USR8700 NAS, Anyone still have one of these? Options

[petec]

Mine's been running pretty well now for about 2-3 years or so 24/7 except for this morning. I have mine set up in a Raid 5 array. Currently showing one of three drives is rebuilding itself (green) and two Raid5 drives (red). The directories are not accessible at this time but showing that the data is intact. My assumption is that the rebuilding drive is failing and I am looking to do a hot swap. (going to add two drives instead for a Raid5 with a spare). As an experiement removing the "green" drive and installed a new one. It just showed new but didn't request to have it put into the Raid5 setup.

The drive rebuilt itself into the array. I see the shares and notice that they are still occupying space but I can't access them. I shut off the box and checked each drive to be physically OK. I believe the OS took a dump in that I can't enable FTP or SSH on the device. I have written to USR hoping that there is a way to "reset" the OS but still giving me access to current configuration.

Anyone have experience with the US Robotics 8700?

This post has been edited by petec: Aug 29 2009, 11:11 AM

[petec]

The USR8700 was rebuilt but decided to downsize the drives in it.

I then decided to build a FREENAS box with a spare PC.

I am very impressed with its speed on the network and light web interface.

[Dan (electron)]

FreeNAS is nice (I do run one as well, it used to use the m0n0wall interface which works well), but I actually prefer OpenFiler, seems to be more mature and supports more advanced stuff.

[petec]

Checked out Openfiler and UnRaid. NoRaid looks interesting too. Currently using softeraid and I like the status that FreeNAS gives me via their GUI. I currently have Smoothwall installed on a couple of other boxes.

This post has been edited by petec: Nov 1 2009, 08:37 PM

[beelzerob]

So, what's the idiot's guide to the merits/differences between NoRaid, FreeNAS, and Openfiler?

[petec]

So far what I am seeing - HW base is 2.4 Ghz / 1 Mb PC in a tower with a 4 drive hot swappable SATA cage, onboard 2 drive SATA controller and PCI 4 drive SATA controller. 4 1 TB drives in the cage and 3 smaller individual SATA drives.

FREENAS - current version is ok but poorly supported. Its based in free BSD. I get some strange HW and SW errors with it both based in the "nightly version". I get network errors in the logs with some major large transfers. I make a couple of tweaks to the "smb.conf" file and I don't see the network errors but the box intermittently loses its network connectivity. I installed a second NIC to test.

OPENFILER - looked at it in London a couple of years ago. Seems that the IT folks that I worked with there advocated its use. Its based in Linux and HW Raid.

UNRAID - bootable via USB stick. Looks promising. As I am still playing was going to give it a try.

This post has been edited by petec: Nov 1 2009, 08:38 PM

[petec]

Next to test will be Openfiler. Had a typo regarding "NoRaid". Its actually "Unraid". In my search though found an interesting article....



Its a couple of years old...

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