Good home server for Windows network?

by philg

Folks: I have two PCs at home that are both fairly new and running Windows 7. They connect (sometimes) to several shared directories on an HP Mediasmart server. At times the shared directories can be browsed as though they were local; at other, unpredictable, times, an application will hang for 5-10 seconds waiting to get a directory listing. The HP Mediasmart, which is running Windows Home Server, seems to be one of the crummiest IT products ever designed. It can take a minute or two to log in to the admin console (when the computer and server are four feet apart and connected via gigabit Ethernet). Instead of using a standard operating system RAID1 arrangement, the Mediasmart duplicates information from disk to disk on a per-folder basis. When you copy a few GB of new data onto the server, the performance becomes even flakier for a day or so. The only thing that I can say in favor of the Mediasmart is that it has a good backup and restore service.

I didn’t like my previous NAS box, a ReadyNAS (now Linksys), because the admin console (viewed from a Web browser) was very slow to load, but the underlying SMB service was much better (I am pretty sure that it was running Linux and SAMBA), and the mechanical/fan noise from the box was too loud for domestic use.

What are my options? I have a hard time believing that this is the best that Windows can do with a shared drive, since I know that corporate slaves all over the U.S. are working off networked drives all day every day.

34 thoughts on “Good home server for Windows network?”

  2. Have you checked out FreeNAS ( http://freenas.org )? It has a bit of a learning curve to set up but you can install it on any number of hardware configurations and set various services (SMB, AFP etc…) as needed.

  3. Chris: Thanks for the FreeNAS suggestion, but I don’t want to use standard PC hardware (my assumption may be wrong, but I am hoping that I can get better/cheaper/quieter hardware if the box is designed specifically for NAS).

  4. I would recommend NexentaStor (free community edition up to 18TB of storage). Has nice web based admin console and ZFS file system. No need for hardware RAID anymore – can be run on inexpensive commodity hardware.

  6. Phil,

    You can build a low power consumption “PC” with quiet fans etc…for relatively cheap (under $200-300 w/o hard drives?). The advantage of building it yourself is having future expansion capability and upgradability. For example I recently built a NAS using freeNAS and off the shelf components (from Microcenter in Cabridge of all places) with 5 TB of storage and it cost me about $600.

    I ended up using more powerful (read costly) components than necessary (ie don’t really need 4GB of RAM and a quad-core processor). The only time I’ve had to shit it down or reboot is when I had move the machine to a new location.

    If I were doing it again I’d use lower power consuming components, which would make it even quieter. I was a photographer in career prior to healthcare IT but I think for the value to cost I’m satisfied to have enough storage for a good while.

  7. What problem are you trying to solve? Backup**? Simple file sharing? How fast do you really need it to be?

    For simple file sharing, hard to beat a USB drive attached to an Airport Extreme base station. It just works. I get about 10 MB/s write, 26 MB/s read using a dirt cheap WD 2 TB drive.

    Or just attach a drive to one (or both) of your PCs and share it. Microsoft’s SyncToy works pretty well ( https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52 )

    ** And don’t forget off-site backups. 🙂

  8. I run Windows Home Server on commodity PC hardware at home.

    It works well. I have 6 TB of storage total.

    I use it to backup up all my Windows 7 machines (5 at last count). Also for sharing pictures, videos, movies and TV shows (<2 TB) in my network.

    I routinely stream 20GB+ movies over my (wired) network with no problems. Hence, I also upload these files and I get a consistence 60-70mb/s write speed.

    I'm guessing the problem with your current WHS is that it lacks the horsepower and bus speed to implement the Drive Extender technology (disk balancing) and run a full Windows 2003 server (which is what WHS is under the covers, you can remote desktop into it and skip the management console).

    Unfortunately, MSFT in its wisdom, dropped the Drive Extender tech in the next version of WHS b/c it's not compatible with their 2008 server block level storage.

    So 1-2 years ago, I would have suggested building your own (buy a license) and then go to newegg + amazon and spec out a nice efficient processor (the intel I3 has a great price/performance/heat profile) and a nice case with quiet fans. The 2.0 TB WD Green drives are less than $100 now.

    However, with WHS – Vail on the horizon, I'm not sure what to recommend, today.

    I still think WHS is the best solution for me (after reviewing the out of the box NAS solultions where you are dependent on one hardware vendor). Also, I don't really have time to implement the *nix solutions. Some of them seemed half baked or Beta quality. Plus I'd lose out on the Windows backups.

    Greyhole (http://code.google.com/p/greyhole/) looks promising but is still in beta. This let's you mix/max drives (like WHS drive extender) without matching size/model (unlike most hardware RAID options).

  9. At home, I have a ReadyNas NVX. It’s much faster than the NV+ that I also own. SMB performance is way better, and the web interface is tolerable for admin tasks. I do a lot of photo/video/web work and having fast afp/smb access is paramount.

    At work, I went with a Synology Diskstation 1010+. I’ve been very happy with it, and it runs Linux so it can be configured as needed if you want, or you can use the pretty snappy web interface.

    However, if I had to recommend one now, I’d suggest the Drobo FS. It’s one of the ‘set it and forget it’ type devices that just works. Earlier versions weren’t that great – no ethernet built in and other missing features. The FS solves that and has a number of available ‘apps’ that can serve up content.

  10. As said, qnap makes very good hardware. Synology has some pretty interesting NAS boxes (eg. the 4-bay DS411j), and their web console earns high praise from reviewers.

  11. You can get great deals on a small/cheap/quiet general purpose servers that will be more flexible and faster than pre-built NAS solutions. (Instead of FreeNAS I’d probably put Ubuntu on it, you’d get excellent Samba and have the flexibility to put am up to date media server or something on it as well).

    The only place where a small server falls down is power usage, the prebuilt NAS solutions all have low power ARMs.

  12. Thanks for the Drobo and ReadyNas NVX suggestions, folks. The Amazon reviewers, though, seem to indicate that both are noisy. The two-bay Synology seems to make people happy. I wonder if that can be loaded up with 3 TB drives (let’s hope they work better in there than in my almost-new HP PC, which rejected a WD 3 TB drive almost as fast as a Wellesley gal would dump an MIT CS major in favor of a Harvard Business School student).

  13. Actually, as long as we’ve got all of these wizards assembled… how about an NAS with a journaled file system? Two drives, mirrored RAID 1, but the ability to flash back to any earlier point in time and view the file system as it was then? I know that there are Unix file systems that can do this and NAS boxes tend to run Unix, so why not?

  14. For years I’ve used a hand-me-down PC workstation running Linux. It was dirt cheap to set up, and once configured and running it’s very solid and reliable. However, setting it up requires occasional descents into the arcana of Linux installs and PC hardware configuration, which is, ah, “educational”, but not fun.

  16. The Synology NAS user interface, “Disk Station Manager” spans their entire product line–consumer to professional, past to present hardware–and it’s fantastic. It’s powerful, simple, beautiful, and all of it “just works.”

    You can test drive it here:
    http://www.synology.com/us/products/demo/index.php

    The live demo tends to be a little sluggish at times, which doesn’t reflect the performance you’d experience at home.

  17. I think I’ll echo some of the sentiments already expressed: go Linux.

    It’s NOT really worth it to use commodity hardware, though. I’d recommend the HP N36L. It has a netbook processor like HP’s Mediasmart, but it’s a bit faster and supports more RAM (RAM is good for fileservers, and RAM is so cheap right now it doesn’t make sense not to max out).

    It runs Linux great! I imagine it runs Windows Server well too, but I haven’t cared to try. I’ve a hardware review of the N36L within which I go over all the geeky aspects. I’m working on a “software” review.

  18. Take a look at ZFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) file system – this is what you need to run on NAS these days 🙂

    Get 4 x 2TB hard rives on RAID-Z and you would have 6TB redundant storage that is more reliable than any hardware RAID or mirroring.
    ZFS supports unlimited number of very quick (constant time) snapshots, compression, deduplication, encryption, built in SMB sharing and many other features. You can have it all for free with nice GUI from NexentaStor on commodity hardware.

    Hardest thing is actually to find a nice case with 4 drive bays if you don’t want to stick your NAS into basement. 🙂

  19. Dmitri: Thanks for reminding me about ZFS. I looked into it a few years ago for photo.net and can’t remember what the conclusion was. Perhaps that it didn’t run on Linux and therefore we weren’t going to use it. The Wikipedia entry indicates that ZFS is part of FreeNAS. Building up my own box and installing Unix is a little more work than I was prepared to do, but perhaps this is the only way to get snapshotting.

    What’s the state of ZFS right now? Is it gaining in practical acceptance? And is it practical to keep months or years of snapshots?

  20. Phil: I think it is gaining practical acceptance in the storage world. There are some licensing issues which prevents ZFS from being accepted into official Linux kernel so it’s unlikely that we will see it as part of standard Linux any time soon. There are patches and user-level FS (FUSE) support but I didn’t bother with that.

    FreeBSD has ZFS support built it and therefore FreeNAS has it too. I don’t want to spread any FUD but when I tried FreeBSD/32 some time ago I had nothing but pain with ZFS on it (I’m ready to accept that I didn’t know how to set it up properly). Perhaps it’s better on FreeBSD/64 because it’s ported from Solaris, which is 64 bit system.

    On the other hand OpenSolaris and derivatives seems to be working pretty well with ZFS – I have few systems running in production on OpenSolaris and Nexenta. Coming from Linux background myself I was a bit apprehensive switching to Solaris until I discovered Nexenta – which is Solaris kernel with Linux user land, so all familiar gnu tools and utilities are there, including Debian packages system (apt-get, etc).

    In terms of installation efforts NexentaStor is not harder to install then FreeNAS and has similar web based UI but being based on OpenSolaris kernel I would trust it more when it comes to ZFS. Easiest way to try is to install it on VMWare – then add some virtual disks and see how to configure it etc.

    In terms of snapshots I’m sure there are practical limit somewhere but I usually have scrips on my systems which creates snapshots every day of the week, every month and every year (so I would have daily snapshots for a week, monthly for a year etc) and it works flawlessly. Additional benefit is you can create snapshots before any changes in OS or installing any patch etc. and then just rollback if things go south.

    ZFS is also machine-independent so you can unplug it from one computer, plug into the other and it would work. Plus RAID-Z would check and detect any data inconsistency and therefore more reliable then hardware raid. And the list goes on. 🙂

  21. Dmitri: If ZFS is so great… how come none of the prepackaged NAS companies are using it? Are they so wedded to Linux that they can’t switch to FreeBSD? Or could they use OpenSolaris without contributing to Larry Ellison’s MiG and Gulfstream fund?

  22. Phil: Good question. I was wondering the same myself. Perhaps one reason is that ZFS has somehow higher CPU and memory requirements then pure mirroring or raid so it might not be possible/productive to run it on typical low power embedded hardware found in home-office NAS. I’m running my home 10TB NAS on old Athlon X2 socket 939 CPU and 4Gb RAM (~ 6 years old desktop PC) and it runs fine.

    Another reason I think is that Linux is much wider adopted for much longer time for embedded systems. I’m also not sure about licensing situation with Solaris.

  23. Dmitri: Sounds like we have a plan for our next company! We will take over the home NAS world with the “FlashbackNAS” that, thanks to our proprietary technology and years of research, enables the consume to go back in time to his or her lost files. Our “years of research” will consist of a commodity case and motherboard and a vanilla install of FreeNAS with ZFS. We can use Perl to change “FreeNas” to “FlashbackNAS (TM, All Rights Reserved)”.

  25. I solved this and a variety of other problems buy buying a server capable of running VMWare ESXi and running a variety of VMs, FreeNAS being one. Not the problem you were looking to solve exactly, but I’ve found it tremendously useful and flexible.

    ZFS really requires Solaris. No Linux kernel module due to licensing. BSD support is still experimental.

  26. Since FreeBSD 8.0 it is well beyond “experimental”; it was in later versions of FreeBSD 7. 8.2 released was released in the last few days, and a bunch of ZFS work has been happening in -STABLE, which will become FreeBSD 9.

    I use ZFS on 64 bit FreeBSD routinely and have put it into non-technical organisations as a black-box solution. Works well.

  27. The unspoken killer feature of ZFS is the “zfs scrub” command, which tells ZFS to go through and use the stored ECC codes for each file directory and data chunks that make up your data, and compare the ECC with what is actually on the disk.

    Doing this on a regular basis, say monthly, allows ZFS to correct any single-bit errors, which are a typical if annoying part of magnetic disks (“bit rot”).

    Look over the bit-error rates for your drive and then compute how many bits (8 * bytes) are on the disk – it is clear that just writing data to the drive until it is 80% full incurs a bunch of errors; errors that ZFS will catch.

  28. There is a very flexible range of prices for Synology products. It integrates with your iTunes, standard file sharing, etc. People on newegg appear to like it. I am looking to get one myself. Check different models to match your price vs. features choice. Basic rule is that more expensive products serve data faster. Cheaper products use cheaper CPU and are slower as a result.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108064

  29. Acer Easystore H340. $399 at NewEgg.com , comes with 1TB drive. Runs Windows Home Server pre-installed.

    I have installed 5 at client companies to backup their PC’s/servers. I have 1 at home. 2-3 years for each, no problems. Runs any size drives, must be SATA.

    I cannot recommend enough.

  30. I know you don’t want to build your own box, but I’ll chime in with a recommendation for nexenta.

    Basically the key point for using nexenta is zfs. No other file system offers the reliability features that zfs does.

    The nexenta distribution seems to work well enough, and snapshots are quick to install and it’s easy to get to the different snapshots (as long as you make them visible). For home networks without too many security requirements, it’ll do the job.

  31. The HP Media servers have all sorts of media add-ins running that consume processor resources. Home built WHS boxes have a number of advantages, not the least of which is that you can plug a monitor and keyboard into it.

    I personally think that the minimum number of physical hard drives in a WHS is 3. With 3 drives no data is ever written to the HD with the OS, even with folder duplication turned on. If the boot disk dies, put in a new one and do a recovery and the whole thing will be up and running again with no data loss.

    What WHS has going for it, that most geeks don’t get, it that it can be set up by reasonably normal folks and it can do bare metal restores of client PC’s. Anything that can’t be setup by your mother will never be anything more than a niche product.

  32. b_: The HP Mediasmart is in its current, semi-usable, state because I turned off most of the extra crud that HP put in there, e.g., Twonky Media Server (when I called HP support they said “Oh yes, sometimes it does take up 100% CPU for several weeks, especially if it gets stuck on a file”; I think this thing is somehow supposed to do video format conversion, which is of no value to me).

    As far as being set up by mom, I don’t think WHS was any easier to set up than the Linux-based ReadyNAS.

  33. For low-performance needs, e.g. archiving, I had good luck with the D-Link DNS-323, a small 2-bay unit that takes 2 drives, you just slot them in, no screws or fuss.

    ZFS is insanely great. It offers the same functionality as the WAFL filesystem on $100K+ NetApp filers, and has phenomenal error-correction and validation functionality built-in. NetApp sued Sun for copying aspects of WAFL in ZFS (which is true, but then again NetApp ripped off NFS from Sun in the first place). The fear of liability may be what kept NAS makers from ZFS, but Nexenta does very well.

    One great feature of ZFS is hybrid storage pools, where you can use SSDs to accelerate writes (by putting the journal on a SSD) or reads (by using the SSD as a level 2 read cache). You can set up a filer with a bunch of drives in RAID-Z2 (essentially RAID5 with dual parity) and get SSD performance for large volumes of data, while paying HDD per-GB prices.

  34. Hi,

    I might be a little late to the game but might I suggest a mac mini? Normally I shy away from Apple but in this case it might fit the bill:

    – Mac mini uses little power and is quiet
    – OS X runs ZFS natively
    – Firewire and USB 2.0 ports for external drives

    I would think about getting some Western Digital Caviar “green” energy efficient SATA drives and slapping them in an external case. I suggest the green drives since they spin down quicker and ought to be a little quieter. Those are consumer drives so get a little SATA drive tower, but look for one with a variable speed fan else it can get pretty loud.

    Looking at the Drobo and DroboS models while writing this. They look pretty sweet. Comes with firewire support (even a firewire cable) which is awesome. No official support for ZFS and I’m not sure what their BeyondRAID really is but it looks ok:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#BeyondRAID
    http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/how-drobos-beyondraid-compares-to-traditional-raid-technologies/2286

    PS – not affiliated to Apple or Drobo. I just like storage technology and databases.

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