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:
Today I experienced a firewire drive failure on my mini. To determine which drive was bad was a bit difficult since the apple profiler does not show serial number information about the drives and the firewire id can change depending on which drive was ready first, etc. After the experience I now have the following steps to take to make this easier in the future. The follow was done after I replaced the bad drive — There also appears to be a Disk Utility issue with disk replacements do I went the terminal window instead.