Netcom intros eSATA-based RAID 5 system

While it's far from the most spacious storage system we've seen, Netcom's new eSATA-based NR5-4 system will accommodate four drives for up to 3TB of storage in a RAID 5 configuration, something the company claims to be an industry first. If RAID 5 isn't your thing, you can set things up in your choice of RAID 0 or 10 configurations as well, and you'll be able to keep an eye on the goings on thanks to the unit's backlit display. You'll also, of course, get the requisite PCI host adapter, along with a one meter host cable, and a "comprehensive" one year warranty. Not surprisingly, the unit doesn't exactly come cheap, with it boasting a near $2,000 price tag. If that's not a deal-breaker, you can get your order in right now.

[Brennan @ Aug 13th 2007 8:08PM]

RAID 5? The only RAID i know n like is RAID 0.

[Mile @ Aug 13th 2007 8:20PM]

RAID 0 is a myth. The R stands for Redundant and striping is the opposite of that.

RAID 10 is where its at, baby!

[Randy @ Aug 13th 2007 8:30PM]

Does anyone have a link to some page that discusses the relative merits of these nas devices? I see so many of them mentioned but no good reviews. I'm interested in buying one of these devices but I want to know which model(s) are generally considered "good." maybe the topic of an "ask Engadget" perhaps?

[abc0815 @ Aug 13th 2007 8:54PM]

Hi there,
i was looking myself for some reviews but found nothing good :(
I am now going to build them by my self (diy). One for mass storage (sata controller [a cheap one] (4 hdds) + an old P3) and one for the Workstation with an hardware Raid Controller (3WARE 9550SXU-4LP) and three HDDs. The Mass Storage One is working under Linux so basic understanding of that is required.
cheers

[Wayne @ Aug 13th 2007 10:55PM]

This is a DAS, not a NAS. You can of course share it via the host computer but it isn't stand alone itself. That said, if you're looking for good NAS solutions for home use you can either build your own or try one of the out-of-the-box solutions. I checked out quite a few when I was in the market but finally settled for the Infrant ReadyNAS-NV (http://infrant.com/main.html). I'm extremely happy with their support and the NAS just works with minimal fuss. At the moment it's limited to 2TB volumes but an upcoming major firmware update will support 2TB+ volumes allowing you to use the full capacity of 4x750GB or 4x1TB drives. Expanding and upgrading is easy with their X-RAID system (an autoexpanding version of RAID-1) or you can use vanilla RAID-0 and RAID-1. Best thing is to check it out yourself and read the review on Tom's Hardware.

[Joshua Ochs @ Aug 13th 2007 9:51PM]

Get a Drobo (http://www.drobo.com) and be happy. The current version is only USB 2.0, but future versions will have additional interfaces (likely Firewire 800 and eSATA).

[Maxime Rousseau @ Aug 13th 2007 10:55PM]

Meh... A bit too generic for my taste. Would you rather buy one of those, or build your own? http://inventgeek.com/Projects/PoorMansRaid/Overview.aspx

[Juke Box Hero @ Aug 14th 2007 12:24AM]

@Brennan: There's actually many more RAID configs than just 0, 1, 5 and 10. There's also RAID 2, 3, 4, 6, 0+1 and 50. I've also heard of a RAID 7 but there was some debate on that...

@Mile: Weeellll, let's not call RAID 0 a "myth" since the configuration actually exists. How about "misnomer" instead? RAID 10 is indeed the perfect balance between access time and thru-put while still retaining redundancy...but man, losing half of your total capacity? Worth it for sure for certain applications (like tlogs or tempdb for SQL) but for home use, I'd lean towards RAID 5.

@Joshua Ochs: Yeah, the Drobo is neat but the performance is terrible from what I've heard. I'd wait for this technology to mature a bit for the desktop market...

It's nice to see an eSATA interface on this type of enclosure tho, it might actually keep up with RAID thru-put, USB is just to slow for this application...

[seva @ Aug 14th 2007 4:25AM]

Can anyone recommend an eSATA JBOD?

[Geir @ Aug 14th 2007 5:59AM]

I bought a eSATA cabinet over at satadrives.com and filled in the disks myself (2x1TB + 2x500GB) and got a eSATA RAID card for my notebook. Real cheap, but fast as he#"... :-)

I could probably get two for the price of the system above, can't justify that pricetag if you check out what is on the market already.

[Ray-- @ Aug 14th 2007 10:11AM]

why are these so expensive? For that price you could buy a pretty fast computer and use the raid on the MB... and yeah I know it's hardware raid... but dedicating a whole computer to just managing a software raid should pretty fast no???

[Chip @ Aug 14th 2007 11:23PM]

Ray, many have had good results with software RAID in Linux. It's expandable, fast (much faster than Windows software RAID) and portable. You can take the drives to another Linux box fairly easily.

The appeal of these NAS boxes are ease of use, hot swap (most of the time) and portable. Imagine putting all your photos, songs, videos, disk image backups of all computers and important scanned documents on one, small breadbox sized box. Have a fire? Grab the wife, kids, pets and the NAS box.

You pick which order.

[Ray-- @ Aug 15th 2007 3:15PM]

yes but NAS != backup.. and RAID 5 doesn't mean you shouldnt be backing up the NAS since RAID 5 doesnt do squat if your kid hits the format drive button. My assumptions is that people are using this for storage and not backups and running backups off this thing to tape or another slower drive?? That makes more sense to me...