Naive question: what is benefit of NAS if already running Sage on a Windows machine?

[t4uecker]

hi there -

a friend of mine (who isn't a sagetv user) recently bought a nas drive and was raving about it. he liked it so much that he suggested that i look into buying one. it sounded appealing, but i'm not sure how it improves or relates to my current configuration.

i have a windows 7 computer with a couple of hefty esata drives attached to my network and that's the machine that sagetv is running on. since that computer is always on, i also use it as a general purpose server for storing shared files and backing up my other computers.

what would a nas add? would it be faster to read/write to the nas than to the esata drives hanging off the pc running sage?

i know it's a naive question but would appreciate some basic advice anyway.

tu

[stevech]

I've made this argument many times. If you have an always-on PC (windows or Linux), you have a NAS that's far superior to the low cost NASes, most of which have a 500MHz CPU.

There is an argument that some have a very fine application suite and management UI, e.g., Synology and QNAP. - take a look at those vendors' on-line demos.

I do have a small low performance single-drive NAS on the LAN. It's purpose is 3rd order backup. Grab and run if I have to evacuate as I did once for a brush fire. But an eSATA would do better at this.

See NAS reviews on
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php

[mayamaniac]

I think it's for people with large amount of data and they want the best way to protect the data. And data redundancy is the answer, so they run a dedicated NAS with unRAID or some sort of Raid 5 solution.

I'm with you and run my server 24/7 for years so never needed a NAS. I just backup data once in a while. I find that if I keep my drives well ventilated and replace them after a couple of years, three years at most, then there's very low chance of drive failures. This method has worked well for me over the last 5 years or so.

[stevech]

The old mantra is: RAID is NOT a backup.
If the file system gets garbled or if the proprietary RAID controller fails, or other failures, you lose everything. It happens often.

I use RAID1 mirroring just to protect somewhat from drive failure as I've had so many fail in the past. Been running a pair of 500GB Western Digital drives in RAID1 for a long time now. Good drives are getting better. I wonder about Hitachi. And every manufacturer seems to have a lemon product now and then. It just seems to me that it's less so with WD.

So with 2TB disks so cheap, and spare SATA ports (USB2 is too slow), backup to a separate file system with automation is needed, IMO, for any RAIDn.

I wonder, never tried it, if RAID1 mirrored disk (NTFS or a Linux format) really do mount and boot and so on when pulled out of the RAID pair.

[SWKerr]

I had someone comment awhile back about having problems with his Mac mounting the windows share but other than something like that I don'e know what a NAS would get you if your server is always one anyway.

I run a Raid 5 setup with a SSD boot drive but I also have a dedicated backup drive in the server that is not part of the raid array. I don't backup everything just the stuff I consider critical weekly. That way if I do something stupid I still have a copy of how is looked last week. I just use synctoy to keep the folders in sync. Every once in awhile I will take an external backup and leave that drive a work. (In case of fire)

A NAS would do nothing for me.

[PiX64]

i woudld strongly suggest unraid for many reasons. here is my setup:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...773#post452773

[sandor]

One benefit of a separate NAS is that it has one purpose - serve files. Especially on my mixed network, having a windows machine as a server has always been a little iffy.

The NAS also got my hardware RAID 6 and an 8 bay compact, well ventilated case - much better than i could have done building something myself (though i did get the 0 TB version, and shopped around for drives) I was going on 180 days uptime till i had to move

I'm not one that has unused PC cases, etc sitting around, and have been burned by software raid (and pseudo-hardware raid cards) prior, so i wanted the real deal. regardless of NAS vs. PC server, the consolidation of data is wonderful - sage server, my laptop and my wife's laptop all seamlessly backup to the NAS, and i can rsync the NAS anywhere i want.

[wayner]

My solution is to run Sage on W7 and to also have a WHS (V1) machine that was my former Sage server that is now my backup Sage server as well as main file server for non-media files, web server and client backup. Even if my W7 Sage server dies I can have everything running (except new recording capabilities and recently recorded TV) with just restarting my Sage extenders and switching Sage servers.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by t4uecker

i have a windows 7 computer with a couple of hefty esata drives attached to my network and that's the machine that sagetv is running on. since that computer is always on, i also use it as a general purpose server for storing shared files and backing up my other computers.

That is the key phrase. Since you don't mind leaving your Sage Server on 24/7 (just like me....any many others), a NAS may be redundant.

A couple reasons you might/maybe want to run a NAS in the future.

1) You run out of space or SATA ports on your current Sage box to plug in HDD's.
2) In light of #1, you want to save some electricity since some NAS's don't need to run 24/7 like your Sage server, or could perhaps spin down drives that are not in use.
3) You have performance problems with your Sage server recording shows while feeding files at the same time - or want to keep your recordings/videos separate from your other home files.
4) Want better data protection, like RAID x, that your current server may not support.

There may be some tertiary reasons, like a given NAS has some special feature which cannot be duplicated on a generic Windows box (unlikely), but those are most of them.