[besson3c]

My wife is in line for a new computer soon and I've also been thinking about an SSD drive. Since she likes the Macbook Air both of these purchase contemplations have got me thinking about changing how we store things around here.

In surveying my disk space, a lot of it is unsurprisingly just my music and general clutter. I'm very lazy about deleting stuff I no longer need. I've been contemplating buying a Solaris box and setting up a ZFS pool for a good while now. This would mirror my server environment with physical hardware, so there is that reason for going this route, but I'm thinking that a cheap tower with 5 or 6 drive bays or so with some otherwise basic hardware supported by Solaris (or possibly even FreeBSD) would suffice for this NAS.

I'd rather not have to spring for the 256 GB SSD, as I don't feel like it is cost effective to pay the premium for this drive when the vast majority of my stuff is just crud I only occasionally need and can live with archived on cheap, slow SATA drives.

So, what I'm wondering is if any of you have tried to pair down your local storage to just the bare minimum so that you relied on a NAS for everything else? The mount sharing protocols supported by ZFS are NFS and iSCSI, so I'm also wondering if any of you have also used either with OS X? Our needs are simple enough that NFS will do fine... Have any of you tinkered with the NFSv4 kernel extension for OS X Leopard? I have no idea whether Snow Leopard supports NFSv4 natively or if this extension would continue to work? NFSv3 would probably be fine for us, but I'm just curious...

I really like the principle behind getting a nice fast disk for the OS and essentials and just offloading the crap that just needs to be archived to something else. The 802.11n in the Macbook Air would be plenty fast for accessing this stuff.

[mduell]

I went with a 240GB SSD ($420) for everything I needed with me, and accessing a media share at home via samba. iSCSI for this sort of thing is just a stupid geek trick.

[besson3c]

Yeah, iSCSI is overkill, but NFS is simple and fast...

[Eug]

So, what's the best Gigabit store-bought NAS that's good for cross-platform use - Windows 7 and OS X 10.5 and 10.6?

[indigoimac]

iSCSI is overkill, but it's robust as hell. NFS, not so much. I've got an atom-based windows machine that does double duty as an htpc and and nas box with a drive shared over iscsi for time machine backups. It's near native speed over gigabit and quite nice... but it's overkill... then again you're setting up a zfs pool... so, you might as well go all out.

Had I decided to continue fighting with linux (more to do with the htpc side of things, not so much file sharing) I would have gone with netatalk sharing whatever you want via afp... which would obviously support time machine and shares for whatever else you want... or I might have ended up with iscsi there too, couldn't tell you.

I've been using global san's initiator for osx and have been quite pleased with it.

[ginoledesma]

Originally Posted by Eug 

So, what's the best Gigabit store-bought NAS that's good for cross-platform use - Windows 7 and OS X 10.5 and 10.6?

Depending on your budget:
1. Cheap: D-Link DNS-321/323
2. Affordable: Iomega StorCenter, Buffalo LinkStation, etc
3. Reasonable: Netgear ReadyNAS Duo
4. Pricier: Drobo FS
5. Pricey: QNAP TS-219P / TS-239 Pro

All can do CIFS/NFS and will work well with Mac OS X and Windows. While they all have GigE connections, performance on the D-Link DNS-321/323 are closer to the 100Mbps speeds due to the slow Marvel processor.

The QNAP TS-239 Pro is much higher end and can do iSCSI among others. It's also got an Intel Atom processor so you can do fancier things like streaming video, Time Machine backups, and basically run whatever apps on Linux you want.

I've listed multi-bay solutions so you get some redundancy in your NAS. :-)