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Networked Storage in the Home
May 23, 2005 Your Data from Any PC Network attached storage (NAS) is huge in corporate IT functions, but NAS hasn't been on the radar for many home users. We've touched on home network storage here at ET, including our reviews of the But now we're starting to see the first of what will probably be a flood of small devices targeted at homes and small businesses. The D-Link and Ximeta drives were leading indicators, but now companies are coming out with devices that offer more sophisticated features and better performance. Let's take a look at a couple of new entries in the home network storage arena. Each is quite different from the other and fulfills somewhat different needs and budgets.
We used an Athlon 64 system running an nForce4 Ultra chipset, a Netgear gigabit Ethernet hub and CAT6 cabling to test connectivity and performance of these two very different network storage appliances.
Maxtor is the first of the major drive companies to jump into the market for networked home storage appliances. While other companies, like Ximeta and Iomega, offer devices that fill this role, the fact that a major hard drive manufacturer is jumping into the fray says something about the potential acceptance factor among consumers. Maxtor recently started shipping their Shared Storage Drive (SSD), originally announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last winter. Most recently, Western Digital announced their NetCenter network hard drive at this year's E3 Expo.
When you create an account, the quick setup wizard creates a set of private folders, with names like "My Photos," "My Library," and so on. These folders work with Maxtor's "drag-and-drop" feature.
A web interface for managing the drive is also available, and allows for somewhat more granular and advanced management, but the capabilities are still somewhat simple. You cannot change any of the characteristics of the drive—turning off write caching for additional safety, for example.
Internally, the Maxtor drive uses a customized, embedded Linux running a version of the Samba file sharing software, which allows Linux systems to be integrated with Windows networks. You can access the drive one of two ways: as a standard Windows share, or using Maxtor's "Drag-and-Sort" method. The Shared Storage Drive seems very protective of individual user information. All private folder sets must be created as password-protected folders, so casual access to the folders is restricted, even if the folders are created as writeable by anyone.
When you first set up user accounts, drag-and-sort is enabled by default. The setup wizard places an icon on your desktop using your account name. You can use it like a standard drive shortcut by double-clicking and opening up the folder. What's more interesting, though, is to simply drag files over the icon and release them. Software built into the Shared Storage Drive will then attempt to sort them into the various pre-created folders. It's rather eerie watching files appear in the account root folder, and then disappear. The SSD software attempts to categorize the files by type, and then places them in appropriate folders. For example, word processing, PDF, and spreadsheet files go into the "My Documents" folder, while executables and batch files are placed in the "My Software" folder. While it's really only a first level kind of organization, it does simplify life a bit.
You can also create and manage folders as they were standard Windows shared folders. You'll have to manually set permissions, but if you're comfortable doing that, it's pretty straightforward. You do give up the ability to use the drag-and-sort capability on folders you create outside the normal user folder structure, however.
The SSD offers a flexible set of power management settings, with five settings for powering down the drive, ranging from 15 minutes to two hours. That's about the only option for configuring the built-in drive, other than upgrading the firmware. We were slightly disappointed that the SSD only supported 10/100 fast Ethernet. It would be interesting to see this device with either 802.11g "turbo" wireless networking or gigabit Ethernet for faster access.
The Shared Storage Drive has two USB ports which can be used to connect USB devices ranging from hard drives to USB memory keys to printers. We attached an external USB hard drive and printer, and both worked flawlessly. There was no configuration needed on the part of the SSD itself, though you can choose to format the external drive as needed. We attached an old HP DeskJet 970, then browsed for it as a network printer through the normal Windows process. Setting up the printer took about five minutes.
In the end, the Maxtor Shared Storage drive is about as simple as it gets. You do give up a little flexibility for that simplicity, but for many small businesses or home users, that's a fair tradeoff. If the Maxtor Shared Storage Drive represents simplicity at the cost of flexibility, the Infrant ReadyNAS offers powerful networked RAID solutions suitable for small businesses, departmental storage, or home users with sophisticated networks and high capacity storage needs.
Infrant is a startup headquartered in Fremont, California. Its original goal was to develop a custom processor for use in compact, relatively low cost networked RAID systems. The fruit of its labor is the IT3107 Network Storage Processor, which uses a 32-bit embedded SPARC core. The NSP offers full support for a variety of complex RAID setups in a single chip solution. Coupled with the company's RAIDiator operating system, the IT3107 brings sophisticated RAID technology at price points lower than similar hardware from other companies.
However, like many startups with new ideas, they ran into some initial market resistance, so the company decided to build an actual product around the NSP. The result is the ReadyNAS 600, a compact, mini-ITX form factor system that supports up to four hard drives. Infrant's designers have integrated their NSP onto a Mini-ITX motherboard with PC2700 DDR memory, a VIA USB 2.0 controller, and a Cicada Gigabit Ethernet chip. The ReadyNAS unit we tested arrived with a single 256MB PC2700 DIMM installed.
The ReadyNAS RAIDiator RAID operating system uses an embedded Linux kernel, then layers network storage-centric functionality on top:
You can buy the ReadyNAS 600 from one of the resellers listed on the Infrant Web sites.Infrant will also be making a barebones version of the ReadyNAS 600 available, allowing users to add hard drives at their leisure. Suggested list pricing for the barebones ReadyNAS is $695 and $1,395 for a complete system with four Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250GB hard drives.
Getting into the system is simple. You remove three thumb screws to remove the chassis hood. To remove the drive bay, you also need to remove the front bezel, which is attached with four large screws. When running, the ReadyNAS is impressively quiet. Although the power supply has an active cooling fan, the unit is quieter than the fan on our Dell 24-port gigabit switch. Even when running full bore, heat buildup seemed minimal.
The system ships with a utility called "Raidar," which is used mostly to locate one or more ReadyNAS arrays on the network, particularly if you use DHCP to assign IP addresses. If you have multiple arrays, you can get LED's on the front panel to flash if you need to isolate a particular system.
The real system management occurs using the web-based interface, which Infrant dubs "FrontView."
The ReadyNAS 600 is necessarily more complex than the Maxtor Shared Storage Drive, but it's surprisingly easy to set up and manage. As you might suspect, the performance settings can have a substantial impact on read and write performance. And note the impact that gigabit Ethernet has on file copy performance.
We were able to connect up a USB printer and use it over our Windows network without any issues, though we didn't have time to test wireless networking or UPS capabilities. These two drives fit very different niches. For the home or a small office looking for easy access to shared data, the Maxtor Shared Storage Drive offers easy set up, simple configuration, and quiet performance. It's also fairly affordable, at roughly $340 for 300GB of network storage, expandable via the two USB 2.0 ports.
For users looking for added performance and vast capacity, coupled with the security that RAID 5 can bring, the ReadyNAS 600 offers a compelling solution. The ReadyNAS may be a slightly better solution as a
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