I have been using a Linksys NSLU-2 with a couple of USB drives attached to it as my home backup/file server, but…
- both of the drives are getting old — one 3 and one 4 years — something not good for a system where you are backing up important data (like this website 🙂 )
- The NSLU-2 (commonly known as a “slug”) has been very slow to access from XP with the latest service pack — Dennis and Deb were both hit by this.
- I wanted more storage space. No, I didn’t actually need it yet, but I was down to my last 150Gig or so.
Given all this, it seemed like it was probably time to look for a new network attached storage (“NAS”) box. After a certain amount of wandering around on the web, I narrowed the choices down to three boxes, each of which provides two internal drive bays:
- Linksys NAS-200
- Somewhere around $150 locally in Ottawa; comes with 2 USB ports that would allow me to plug in my existing drives; but by all accounts the slowest of any of the available devices
- D-Link DNS-323
- Approximately the same prices as the NAS-200, but significantly faster; only 1 USB port which can be used to control a printer or UPS, but not a drive
- Synology Disk Station DS207+
- Faster and more powerful than either of the others; around $400 in Ottawa.
Now, you know that I would normally go for the most powerful box, even though it was more expensive, but my normal dealer, PC Cyber [“Hey, man, you got da stuff?”], did not have any in stock, so I ended up getting the DNS-323 and one 1 terabyte drive. (I actually picked up the DNS-323 at Best Buy, because I had been given a gift certificate there for my birthday.)
Installing the drive was trivial — no screwdrivers or wiring required. Just lift up on the front cover and pop it off, slide the drive into the bay, close the lid. Booting, formatting the drive, and configuring it with separate storage areas for Deb, Dennis and I all went without a hitch.
I then started copying everything from the drives on the slug to the DNS-323, whereupon I learned two interesting lessons:
- Copying files between two fileservers by transferring them back-and-forth across a network with a wireless-N bridge in the middle of it, is somewhere between 4 and 5 times slower than doing it on the other side of the bridge. I learned this when I mounted both servers on my G5, dragged a massive backup directory from one to the other and had it say “estimated time to completion: 29 hours“!
- The slug is really slow. I didn’t do a lot of testing, but by my count, copying from an internal drive on a Mac to the DNS-323 was >10x faster than copying the same file off the slug.
Everything is now copied across to its new home. Deb is happy because I removed three devices, each with a power brick, plus a power bar from her study, and replaced it all with one; I’m happy because we now have more than double the storage we had and can access it much more quickly; and Dennis is happy… Well, actually Dennis isn’t happy because next week is exam week, but that’s another story.