Do It Yourself NAS

Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder describes their methodes for benchmarking NAS devices with IOzone.

AnandTech reviews the latest update to Western Digital’s 74 GB 10,000 RPM hard drive.

Over the course of the last couple of years, the 8MB cache drive has been enhanced with minor revisions with one of the latest versions, WD740GD-00FLC0, receiving tweaks that significantly improved its performance in single-user applications.

The Tech Report reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES hard drive. This ES drive is the enterprise edition of the 7200.10. Differences include better performance when dealing with vibration, and a shorter error timeout period so the drive won’t drop out of RAID arrays.

AnandTech has a server guide for SCSI, SAS, and enterprise SATA hard drives.

AnandTech reviews the Infrant ReadyNAS NV.

AnandTech has one of the best comparisons of NAS devices on the internet.

AnandTech reviews the Promise VTrak J300s SATA/SAS chassis. Up to four of these can be daisy chained to a nice SAS RAID card.

NewsForge reviews FreeNAS 0.66.

FreeNAS, an open source NAS server, can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.

SmallNetBuilder reviews two Infrant NAS devices, the  ReadyNAS NV+ and 1100.

Ars Technica has a system builder buyers guide for low and high end home NAS systems. Both hardware and software raid makes an appearance.

With multiple PCs becoming commonplace in the home, the need to push data through every room in the house via Ethernet or WiFi combined with the proliferation of digital-only content mean the storage demands of home users are rising quickly.