I usually backup my computer to a USB hard drive. This is pretty ad-hoc and I got caught recently when my Maxtor 200Gb drive went up in smoke. Sure Maxtor replaced it under warranty, but I lost about a month of pictures. Mainly from my England and Wales trip. Only the smaller ones published on the web remain. According to Seagate Mean Time Between Failure is 700,000 hours, and the Annual Failure Rate is 0.34%. So regular backups are very important.
I looked at Network Attached Storage (NAS). All the low cost ones were single drive, and most of the RAID ones were very expensive. The new Linksys NAS200 had lots of poor reviews for being slow although it was cheap. However the QNAP TS-201 was pretty good value at SGD $600, with decent performance, and allows you to use regular SATA disk drives. I bought another ST3500630AS to go with the one I already had. This would give me 500Gb of RAID1 storage. Fully redundant.
I chose the QNAP TS-201 because of the good price, but because it also runs embedded Linux which supports Bittorrent and HTTP/FTP downloads. This means I can switch my main computer off and use the TS-201 to download BitTorrents. The Low power consumption and HDD sleep mode combined with the 25.2W op and 10.2W sleep power consumption further enhance my green credentials. A good review of the TS-210 can be found Bjorn3D
Out of the box the Download Station for BitTorrents was a little disappointing. The front end is very basic and does not give detailed information on the Torrents. This is helpful if one gets stuck. Also remote management of the Download Station is done via port 6000, which is the same port used to administer the whole of the TS-201. This means to support remote access to the Download Station I would have to expose the whole of the NAS admin features on the Internet. No thanks!
But this is embedded Linux which means we should be able to do some cool stuff. After upgrading the TS-201 firmware to 2.1.0-Build 0612 (Telnet Version), it gives telnet access to the Linux shell. A quick search on the web found someone already doing good work on the TS-201 at Open TurboStation.
I followed the instructions and loaded mlDonkey on the TS-201. Unfortunately mlDonkey suffers from the problems of so many open source programs, lack of good documentation. The usual support forums are full of spods pretending to be gurus but offering little real constructive help. With a bit of trial and error I got mlDonkey working, but it has a number of serious flaws. Disabling of sharing specific torrents after completion is near impossible. When you upload a torrent it computes a different torrent name by looking inside the torrent and using either the directory or file name. If two torrents have the same directory name inside the torrent mldonkey refuses to load it. This happens to Coronation Street torrents from uknova.com. Coronation Street torrents are the main reason I use BitTorrent. Its difficult to get good TV in Singapore!
Back to square one, I hunted around the TS-201 filesystem and found out it was using BitTornado, which is a command line Python program. A quick search on the net, and I found TorrentFlux was a popular GUI front end for BitTornado, and other downloading programs. Only problem was that in August the TorrentFlux site abruptly disappeared from the Internet! Luckily a project fork TorrentFlux-b4rt had been created! TorrentFlux-b4rt requires apache, SQLite and PHP, all of which come bundled with the TS-201.
I managed to get TorrentFlux-b4rt working on the TS-201. For detailed instructions please see here.
WARNING: I got fed up with TorrentFlux not tying up with actual processes that were running. Also when you upload a new Torrent it deletes the pid files of other running torrents. Which messes up my cronjob that restarts torrents that have dies. This makes the torrents unmanageable. The only way to administer these now rogue torrents is to use the command prompt to kill off these torrents.
Also TorrentFlux has lots of stuff I do not use, so I ended up writing a simpler PHP front end to the TorrentFlux bittornado python programs. This allows me to manage torrents, and even processes much more efficiently.
The icons need a bit of work, but for a first attempt at a PHP program I am quite happy with it. For full details see Steves BitTornado PHP Gui.
I can now switch my desktop computer off when I go to work and at night.
Its important to understand that Ethernet speeds do NOT translate into NAS speeds due to protocol over heads and such like.
The maximum raw data rates are:
| 100Mbps Ethernet | 12.5 MBytes/sec | Gigabit Ethernet | 125 MBytes/sec |
For reading about NAS performance and comparisons I recommend Small NetBuilder
The QNAP TS-201 is rated at a Read RAID 1: 11MBytes/sec. The more expensive TS-209 is slightly faster at RAID 1: 18 MBytes/sec. I decided to go for the TS-201 because I do not have 1Gb Ethernet, and when I do I am sure Home NAS boxes will have advanced even more, and it will be time for an upgrade.
So at 11MB/sec I should in theory be able to transfer a 1GByte file in 90 seconds. In practise (using Windows file shares) it takes around 115 secs - just under 2 minutes. But this is with 100Mbps, no tuning of cables etc, and the NAS doing BitTorrent downloads at the same time. A realistic day to day speed.
Now for the interesting part. I have all my photos, music and email folders on the NAS now, and the applications access the data directly from the NAS. No problems, apart from Thunderbird trying to rebuild summary files occasionally. This was fixed by moving to the more reliable Sylpheed. So for day to day use I am using the NAS to host all my files, and it is working out well. Where it gets interesting is video.
Say I have a 785Mbyte DivX movie on my NAS and I double click on it on my desktop PC, the good news is that it does NOT take 90 seconds to start playing it, but plays it straight away. It plays it seamlessly and I can skip forwards and backwards as I please. Excellent - the file is actually being streamed. But what I found out is that it is NOT being cached. If I play the 785Mbyte movie for 10 minutes, which is more than enough time for the computer to load the whole file, and I unplug the network cable, the movie stops. There is very little caching going on here.
Things get more tricky when we move onto a WiFi G network with an optimum 54Mbps. Here the same file takes 5 minutes to copy from the NAS to my WiFi HTPC. Note this is in my flat where the NAS and HTPC are separated by a concrete wall with steel in it. Flats in Singapore are much more robust than the UK. Where it falls apart is streaming the media. If I start playing the file remotely over the network using the MediaPortal software I get three or four brief freezes while playing a 30 minute video. MediaPortal has no buffering. If I use WindowsMedia player where I can set the buffer to 30 seconds the results are better but not freeze free.
|
Streaming media is relatively new technology and software developers are still in the early stages of implementing it. The software should read ahead as fast as possible and cache the whole file either to memory of temporary disk space so it is available should the network hit congestion that would affect delivery. |
|
|
WiFi-G is not really good enough for streaming with the speeds and current softwares lack of caching. Most of the faster WiFi-N equipment is all based on N Draft 2.0, or worse an earlier draft and pretty flaky if you read the reviews. |
|
|
MediaPlayer can play full size and FF and REW in movies. |
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is the future. MediaPortal state they will support this in release 2. But as of December 2007 and firmware 2.10 the Playstation 3 now supports DLNA streaming from the Twonky Vision Media Server which is installed on the QNAT TS-201 NAS! And so does the Xbox360. Checkout the 3 way head to head test PS3 v Xbox360 v HTPC.
Its important to note here that the PS3 is only supported in TwonkeyVision Media Server 4.4.4 and this is only available on the QNAP TS-201 in Beta version v2.2.1 Build 0108. It seems QNAP have stopped working on new releases for the TS-201 and are now concentration on the TS-209 and TS-409. The last official firmware is v2.1.1 released in August 2007. This is very bad. It seems like they have stopped supporting a product they are still selling. There are lots of unhappy owners in the QNAP forums.
When buying a product the vendor does not have to issue updates. However this is particularly bad for the TS-201 which is marketed as more than just a NAS. QNAP sell it on its BitTorrent and Media Server features. But what happens when the BitTorrent protocol changes? Or when there is a new DivX release, or new PS3 update? Whilst the functionality of the NAS (on Beta firmware ONLY) is great its future is in doubt. Personally I will not be buying any more QNAP NAS products. Instead I will rebuild my SK22G2 Shuttle as a NAS using Linux. It has hardware RAID1. My QNAP TS-201 NAS will be heading for eBAY.
The TS-201 NAS with a couple of USB backup drives.
QNAT TS-201 Turbo Station Forum