NAS NooB - are disks/data portable?

[bowens]

Hi All, I've been wrestling with a NetGear diskless NAS, RN102, and I now understand that the disks can't be removed and put in, say, a standard external drive with the data accessible. Is this standard for NAS devices? It makes me very uneasy to have so much of my data on what basically is a closed device.

thx,

brad

 

[Whattteva]

I think you're missing the point of a NAS in the first place (read: Network Attached Storage). It's not meant to be a plug & play device. Constantly removing it out of the network defeats the whole purpose of it BEING a NAS.

You want plug and play, you just go for a simple USB external drive/enclosure (which btw will cost you way less than a NAS device as well).

 

[bowens]

I don't think I'm missing the point. Basically, I'm wanting to make the files on my external available on my LAN without having to be attached to a full blown computer.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hi All, I've been wrestling with a NetGear diskless NAS, RN102, and I now understand that the disks can't be removed and put in, say, a standard external drive with the data accessible. Is this standard for NAS devices? It makes me very uneasy to have so much of my data on what basically is a closed device.

thx,

brad

FreeNAS is not "closed". Worst case, you can mount the pool on vanilla FreeBSD, NAS4Free, ZFS on Linux or any other OpenZFS system and rescue your data. Not that it will ever come to that.

Crummy NAS boxes, on the other hand... God known what goes on in there.

 

[Whattteva]

Oh I see, so you just want that particular external drive and not the entire disks in the box.
It's a bit of an involved process to do that since there are several variables involved:

• Different file systems require different drivers. (Most external drives probably use NTFS or FAT32).
  
• Once it mounts, you need to make it available through CIFS (or some other protocol you're running).
• Procedure varies depending on the NAS device.

Anyway, I'd imagine what you're asking is probably too much specific effort for most people on the forums. Good luck though.

 

[bowens]

thanks, Eric. So, are you saying that this Netgear device is in the "crummy" category? cuz they're telling me that if the disks are removed from their box, the data won't be accessible. Maybe I need to build my own device using FreeNAS?

 

[bowens]

maybe the question I should be asking is, is there a NAS that uses NTFS as its filesystem? (or another widely mountable filesystem)

 

[solarisguy]

maybe the question I should be asking is, is there a NAS that uses NTFS as its filesystem? (or another widely mountable filesystem)

Yes. Try Windows Server 2012 R2, it offers very good support for NTFS.

On the other hand..., if you are just interested in the data accessibility in the case something goes horribly wrong with the NAS hardware, but data on the disks are still (at least partially) intact we can offer some good advice here.

For example, I base my choice of zpool version taking into account a scenario just one like above.

 

[Ericloewe]

thanks, Eric. So, are you saying that this Netgear device is in the "crummy" category? cuz they're telling me that if the disks are removed from their box, the data won't be accessible. Maybe I need to build my own device using FreeNAS?

Anything not based on an OS I can just grab and install on proper hardware typically qualifies as crummy.

If you want NTFS, use Windows, but ZFS can do things NTFS never will, much less a black box NAS.

Regarding general NAS advice, this isn't the best place, since we deal mostly with FreeNAS and are not up to date on the various black box NAS devices out there.

 

[cyberjock]

maybe the question I should be asking is, is there a NAS that uses NTFS as its filesystem? (or another widely mountable filesystem)

I laughed pretty hard at that. "widely mountable" is so vague and open to interpretation as to be a useless statement. NTFS is Windows-centric. You are definitely coming from a world that has basically been "Windows" and "everything else". You will see the world in a different light if you are still around in a year. You will realize Window's isn't the great panacea you think it is. :P

 

[solarisguy]

@bowens, since ZFS or Open ZFS is available for Solaris, illumos, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X platforms, it really qualifies as a widely mountable filesystem.

If you were asking your question five years ago, the answers would be different.

Ask anywhere about mounting disks from top of the line EMC or NetApp NAS products, you would be laughed at...

Anyway, the issue you are against is not the filesystem, as the current FreeNAS RELEASE can still do UFS, which is mountable almost everywhere. With most of the hardware RAIDs, almost always one needs the exact RAID hardware to recover the data. With ZFS one only needs another hardware assembly that can directly interface to the disks - trust me that is a good route to take (certain conditions apply, offer void where prohibited, minimum skills required...)

 

[bowens]

I go way back with UNIX, so call me a believer, but this little LAN is primarily to access files with a media server. I figured that NTFS would be the surest thing since the files are coming from either a Mac or a PC. But it's bothering me that I can't move the drives that I put in this Netgear box from it to any external or internal device.

 

[solarisguy]

@bowens, so you are looking at something like DNS-323, but more disks? Times have changed... Users want 8TB solutions, but they are not willing to pay for 8TB hard drives. RAID 6 and RAID-Z2 are not esoteric options anymore. It is your choice to go for a hardware of software RAID solution.

By the way, complaining about Netgear in a FreeNAS forum???? Please do not answer this one...

 

[bowens]

@bowens, so you are looking at something like DNS-323, but more disks? Times have changed... Users want 8TB solutions, but they are not willing to pay for 8TB hard drives. RAID 6 and RAID-Z2 are not esoteric options anymore. It is your choice to go for a hardware of software RAID solution.

nah, the Netgear box I bought for $85 is probably the same as the DNS-323. I bought a pair of nice 4TB drives for it (WD Black WD4000F9YZ). I really need an off-the-shelf solution, though; just can't put the time into building my own this time...

 

[solarisguy]

There are two options.

You did RAID-0...

You did RAID-1, but you were thinking that the filesystem is ext3 or NTFS, that can be read by Windows (and it is Btrfs, and unlike ZFS it is Linux only as far as I know...).

I am guessing you had just discovered, that time or money has to be spent...

 

[mjws00]

The synology nas' s are just Linux and ext4. You can plug and play easily elsewhere. I'll second that I wish we could write ntfs nicely.

 

[solarisguy]

The synology nas' s are just Linux and ext4. You can plug and play easily elsewhere. I'll second that I wish we could write ntfs nicely.

No, you cannot plug and play ext4 disks if they were in RAID 0, RAID 10, RAID 5 or RAID 6 - Windows will only take a single disk ext4.

P.S. Me too, on proper NTFS support in FreeNAS...

 

[mjws00]

True. Xpenology will boot from a USB port on almost any hardware. A live Linux cd is trivial enough for me to consider it easy and portable. My consideration was when the hardware dies more than cross platform. So portable from plug and play junk to different hardware. ZFS is just as easy, but no cheap off the shelf device to get started.

 

[Rob L]

The Netgear RN series can be read by a standard Linux machine with a little bit of work. It runs BTRFS on top of Linux MD. Recovery is available. The steps are on their website.

Instead of focusing on creating a NAS filesystem where its disks can be natively read by a standard windows box (even with windows server you'd need them in JBOD mode, which defeats the purpose of a reliable NAS), I would focus on a backup strategy that allows that. Use a program that syncs your data off the NAS on to a NTFS portable drive on another machine that you can also plug in to any windows machine to access your data. Robocopy, SyncBackFree and some other programs do this.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[bowens]

thanks for all your replies; gonna have to give this some more thought.