Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Firewire

[Le Big Mac]

I've been looking around for an NAS. It seems that all of them have USB 2 and none has firewire for adding extra drives.

1) Should I care that it's USB2, not Firewire?

2) Why does NAS have only USB2 and not firewire?

 

[Bear]

I've been looking around for an NAS. It seems that all of them have USB 2 and none has firewire for adding extra drives.

1) Should I care that it's USB2, not Firewire?

Depending on a lot of factors, it may not matter.

If the ethernet on the NAS box is 100mb/s then it really won't matter. If the ethernet is 1000mb/s(gigabit) and you are only hitting the one drive, it could matter. But I don't think it would make that big of a difference. However if you were that concerned about speed you would be using internal storage.

2) Why does NAS have only USB2 and not firewire?

To save money.

 

[FireArse]

Linux with 1Gb ethernet or NAS unit?

Hi bear,

I know a bit on NAS and Linux shares, but do you know what would be quicker - an old 522MHz AMD k6/2, 320MB RAM with 1Gb ethernet card running Linux (internal HDD and samba) or a NAS unit with 1Gb ethernet?

Thanks,

F

 

[Bear]

I know a bit on NAS and Linux shares, but do you know what would be quicker - an old 522MHz AMD k6/2, 320MB RAM with 1Gb ethernet card running Linux (internal HDD and samba) or a NAS unit with 1Gb ethernet?

That is a tough question.

What is the speed of the I/O bus in the system? How does it compare to the one in the NAS box?

What type of disks would you have in the PC vs the NAS box?

Have you thought about using NFS instead of SAMBA? You might get better performance.

Maybe the better question would have been, what is the data bus speed on the AMD chip? Also, I suspect the AMD chip might not have enough processing power to really support gigabit speeds, especially with disk I/O happening.