Home "cloud" drive - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 06:47:52 pm
content: I usually carry an 8GB memory stick around in my wallet and keep loads of files on it but really I'm getting fed up with that and would like access to more storage and files.So is there a device with a HDD in it I can connect to my router and access from any PC in the house or over the internet from a "remote pc" like at work. I'd rather not go the "internet cloud" route, I've just tried that and was not at all impressed with the free yousendit service and I'm not paying 15 dollars a month for something a bit better.

author: Chet T16
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 06:54:46 pm
content: What about Dropbox? You start with 2gb but can easily be bumped up by referrals and other stuff. I've 20+ free now and got an extra 48 for 2 years with my phone.Or ftp into a nas?

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 07:05:52 pm
content: Get an LG Nas box. they are cheap , and you can remote access, even with dynamic ip.they mount like a drive letter. the advanced machines let you slap in your own drives . they support raid and even have memory card and optical drive. you cann connect external usb drives as well.other services : ZumoDrive ( subscription but they give you 2 Gbyte free. requires installing their software...

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 07:21:25 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 21, 2012, 07:05:52 pmYea just like "you send it", update speed is crap and on my work PC the "app" burns 100% of a 2.8GHz celeron just to syncronise. Plus this means keeping duplicates on the PC so not safe

author: johnnyfp
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 08:16:11 pm
content: There's various bit of server and software that can do cloud type things. Some cost lots others are free, but will they do what you want?http://owncloud.org/orhttp://sparkleshare.orgare free and can be installed on any server with PHP. Works ok except when deleting. It gets a bit confused as to what is deleted to what is missing.This can be installed on unRaid NAS fromhttp://www.lime-technology.com/.A more costly one is from synologyhttp://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS412%2Bwhich has a cloud pluging. These are really sexy NAS's but cost an f'ing fortune. Not sure how good the Cloud software is. My mate bought one and am waiting for him to test out the cloub pluging.There are many other software solutions out there. Just google it, but check before you buy. Oh and they sux if there are too many files. So if you're planing on using it to sync ten's of thousands of files, check that it doesn't cripple your system

author: david77
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 08:24:53 pm
content: I know a couple of guys who run their own NAS (Icybox I think) at home and have FTP access to it. Speed very much depends on your broadband, of course.Personally I run a small linux box as my home server that also lets me access my data via FTP. With a VDSL connection and DynDNS.org that works quite good. It's ok for smallish files <5MB, everything bigger is a pain as the IP only lets me have 1MBit upstream.The NAS solution is certainly less power hungry but probably also less flexible, the server does other things as well.

author: benemorius
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 08:50:42 pm
content: The most straightforward solution has been around since before "cloud" became a term. You can use a VPN or some other means to connect to your home network and simply access your files from your desktop machine, assuming that's where they normally are. That may or may not be ideal for your use case though. Anyway what I came here to say was this:Quote from: david77 on June 21, 2012, 08:24:53 pmThat may be the biggest problem you encounter in keeping your stuff behind your home internet connection. Depending on what service is like in your area, you might find your upstream bandwidth to be severely lacking. Hopefully it's less of a problem in the UK than the US, but here it is not at all uncommon to find best-case upstream connections of 512Kb or less. Youcanserve files on that of course, but it will eventually drive you bat shit crazy.

author: G7PSK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 08:56:30 pm
content: Many NAS boxes have that facility built in these days, there is also free software out there that will enable such use as well.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 08:57:36 pm
content: Yes the upload speed is an interesting issue. My main concern is power consumption. I do not want to run a full blown PC so that I have this luxury. I'd rather a low power NAS.I'm now wondering about 1 drive versus 2 drives with RAID1 (might as well start off on the right foot)

author: johnnyfp
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 09:02:34 pm
content: Wth just one drive, you won't have any redundancy. So if that drive fails, that's it.Raid1 is ok and gives you the fastest recovery, but cost the most as it's a one for one backup.Raid6 looks cool.

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 09:08:59 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 21, 2012, 08:57:36 pmTwo drives, not RAID (of any kind), but the second drive for normal backups. RAID is not for backups, RAID is for increasing availability and performance (depending on the RAID level). If your RAID controller freaks out it can easily destroy the contents of both drives. If you happen to accidentally delete a file, the RAID controller will happily delete if from all drives, as instructed.

author: benemorius
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 09:14:18 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 21, 2012, 08:57:36 pmDefinitely go with 2 drives if this will be the only place that the data exists. It is never ok to have important data stored on only one hard drive. Whether a drive will fail is never a question - the only uncertainty is when. They all fail, and some of them go before their time.I'd strongly recommend against parity raid (raid 5, 6, etc) unless you know what you're doing or are using a proven turn-key solution. Writes to a parity raid are not atomic and WILL lead to data corruption in the event of a power failure during a write operation if there is no nonvolatile write cache to finish the operation when power is restored. It sounds (and is) easy enough, but the number of vulnerable raid5 implementations out in the wild is absolutely shocking. I used to work in IT and I saw it all the time at businesses that really should have known better.

author: DrGeoff
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 09:45:44 pm
content: You could:a) Buy a NAS box, many are Linux based with lots of additional services that can be enabled (eg Qnap, Buffalo etc).b) Build your own Linux based NAS box with an old PC and a few drives.If this is a real data archive and backup facility then use pairs of drives in Raid 0 configuration (mirror).Enable ssh (with pre-placed keypairs) or https (with certificates) through your firewall and access it remotely using a portable device.

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 10:13:08 pm
content: Quote from: DrGeoff on June 21, 2012, 09:45:44 pmWhat part of "RAID is not for backup" didn't you understand?

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 10:20:42 pm
content: The LG nas boxes have interesting features such as selective replication, shadow copy and history.You can stuff two drives in and tell the machine replicate this folder on drive 1 to drive 2 but keep a history of filemods on drive 2.So if you accidentally delete a file from drive 1 you still have a backup on drive 2. you can specify how many revisions it needs ot keep so you can even go back in time.http://www.lg.com/us/network-storageI use the N2R1D's. (drives are free in my life)LG updates the firmware regularly with new features. ( not like linksys and buffalo and d-link that don't give a rat's fart. sold is sold. .. )Slap in the drives of your choice and off you go.It can make ISO files of a cd or dvd you put in the tray all by itself and you can burn files back to optical standalone as well... so your computer is not loaded with stuff like that. You can also use the optical as a regular external drive. simply mount as a drive letter and of you go. full read/write capability. over the network.The top of the machine has a little pop out box that has a usb port and a cardreader. Pop in the memory card from a camera and press the copy button. the nas will make a new folder with todays time and data estamp and copy the cards contents...Same for any usb memory stick. or you can set up that usb port to keep a specific folder in sync with the stick.before you leave home you plug in the stick : the nas makes sure all files on the stick are in sync with the nas folder. come home , plug in the usb stick and it does the same. ideal to take a file from home to mobile , work on it , come home and the updates are pushed back to the nas box without doing anything.the backside has two usb ports so you can connect either printers or more usb harddisks.I have three of these things. The oldest is 3 years. zero defects. low power Two are in a closet happily humming away. the third on my desk to do the usb stick sync.LG gives you a free URL to get to your machine, each machine has a dynamic dns onboard that pings with the LG site.give your nas box a name , it self registers at LG's site and you simply connect to it by going to <mynasname>www.lgnas.com/folderenter username and password and off you go.So you don't need to muck about with dyndns or any other kind of sometimes-it-works / sometimes-it-don't service.The drives sit in metal quick disconnect trays that slide out. machine has a huge slow-spinning fan to keep everything cool. so there is no noise of this thing.it has a neat lcd that shows it's ip addres and name as well as other messages.I have had many different nas boxes .. from ethernet to usb drive converters , dlink 323 , linksys mediahub , wd nasbook , buffalo's , simpletech , and some noname brands... they've all gotten the sledgehammer treatment or been returned to the store becasue of endless misery...The wd nasbook is good. That one i have because it comes with photo and slidshow apps for ipad and android. so my mom can see slideshows of pictures i have on the nasbook without doing anything. but it is single drive only.And as bored@work said : raid is NOT for backup ! raid is to cluster drives in a pool to make higher reliability and larger volume spans. NOT for backup. ( especially not raid 0 and 1 ... raid 5 is good for large volumes with data integrity and hot rebuild. but that requires 4 identical drives... two for data, one for parity and a hot-spare so the array can rebuild when a fault is detected on one of the drives... the broken one needs to be ejected and replaced asap. the server will not go down in the menatime and files are accessible )but... raid 5 requires a real raid controller.... preferrably with large amounts of buffer ram and battery backup for the buffer ram ...Promise technologies has good ones. so has 3Ware.The reason i have more than 1 nas box : i replicate between nas boxes. if one craps out ( dead motherboard or power supply ) i have a hot spare ... and i have an off-site one as well ... so if the place burns down... backup !

author: DrGeoff
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 10:28:36 pm
content: Quote from: Bored@Work on June 21, 2012, 10:13:08 pmThe bit where you started spouting nonsense.

author: baljemmett
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 10:49:26 pm
content: Quote from: DrGeoff on June 21, 2012, 10:28:36 pmIt's far from nonsense -- RAID, in some flavours, offers some resiliency against one very specific data-loss scenario, and bugger all against all the others. It'll be no help whatsoever if you (or some nefarious entity) deletes or corrupts your files or trashes the filesystem. It might help if one of the drives sticks its little feet in the air, but then again it might not -- it only takes whatever took one drive out to take the other out during the rebuild and the whole lot's gone.(Yes, I used a mirrored pair in my NAS, because I wasn't sure I trusted the shiny new 2TB drives I bought with it -- no offence intended, free_electron! -- but there's a pair of external USB drives that contain copies of all the important bits and bounce between home and the office...)

author: DrGeoff
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 11:03:47 pm
content: Quote from: baljemmett on June 21, 2012, 10:49:26 pmI agree with you on this, however it depends on what you mean by 'backup'.A backup is something that is done nightly and/or weekly to protect against short-term data loss. An archive, on the other had is a data snapshot that is kept forever. The raid NAS (and even with enterprise class drives I use raid 0 since they are going to fail one day) is used for backups and file/media serving. Anything on there can still be reconstructed from the original sources if something dies in the NAS. Archives are stored on other media (often USB drives) and stored elsewhere. In a 4-bay NAS I have 2 bays for backups and either USB or one of the hot-pluggable drive slots used for creating archives.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 11:21:18 pm
content: Quote from: baljemmett on June 21, 2012, 10:49:26 pmnone taken... you think i trust those ?I know exactly what drives i want : enterprise class drives.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 21, 2012, 11:46:14 pm
content: Quote from: DrGeoff on June 21, 2012, 10:28:36 pmSays the guy who thinks that 'RAID' 0 is a mirror. It's astripeand greatlyincreasesthe chances of data loss.

author: AntiProtonBoy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 12:33:02 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 21, 2012, 10:20:42 pmI understand avoiding RAID 0, but what's the matter with RAID 1? It may not be as fancy as RAID 5, but RAID 1 is pretty good form of cheap redundancy.

author: T4P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 12:52:39 am
content: HOLD YOUR HORSES. Don't turn this thread into a rage threadHow about an old computer with unix and samba ? I bet you can find many old computers as easily as you want to.At least you can install as many SATA drives as you wantI think you guys want RAID 10 (Actually, RAID 1+0 but i assume that's what they call RAID 10)

author: benemorius
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 01:01:18 am
content: Quote from: AntiProtonBoy on June 22, 2012, 12:33:02 amWhat people are talking about is simply the difference between the intent behind two forms of data redundancy:RAID is for keeping your data AVAILABLE in the event of an (often unpredictable) drive failure. The point is to have zero or close to zero down time while the failed drive is replaced.BACKUPS are meant to PROTECT your data against essentially ALL forms of data loss - kinds that involve drive failure and kinds that don't. There are a lot of ways to lose data: deletion, overwriting, drive failure, RAID CONTROLLER FAILURE (yeah, it happens, and when it does you can end up with 10 drives that all have gibberish written all over them). RAID1 stands a good chance of protecting your data if one drive fails, but it also opens you up to a few other ways of losing your data while offering no protection at all from countless other kinds of data loss. This is not being pedantic. Failures do occur and data is lost.If you want your data AVAILABLE 24/7/365 despite drive failures, use some form of redundant (not raid0) raid. If you want to PROTECT against data loss, implement one or more of a myriad of forms of data backup. If you want both, do both. Just don't get them mixed up or people start getting pissy.If protection is important, you really do want to have your data stored in two or more distinct places as far apart as you can manage. Having them on the same raid controller is not at all ideal, but better than having them in the same array. Better to have them in separate computers. Preferably not in the same building. Different cities is even better. Different regions would be great... you get the idea...It's really just as simple as that. You can choose how seriously you wish to take things, so there need not be any disagreements. Obviously not everyone needs to keep their data available 24/7, and nor does everyone need to go to great lengths to protect all of their data from accidental deletion.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 04:20:55 am
content: With just a static IP or dyndns address and linux box running a webserver+ssh you can do quite a bit.You can run something like ajaxplorer on the box to allow remote web based file management (upload/download/copy/move/rename etc) all from a remote browser.I personally wouldn't put it on the internet directly, just have SSH accessible and then do a simple SSH tunnel to get access to the file manager remotely.(this way you don't need to trust the password system of the web file manager and rely on ssh instead, which is far more secure)

author: AntiProtonBoy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 04:41:00 am
content: Quote from: benemorius on June 22, 2012, 01:01:18 amOh yeah, I totally understand the difference between the purpose of RAID vs. backup operations. (My spare job is actually maintaining backups of patient data for a GP clinic. So yeah, I can't afford to screw around with that.) Perhaps I should have quoted free_electron's post better. I was rather curious why free_electron stated RAID 1 is something to avoid (along with RAID 0).

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 05:13:51 am
content: Remember as well RAID5 has to have a low utilisation during rebuild after a swap, otherwise it will most likely drive the weakest drive in the array to failure during the rebuild, with no redundancy left for this second failure.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 06:18:02 am
content: right so raid is out and I might as well use my PC to backup to and have a single drive nas unless 2 comes at not much extra cost.Again, I'm not using any pc running linux or anything like that because I need to save on power consumption, I have an old PC, it uses 90W with a laptop drive attached !

author: G7PSK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 06:58:21 am
content: If you want to keep power consumption down why not use a usb to lan box such as the one by Sharkoon.http://www.sharkoon.com/?q=en/node/1798or even check your hub/modem as many of those have a usb on the back now that can be used for network storage, the one I have which is from BT does.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 11:41:18 am
content: well I've seen NAS boxes rated at 16W not sure if that includes the drive but if it does that will do me. I don't really have any USB drives around I can use so I'd possibly end up spending what I wouldanyway on a decent NAS that would last some time, I'm going to look into all options though.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 01:54:49 pm
content: Raid 0 is simply striping. Join a bunch of disks together to make one large, fast volume.One error one any one of the drives and kiss the data goodbye.Raid one is mirror. This does not protect. This is again done for speed. Databses that have multiple files open can pull from different sources on different drives. Raid one gives a tremendous speed improvement for READING... For writing it is is the speed of the slowest drive.Security ? None.One error happily gets replicated to the other drive....Raid 5 is for high availability. The cluster can detect errors, recover and rebuild on the fly to the hot spare without downtime or going offline. But this is again no backup.It starts going the backup way if you have two raid 5 based filers with dual power supplies that each are on their own ups , and mirror each other thru a dedicated network connection . ( second network card on a closed network that only has those machines on it ).We had such a system in our lab. Anything can or may happen. The data is there , alive, and accessible.Wort case Scenario : one filer completely dies. The other one loses mains power, one power supply fries and a drive dies.. The machine is still alive, data is still active and correct . Of course, anything that happens now kills the system.But even in this worst case scenario you won't notice any penalty in speed.A backup is an off-line duplicate. Preferrably stored in a physically different location.Raid systems with mirroring and clustering are on-line systems.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 02:00:24 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 22, 2012, 01:54:49 pmBeen there done that - never again. For speed I'd now use a SSD forincreased space well hec I mean if you want more than 2TB on one partition your freaking mad !!!

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 03:17:20 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 22, 2012, 01:54:49 pmRAID 5 is inferior to RAID 1 from reliability point of view. RAID 1 has 50% redundancy, RAID 5 has 1 over the number of drives redundancy. Both can tolerate a single drive failure, but the probability of a single drive failure in a two disk array is much lower than a single drive failure in a four disk array. If you compare a four disk RAID 0+1 array with a four disk RAID 5 array, then RAID 0+1 can tolerate at least a single drive failure, with 66% probability of surviving a second drive failure (assuming equal failure probability for all drives). RAID 5 can survive a single drive failure, but has 0% chance of surviving a second failure.Advantages of RAID 5 are less 'wasted' disk space and better performance. Resiliency is not one of them. If you want integrity, get a file system with built-in checksums (eg. ZFS, BTRFS). Of course none of this provides backups, although you could argue that filesystem snapshots combined with RAID provides protection against the most common causes of data loss.RAID 5 also has the disadvantage of severely reduced write performance in degraded mode, and lengthy rebuild times with the increasingly larger (but not that much faster) drives. During this rebuild the drives have a much higher load than on average, which increases the probability of a second drive failure. People are moving to RAID 6 (enough redundancy against drive failures), and these days often 0+1 because of improved performance and cheap disk space.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 22, 2012, 03:42:35 pm
content: Personally I think that with the exception of specific non consumer requirements Raid is no longer necessary and old hat. I mean jesus raid was thought up well over 20 years ago when the need for servers with high data transfer speeds were needed with the then slow hard drives that had little if any cache. These days I think for the average user a good quality drive with decent cache does it and if speed is of the essence use an SSD or even a hybrid, far less headaches than the time bomb raid seems to be.Of course if your a pro film studio or something rendering hi res video etc I can concede you might want fancy raid and I'd bet it would still be a minor expense compared to the rest of your hardware. Obviously internet servers would need the cost effectiveness of raid but again from what I here tell even google's idea of backup and redundancy is to have containers spread all over the world running their own generators and a whole bunch of second hand PC's lashed together into "data centres" backing each other up.

author: AntiProtonBoy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 23, 2012, 01:22:18 am
content: I distrust SSDs more than anything else from a reliability perspective. I think RAID 1 is still relevant.

author: johnnyfp
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 23, 2012, 02:27:43 am
content: Have a look at unRaid athttp://www.lime-technology.comthey do a free 3disk version and it works. Or a 21disk Pro version.So its one parity disk and data disk. If the parity disk breaks then install a new parity disk with no data loss. If one datadisk breaks, install a new disk and rebuild. If two disks go at the same time then you only lose the data on those two disks and not the whole array.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 23, 2012, 07:25:59 am
content: Quote from: AntiProtonBoy on June 23, 2012, 01:22:18 amwell I'm a bit iffy on them too but I guess backing them up on mechanical disks will protect against that.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 25, 2012, 09:51:02 pm
content: Well I got the LG N1T3, one 1TB HDD and a DVD-RW built in. set it up and not it won't let me in because it keeps saying wrong password ! so how do I reset it ? I can't reinstall because it's already on the network.Strangely the "fan hole" has no fan behind it. I'm fast getting un-impressed

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2012, 11:00:58 pm
content: there is a procedure where you hold in a button while powering up the machine. this will reset everything to default ( note : the drive gets wiped as well ! )don't have experience with these machines. only the dual drive.the default password and user is admin

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 26, 2012, 05:39:53 am
content: this was the password it asked me to set, it messed me about so much. Told me to use carachters and numbers then would not take the numbers, was soo annoying. In the end it took just carachters, I've tried the 4 possible variants of the password but none work. I am just a tad pissed off right now. Not impressed with LG at all expected much better than this shit.

author: DrGeoff
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2012, 05:44:45 am
content: LG = Lucky if it Goes.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 26, 2012, 05:45:35 am
content: Quote from: DrGeoff on June 26, 2012, 05:44:45 amyou mean lucky if you get in !

author: MickM
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 27, 2012, 06:07:02 pm
content: Hi;http://www.freenas.org/Enough Said!Mick M

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 27, 2012, 07:06:23 pm
content: A few LG TV sets had a sticker inside that said Lucky HIPS.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 28, 2012, 04:29:50 pm
content: well I have a grumpy grudge with anything ubuntu at the moment anyhow.I have bought the LG N1T3 NAS so just trying to work that out.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 29, 2012, 04:10:09 pm
content: I can see it on the network but can't get in