Non-RAID Multi-Drive NAS setup?

Question

I'm looking to setup some kind of network storage device, which can take multiple drives (preferable 3 or more) and still see them as separate drives which I can slot in or take out at any time without affecting the others. I gather that NAS devices that provides RAID or JBOD would not work in this situation.

The drives needs to be accessible from the 8 computers around the house simultaneously as well. The reason I'm looking for this is so that I can purchase additional HDDs for shared storage by the family as and when it is required, as opposed to purchasing multiple add-on drives for each PC, or moving around an external HDD.(Just caused physical damage to a Seagate FreeAgent Pro when it got tipped over accidentally while in operation over the weekend and lost all data - it WAS the backup drive.) I'd probably use the first 2 disks as a shared network-accessible storage area for the family, while using the 3rd or 4th as space for manual backup.

Any recommendations? Thanks.

EDIT TO ADD DETAILS: I would prefer a dedicated solution that would allow for lower power consumption, heat generation, small physical footprint, and ease of upgradability/maintenance.

I need the device to allow multiple physical disks to be seen as multiple logical drives so that users can choose exactly which drive they want their data to go into, and so that in the event of the device's failure, I can easily take any of the other disks, connect it to a computer and read data off it. I understand that with RAID you can't do that until you rebuilt the RAID array. Also, some data may be more valuable than others, so I have opted for a more manual way of backup (as opposed to automatic mirroring) where users have the choice of copying important files to all the disks, and only one or two disks for the less important files. It's certainly seems a bit more of a hassle, but it can gain us some flexibility in space usage and the usual problems that comes with recovering from RAID arrays.

Answer 1

I would highly recommend you take a look at Freenas, I have been using it for around 6 months and love it.

It runs on pretty much any machine, and whilst I use it for RAID on four hard drives, you can set it up however you want.

It supports MANY different connection systems - CIFS/Samba, NFS, AFS, FTP for starters!

I would recommend messing around with it in a virtual environment first so you can add multiple disks and test that it does what you want. But I love this software and would highly recommend it!

Another solution for NAS software is Openfiler, many people like it however again, after testing both, I settled with Freenas!

Answer 2

JBOD is exactly what you are looking for. It stands for "Just a Bunch Of Disks", as in the opposite of RAID, it just appears to the OS as a bunch of disks.

Answer 3

Microsoft has a paper on Windows Home Server Drive Extender (warning: this is a Microsoft Word document).  Regarding recovery:

If the home server fails completely, all the surviving drives can be attached to a computer that is not even running Windows Home Server Drive Extender, and you can copy the files from the drives to that computer. Because the files retain their original names and paths (under the \DE directory), the files can be used with no specific recovery steps.

Apparently Drive Extender is flexible as it supports external (USB/Firewire) hard drives as well. You first have to notify it that you will be removing a drive and it will begin copying off any files that are not duplicated onto the remaining drives.

Another advantage is that it supports RDC so you can manage it from any computer as if you were sitting at the console, and RDC really is fast enough to make you believe your monitor is connected to the machine.

If you have your own hardware, WHS is about USD 92 at newegg. Otherwise you can buy appliance-type machines with it pre-installed.

2018 update: This item [Windows Home Server] is currently out of stock (at Newegg) and it may or may not be restocked

More here:

• low-power motherboard for windows home server
• Creating one big continuous space from 4 disks

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I'm a little puzzled at your multi-drive req. Why not have a Shared Folder for each person instead of a separate drive? They can map that folder as a drive on their own computers, and data in a Shared Folder is automatically duplicated onto another physical hard drive (if one is available).

Answer 4

Try setting up a VM, running something like FreeNAS, and then adding dynamic virtual hard drives to it, but storing them on external hdd's attached to the host.... This should be quite flexible..?

Answer 5

fantastic solution if you just want to read from the disks, for example film archive that spans several disks. and if one fail you just loose the films on one drive instead of all as you would with JBOD.

mhddfs https://romanrm.net/mhddfs

Have used it for many years and is working fine, also speed is ok. When writing, you have to copy the files to the separate disks, there is an option that might handle this but I would be careful.