NAS enclosure

[jfish]

looking for a relatively realible NAS enclosure, SATA or IDE that will allow me to set security for users on the NAS itself (not Windows security)

seen plenty of EBay but not sure how realible they are.

will be used within a small office - around 5 users to share share documents but security is important.

 

[techquest]

What kind of budget do you have in mind? Ther's a lot out there but you get what you pay for.

 

[Captin]

You could just use an old pc and run freenas on it, it has lots of security features.

 

[jfish]

What kind of budget do you have in mind? Ther's a lot out there but you get what you pay for.

around 50 quid maximum

 

[jfish]

You could just use an old pc and run freenas on it, it has lots of security features.

was my original idea, but the person who wants this doesnt want to setup another PC and wants a standalone NAS unit to connect to the network.

 

[Captin]

You dont need a full setup, once you've setup freenas you access it remotely, like a NAS enclosure. There is no difference, just the PC may be a little bigger unless you buy a small case. The freenas can be setup anywhere, even at home, then taken into it's final resting place, just like a NAS. You dont even have to install freenas as it will run from a CD or a USB flash drive. But you can install it to the first hard drive.

Pund for pound you would get much more for your money building a small pc than you would uying a NAS box an populating it, and there's expantion for the future too, most microATX motherboards will take 4 or 6 hard drives (providing there isnt a CD-rom taking up one). A NAS enclosure that will take as many would be twice the price. I havent looked on ebay but the cheapest 4 bay NAS enclosure on microdirect is £262 and thats unpopulated.

 

[jfish]

You dont need a full setup, once you've setup freenas you access it remotely, like a NAS enclosure. There is no difference, just the PC may be a little bigger unless you buy a small case. The freenas can be setup anywhere, even at home, then taken into it's final resting place, just like a NAS. You dont even have to install freenas as it will run from a CD or a USB flash drive. But you can install it to the first hard drive.

Pund for pound you would get much more for your money building a small pc than you would uying a NAS box an populating it, and there's expantion for the future too, most microATX motherboards will take 4 or 6 hard drives (providing there isnt a CD-rom taking up one). A NAS enclosure that will take as many would be twice the price. I havent looked on ebay but the cheapest 4 bay NAS enclosure on microdirect is £262 and thats unpopulated.

will have a look - I guess freenas could be run on a laptop

 

[Captin]

will have a look - I guess freenas could be run on a laptop

I cant see the point of using a laptop as a NAS device though.

To administer freenas you just use any pc/laptop and use the browser, IE or firefox to log into the freeNAS setup pages.

But to start off with you would need to connect a keybord & monitor to the NAS box. Once setup then the keyboard and monitor can be disconnected.

You can even use freenas as a printer server, last time I used it we had 7 PC all sharing files and the same printer.

FreeNAS is an embedded open source NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD, supporting the following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target) and UPnP.

It supports Software RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T/email monitoring with a WEB configuration interface (from m0n0wall).

FreeNAS can be installed on Compact Flash/USB key, hard drive or booted from LiveCD.

Need only 64MB on media (flash compliant) and 256Mb of RAM
Multiple arch: i386 or amd64
Full Web Management Interface (same as NAS enclosures)

Extra Features,
Bittorent client
iTunes/DAAP server
Webserver

http://freenas.org/doku.php

 

[TheCheekyMonkey]

You dont need a full setup, once you've setup freenas you access it remotely, like a NAS enclosure. There is no difference, just the PC may be a little bigger unless you buy a small case. The freenas can be setup anywhere, even at home, then taken into it's final resting place, just like a NAS. You dont even have to install freenas as it will run from a CD or a USB flash drive. But you can install it to the first hard drive.

Pund for pound you would get much more for your money building a small pc than you would uying a NAS box an populating it, and there's expantion for the future too, most microATX motherboards will take 4 or 6 hard drives (providing there isnt a CD-rom taking up one). A NAS enclosure that will take as many would be twice the price. I havent looked on ebay but the cheapest 4 bay NAS enclosure on microdirect is £262 and thats unpopulated.

ive used freenas a few times to build NAS`s excellant, and definately much better than a prebuilt one, however its just getting your head round building one (its not that hard really) but definately faster and more capabilities and cheaper than anything you can buy.