Hardware Fault Tolerant NAS?

[Scouse]

So, I'm idly thinking about NAS storage (hot swappable preferably) and I've not looked hard but are there any solutions out there that don't kill the bank but will still run if a controller fails?

At the mo, I can't really see many benefits over running my 6Tb of storage in my PC on WDC greens. They turn themselves off when they're not being used and everything's local and can be streamed wherever. If it goes to tits it's NTFS and I can recover everything reasonably easily.

What am I missing? Any suggestions?

 

[Moriath]

Missing the power use of a pc over a nas. Imo. Maybe you can raid your greens?

 

[TdC]

it so happens I'm redoing my server / storage device chumlar. I've bought a SAS/SATA HBA (which are cheap as chips compared to RAID cards) which will be controlling 8 WD Red's for me. ZFS will be the file system in a RAIDZ, and I have some SSD's on a dedicated RAID card for a cache. Server itself is built up around one of the smaller Xeon's with built in GFX and also 32GB of RAM.

All ridiculous overkill ofc, but then I do run some 10 VM's on it of which one monitors all my kit and another is my dedicated development box. If it were a true NAS, I think I would miss the flexibility I have now, and I enjoy dicking about with it. Imo that's the choice right there: if you enjoy faffing about, build a dedicated rig. If you don't give a hoot, buy a NAS. Given your statement of hardware fault tolerance, you can handle a bit of a faff. Tbh I'd get some small second hand server chassis from some hardware refurbisher and just take it from there. With two HBA's you could mirror your data drives. Some kind of (small) UPS to shut your system down gracefully and you're golden.

 

[Scouse]

Cheers Teedlar. I think I'm past giving a f00k about tinkering that much. I'd be happy to buy outright (maybe).

What'll prolly happen is that I look at solutions and just go "woah! that's a hell of a lot of accomodation for biking weekends" and leave it at that.

But you never know

 

[smurkin]

If you have a back-up concern, it might be easier/cheaper to buy portable hard drives and back up your bulk data manually and to stick with your pc. Its considerably less faff. Especially if you have a router which can map a USB drive.

NAS's are good for staying on all of the time, having a small footprint, arrays/backups, and serving when you are out of the house. If you keep your pcs on all of the time, there's probably not much advantage in a NAS.

 

[Zarjazz]

So, I'm idly thinking about NAS storage (hot swappable preferably) and I've not looked hard but are there any solutions out there that don't kill the bank but will still run if a controller fails?

Dual controller puts you at Enterprise level hardware (and pricing). I'm not aware of any Home / SMB NAS's with that feature - someone correct me if I'm wrong!

If you really want that then a custom build-it-yourself would seem like the only option. Closest you can find retail is something like Dual DOM so if the primary NAS O/S flash device gets corrupt there's a backup available to boot from.