Netgear Stora NAS

 

Warning:  Nerd Content ahead!

Since I work helping companies manage their enterprise storage environment, I tend to be very anal with storing my data at home.  It needs to be resilient, redundant, and fast. Why?  I’m retarded. Most of the time, I spend more than enough money on something I have to manage and tweak constantly.  No inexpensive NAS device has had all the features I wanted in an embedded device – until now.

A few weeks ago, I decided to try Netgear Stora, and I’m very impressed with it.  Firstly, it’s a 1TB NAS device for $200 bucks that performs.  I have a gig network at home, and Stora works very well with its 1gbit net interface.

It can support USB drives directly and will auto RAID1 if you install a second drive inside it, which was the main reason I tried it.

What’s so lovely is that it has a web interface for file manipulation that can be accessed easily from the internet. Who cares, right?  While the 1gbit network is fast, direct hard drive access is much faster.  Usually, a NAS device has a computer available to upload the data from other disks onto the NAS device.  With direct USB disk support and a web interface, I could migrate 700Gb of data much faster than having a computer as the middle man.  Since the Stora was doing the copying, I didn’t have to worry about network hiccups and file share weirdness with larger files.  Nice.

I just found out that while Netgear says the file system is propriety, I was able to mount the internal mirrored drive on my computer by mounting it as a XFS filesystem within a ubuntu VM instance.    AWESOME.   If the Stora dies, I can still get to my data.

Optional RAID1, Great Net Performance, USB Disk Support, Internet support, Media Server support for my PS3 – $200 bucks. Good times.

Here’s  a demo of it: