing can do pretty much nas stuff but abit more like setting up sickbeard etc, first nas drive i will have but would rather get the right thing in the first place and stick with it, nas drive seems easy to set up , not sure about the hp , raid configs aswell ive never messed with them so not sure if nas or hp offer different raid set ups or not, i really have no idea which is best one to get, anyone any thoughts ? Thanks

 

[Abu Baniaz]

Also...

Is it possible to only have certain volumes in a raid array (mirroring)? Not everything needs to be backed up.

How does one setup different access rights to the volumes? You don't want everything shared especially when you have little ones about.

 

[oneman]

just set up a N54L today, using W2K12 server but you could just as easily use windows 7 though I would advise putting in another stick of 2GB of DDR3 memory.

For RAID you have two options, the N54L supports RAID 0 and 1 through BIOS (mirroring or striping). In this instance the operating system only sees one drive and BIOS handles the mirroring of the drives.

The other option is to use software RAID and windows 7 supports RAID 0 and 1. If you want RAID 5 then you will need to use one of the windows server variants or one of the Linux variants such as FreeNAS. Its totally up to you how much and how many disks get added to an array, you can even mix and match raid 0, 1 and 5 on the same hard drive. Of course you can set up different shares with different permissions so set up a family share which is unlocked and then a second adult only share which is locked down by user ID.

The only limitation in windows is that you can't add the boot partition (the C to software arrays. So I suggest keeping the 250GB drive that is supplied as the operating system and then install extra disks for actual data storage.

BTW, if you are installing Windows I recommend this BIOS upgrade, not only does it unlock SATA 5 to support AHCI so you can use 5 hard drives, it also installs 2.2 SLIC so you can activate windows using DAZ loader.

Download HP ProLiant Microserver_O41-(07.29.2011)+AHCI-Mod-var3_Dell22_.rar from Sendspace.com - send big files the easy way

 

[dilly1066]

Hi oneman, do you think that hp was a good option then ? Ive read you can set it up like a nas and still have other options, can you add drives to it and take drives out with out it affecting things ? Or do you really need to buy the amount of drives you want with it and put them all in together ? I was thinking of a nas drive 10 or so minutes ago but now unsure again lol, big thing for the hp at the minute is the price, if i decided its not for me i shouldnt lose much money at all,

 

[oneman]

Hi oneman, do you think that hp was a good option then ? Ive read you can set it up like a nas and still have other options, can you add drives to it and take drives out with out it affecting things ? Or do you really need to buy the amount of drives you want with it and put them all in together ? I was thinking of a nas drive 10 or so minutes ago but now unsure again lol, big thing for the hp at the minute is the price, if i decided its not for me i shouldnt lose much money at all,

The device takes standard 3.5" SATA drives including 4TB ones, it comes with a 250GB drive to get you started and you can add more as and when you need them up to a maximum of 5 (4 in the drives bays and 1 in the optical bay). The only thing I would advise is you are planning on RAID 0 or 1 its best to buy matched pairs of drives