Marc from techmoments.com looks at 3 cheap/free data storage solutions and discusses FreeNAS, OpenFiler and the D-Link DNS 323:
So, you have alot of old equipment hanging around? What is that you say? You also suddenly have the need to set up remote storage? Well, let me tell you, of all the times to need this, now is probably the best.
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The first is Freenas. You can find this one at www.freenas.org. I’ve personally used it for a couple of years and its stable, reliable and easy to install. This is so lightweight you could boot it off a USB key. Its based on FreeBSD and it supports NFS, SAMBA for Windows compatibility, FTP, iSCSI, user permissions for access rights and more. It can act as a media server for your xbox-360, even an itunes server. Its even easy to upgrade the software, having done it in place through a few revisions during my year using it. Only issue is, and you might not think of it this way, is that its community supported only. This means the it down to the usual google search if you have an issue in order to see if anyone else has encountered and corrected it. That or you need to post your issue to community supported boards and hope for a reply.
The next is a product called open filer. This is also a linux based and can be found at www.openfiler.com. While the Freenas product is more of a consumer grade product, openfiler is much more of a commercial grade offering. You can even purchase support for it from the vendor. And that where you know this one means business. I did a few tests with it and from the beginning you can see it power. It supports iSCSI, NFS, full LDAP and CIFS integration. It can be an Active Directory of NT domain member. It can even be permissioned via AD based groups and users. The iSCSI integration was supurb. The few issues, actually not issues but questions about this and that, were easily found on the web and solved.
Ok, I do have one other but in a few ways its not a fair comparison. The D-Link DNS323. www.Linksys.com is the site to find more information. This is a true appliance. It contains slots for 2 sata drives but comes empty. I added it because in the cheap catagory its close. Going price is about $125 US without disks. If you happen to have a few sata disks lying around, this could really make sense. Where it falls behind its stablemates is that its not as flexible. The others can be used as SAN attached storage. The 323 cannot. But, the 323 is a greener alternative as it does not need to have a full PC behind it chugging lots of electricity. It can spin its disks down after a predetermined time and can even be used as a USB print server. It even supports disk mirroring and good old JBOD.
Read the full post here (techmoments.com)
