Network Attached Storage?

Buffalo Terrastation supports jumbo frames
Infrant NAS NV looks good
WD NetCenter not much to see here

Buffalo sounds good. Then you can use 9000 MTUs with your G5 which I assume supports 9000 MTU.

All you would need is a DGS-108D or DGS-105D or DGS-1016D or DGS-1024D

Those are supposed to work good and support 802.3x flow control and jumbo frames.

is there a problem with naming conventions and os x nas?

The maximum STR you'll get over 100 mb ethernet is about 11 MB/S. If you use jumbo frames (9k packet size) you'll get faster file transfers to/from the NAS.

The buffalo supports 9k packet sizes (MTU) and you G5 should as well. If you didn't have jumbo frames the MTU would be 1.5k slower file xfers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTU_%28networking%29

D-Link switches like the DGS series support flow control and 9k packet sizes, which you will want if you are putting files on your NAS.

The 9k packet size will save you CPU cycles and also save you time.

Both are very imp. imo.

The buffalo is the only one that appears to support this feature.

If you chose one of the other NAS's they would only pump out 11 MB/S, which is pretty slow imo.

Some people can get 80 MB/S with jumbo frames. It all depends on your RAID scheme and your network setup.

The maximum would be 125 MB/S over 1000 mb e-net.

The only problem you may run into is if you're doing raid-5 with the enclosure. You may have slow write speeds.

If you do Raid-0 it'll be fast, but you quadruple your chances of failure over 4 drives.

Difficult to choose. I personally use raid-5 for network backups. It's a slow write at 20 MB/S, but it's redundant.

looks like I hijacked your thread, sorry =(

ok, the Buffalo unit uses software raid

this means that the gigabit transfer packet size of 9k really has no meaning writing to the array, but reading FROM the array (NAS) will probably see a benefit only if you are copying files from the NAS to a client.

my recommendation is that you purchase a different product. the Buffalo unit would be nice if it could handle the speed of gig-e but it can't. In this way it's a non-gig-e unit or 'gig-e hype' I like to say.

Unfortunately to get RAID-5 hardware NAS you'd have to buy a xserve raid which would cost you the price of about 8 used cars.

looks like you'll have some opportunity costs to mull over.

But, for general stuff software raid withstanding the buffalo unit seems to be a good pick,

Read this

http://www.campworld.net/thewiki/pmwiki.php/MACosX/BuffaloTeraStation

looks like for some reason afp only does 4 GB file sizes

it would stink to purchase the unit then be frustrated

looks like the guy figured it out. it's difficult to say if he had a now discountinued product, as the 0.6 and another unit are not produced.

http://www.terastation.org/wiki/Harddisk_Layout

it also may be that the swap partitoned area is non-recoverable (although most systems auto rebuild the swap if it's not found)

it's hard to say if the unit will give what you want.

I'd personally port a G4 to a rackmount server case, that'd cost about ~150 for parts, ~80 for the case, ~250 for a RAID-5 controller card, ~300 for drives

you'd get a 750 GB RAID-5 fault tolerant server running OS X with 100 mb e-net for about $780. That's a dollar per gig, plus you have a full fledged OS behind the unit, no problems with naming conventions.

I could build it for you if you wanted. It's pretty easy once you've done it a few times. The only setback would be it would only do 11 MB/S unless you got the $100 apple jumbo frame card. The 400 MHz processor should be plenty for a standalone file server. You may then want to upgrade the proc in the future with a faster unit.

The NAS devices are pretty much themselves computers, they just don't have a display or keyboard, mouse, and such. You may be happier building your own custom NAS because then you can expand as you wish, and wouldn't have problems with naming conventions or file sizes or quasi-gig-e hype, or swap file partiton possible problems.

my two cents.

Kelly,

I looked at getting a NAS device last year and considered pretty much the same options as you are.

One of the things I found out is that the Buffalo Terastation does not fully support Mac OS. While the website clearly says that OS X is supported, there was some fine print that clarified the fact that OS X is supported based on the fact that OS X can mount SMB and/or NFS shares. In other words, if youare to get the Buffalo Terastation you would mount SMB or NFS volumes, not mac volumes. That's the reason why file names with "weird" characters don't get saved properly. Also another big problem is that any file over 2Gb long will not get saved (that created a big problem for me as I was looking at using it for backup, and Retrospect's backup files grow way over 2Gb!).

It may have changed now, I haven't checked any of those technologies for a while. I just wanted to warn you just in case things are still the same.

The only device I know supports OS X natively is the Infrant device. It also happens to be the best looking of the bunch too 😉.

I hope this helps.
Julian

I contacted sales at Buffalo, here's what they said

------------------------------------

Douglas,

Write speed for the TeraStation is 5-6MBs. It uses a software raid.

Regards,


Chris Hall
Technical Support Engineer & MIS
Buffalo Technology USA
www.buffalotech.com

Why does TeraStation's use of software raid have anything to do with its ability to handle large frames?

pretty interesting. infrant claims it will do hardware raid but the results here

http://infrant.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=21

suggest they are using software raid based on everyone's speed results

they sound like a bunch of liars imo. if you were using 4 HDD in HW RAID-5 w/ jumbo frames enabled you would be getting faster than 25 MB/S (which they claim is the maximum)

that may be ok for you but at that price it's sad they claim it's hardware raid

Kelly,

Just like everything, it all depends.

Are you really looking at RAID, or just NAS? There are far cheaper alternatives as far as NAS is concerned that don't involve RAID. You should be able to get one for less than $200 fairly easy.

If it's RAID what you're after, my personal opinion is to go for the infrant box. They seem to have pretty good support and everybody who has reviewed the device has spoken very highly of it. You can get the infrant box empty with no hard drives and add drives as your budget allows it.

I hope this helps. Regards,
Julian

Kelly,

I would go for the ReadyNAS NV. I read there were a few issues related to temperature and cooling efficiency on older models. Plus the NV is quite nice looking too.

What I like about the ReadyNAS is the fact that:
- You can buy the device empty with no drives and get whatever drives you want, from wherever you want at a price you like.
- You can add as little as one hard drive in the beginning. The ReadyNAS will behave just like a one-drive NAS.
- If you add a second drive later, ReadyNAS will automatically switch to RAID 1 and mirror between both disks (given that the disks are the same size) while preserving all the information you had already stored in the first drive.
- If you add a third drive later, ReadyNAS will automatically switch to RAID 5 using all three drives and while preserving all the information you had already saved before.
- If you add a fourth drive later on, ReadyNAS will automatically expand the RAID 5 array to use all four drives, again while preserving all the information that was previously stored.

I think Infrant has really though of the end-user and has provided a device that gives the piece of mind of redundancy without requiring the knowledge of a network administrator.

I hope this helps.
Julian