The main idea of this post is not to describe each solution into details as there is really no need for it since detailed information can be found on homepage of each particular solution described here. Another thing you should be aware of is that mentioned solutions rely only on free software component of the NAS system and not the hardware one. In relation to pre-built NAS systems from various manufacturers like Synology this approach's advantage lies just in the fact you can use free software component on any available hardware components you have access to (of course be sure it meets the minimum requirements for software installation).
The most popular solution for this is FreeNAS which is available in both x86 and x64 versions and which has support for extremely large hardware platforms. Detailed information about supported hardware and hardware requirements/recommendations for the latest available version at the moment when I was writing this post is available here or here (detailed text preview).
To provide you with basic guidelines I can just say FreeNAS supports the following protocols: SMB/CIFS (Windows), AFP (Apple/Mac), NFS (Unix/Linux), FTP, TFTP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI and UPnP. It also features support for Software RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, and disk encryption. It's networking features supports VLAN tagging, link aggregation, and Wake On Lan (WoL). The monitoring features include S.M.A.R.T (smartmontools), email alerts, SNMP, Syslog, and UPS (NUT) support. You'll also find extra services: bittorent client (Transmission), UPnP server (FUPPES), iTunes/DAAP server (Firefly), webserver (lighttpd), and network bandwidth measure (Iperf). More details about it's features can be found here.
The main point with FreeNAS is it will allow you to bring back to use some of your old(er) computer equipment, but to run smoothly you'll need at least 4GB of RAM or 1GB more of RAM for each 1GB of storage over 6TB. So it might not be totally free solution if you need to upgrade certain components in your old(er) PC, but there is no doubt it will be at much lower costs than buying a dedicated NAS box. Of course this in no way means FreeNAS should exclusively be used on old(er) computer components, you can freely run it on newest and fastest equipment as well.
The second solution is called CryptoNAS and is a bit more specific as its name says it is dedicated in bringing more security (encryption) to NASes based on PC components. It has a bit different approach and is available in two flavors - one in a form of live-cd and other as server component. Live-cd provides easy solution to add encryption to your NAS whilst requiring minimal hardware resources. Another flavour - server based - will enable you to add encryption to existing NAS systems.
CryptoNAS definitely isn't developed actively as FreeNAS is but has its advantages over it - and the most obvious one is to provide encryption (security) along with a very low hardware requirements. One other thing you should keep in mind if you decide to go for CryptoNAS it that you'll need additional software to access encrypted data - FreeOTFE in Windows.
No matter which type of NAS you'll decide to use I strongly suggest you to keep in mind what type of HDDs you'll use for storage. I've wrote about that in this post, so be sure to take a look at it too.
If you found this post to be useful please consider encouraging me to keep up the good work. You can easily do it by signing up with Copy.com cloud storage provider. Just click here and you will get 15GB + 5GB for following my link absolutely FREE. This way I'll get 5GB too.
No comments:
Post a Comment