[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Julian Hall wrote: > Hi All, > > A friend of mine has been looking into setting up a NAS drive for backup > and network share of his files. The ideal system would have two 500Gb > drives in a RAID 1 configuration It seems that the prebuilt NAS > enclosures all use Linux and state the available formats are FAT32, EXT2 > and EXT3. He does a lot of video work in raw AVI format, over the 4Gb > limit for FAT32 (he's a Windows user) so he wouldn't be able to format > it as FAT32. > > 1. Would there be any problem with using an EXT3 (or 2) formatted drive > on a NAS drive accessed by a Windows PC? I'm thinking there wouldn't be > as the enclosure's Linux firmware would handle all the data throughput > and the enduser PC would just see a drive to read and write to, or is > that complete cobblers? > > 2. If (1) wouldn't work, is there any major issue with an NTFS drive > being used in a NAS enclosure? > > 3. He's also considering building a NAS server out of old bits and > installing FreeNAS. Any experience of this, pitfalls, idiosyncrasies? Much as I love Linux and will support it forever, if he's not built a Linux box before, building one to store and backup valuable data from scratch is quite a daunting task, and he may well be better off buying a NAS/Disk box already to go. NAS really ought to be filesystem independant as the N in NAS is Network - so all it has to do is emulate one of the network filesystems - such as SMB/CIFS or NFS. So you could have a Linux based NAS use EXT3 as the underlying filesystem, exporting to Windows clients as CIFS/SMB and they would not know anything else. A box with a USB cable isn't really a NAS box, then it does have to support a native filesystem format that the host will accept. If he wants direct attached via USB, then I would suggest he look at a Drobo - http://www.drobo.com/ - however, I do have a friend who works for them, so I may be biased. Not as cheap as building it yourself but extremely flexable. 4 slots of any size drive, but it looks like a single 4TB drive no matter how many or few disks it has. It can be formatted NTFS and off you go. You just add more disks when it gets full, or take out smaller ones and put in bigger ones and the box "just works" and the host doesn't notice any change. If it has the capacity, then data will be mirrored or RAIDed over the drives. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html