Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

June 14, 2014

NAS-ty

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , — wimminz @ 9:46 pm

As I have mentioned before, my main NAS box is one of these…

14 x 25 x 23 cm, and it is light and compact and uses fuck all power.

This + laptop + small inverter + 12 volt DC lead acid battery = computing power and information retrieval anywhere.

Nobody *gets* this, because statistically speaking nobody uses them, it’s chicken and egg, so, some explanations…nastwo

This is a screen cap from my actual  *main* (as in, hot and online 24/7)  NAS, as you can see, 4 identical 2TB WD greens with duplication turned on (every file exists at least twice, and no two copies of the same file are on the same physical hard disk.

7.2 TB total usable space and 3 TB currently free, 2 TB shared folders, 2 TB of duplication, 200 GB of backups and 25 GB for the system itself.

In this second pic we can see the root of my shared folder, this appears via network mapping as the Z: drive on all my PC’s and laptops.

In here we can see I have some sort of directory structure

BACKUPS is not the 202 gig of automatic windows backups mentioned above, this is backups of other and older shit, going back to 1999 on this NAS box, eg old emails and crapola.nasone

DISK IMAGES is exactly what it says, Macrium Reflect disk images, which thanks to it being on a NAS, and thanks to the way Macrium works, means I can if I choose just mount them the same way as virtual clone drive.

DRIVERS, exactly what is says, copies of all the drivers and driver CD’s for all the hardware I have ever had, currently run, and then some, absolutely fucking invaluable.

ECR Originally I meant to call this ER, like the hospitals, as it was where I was keeping all the files and shit that other people might call workspace, workbench or work in progress, but by the time I noticed the typo I’d already mapped it and just never bothered, so all the project stuff goes in here, so if I shoot some stuff on the 1080p video camera the raw files go in here, as do the project files (videostudiopro 17 / handbrake / vegas etc) but not the actual finished products, this means I can revisit older projects and change them etc

GAMES what it says, all the pirate games as well as a dupe of the stream directory on my main PC

GED FILES, one of my little hobbies, genealogy, lots of genealogy software uses files with the .ged extension.

GUEST, what it says, the one directory that a guest on the LAN has read and write, but not edit or delete, permissions to.

LIBRARY, this has everything, monster selection of pdf manuals, bike stuff, computer stuff, engineering stuff, hobby stuff, mil-tech stuff, science stuff, there are around 6,000 manuals in here, plus the library also contains technical videos, all my website archives, teleport pro copies of other websites that I grabbed before they disappeared into the ether…

MOBILES, all my android mobile devices sync daily, via the excellent SyncMe app, their entire contents, both internal memory and add in micro SD card contents, fucking everything.

MP3 Jukebox, what it says, at last count some 50k files all sorted and indexed, so A-B directory, Black Sabbath directory, Paranoid 1970 directory…. magic

PHOTOS, again, what it says, but I know that I will never lose another photo, and I can easily find any photo

SOFTWARE, again what it says, categorised by iso’s and flat files, anything and everything, together with serials, every windows OS from Chicago 95a to present, and a bunch of other besides, multiple versions of office, and paint shop pro, and acrobat, and bryce, and partition magic, and so on, because you never know when you need a version that is 3 iterations old etc.

VIDEOS, my own little digital blockbuster store, bliss… this is of course the shit worth keeping, so not godzilla or spider man 2 or prometheus etc etc etc

VIDEOS – MINE, videos I have made, things I have converted over the years from old family cine, all my own work, none of it is commercial of course, just irreplaceable

Z-PRIVE – my donkey and midget porn collection..lol.. actually this is just a useful second string of “are you sure”, call a directory private and put all the shit in there that you really do want to think once, twice, thrice, before you share it or attach it to an email or some such, eg scans of passprts and driving licences, ebanking records, scans of vehicle ownership papers, rent agreements, invoices and receipts, insurance documents, all that good stuff, all in one place.

I can sit at any computer in my place, and all that stuff is the Z drive, whoch of course also means that I can have three different computers all working on the same word document, and thanks to versioning etc there is just the one copy they are all working on, you don’t get nests of New Folder inside New Folder and so on.

You don’t get “accidental” duplication of data either, that 2TB of data, it was once 4.5 TB, there was so many large files or sets of files that were duplicated more than once, which isn’t just a waste, it makes shit real hard to find.

Copernic does a full text index of the whole thing, so I can find anything.

Another incredibly useful thing, I can sit down at the laptop in the kitchen and compose an email, and just attach a picture I took on one mobile that morning and an email attachment sent to the other mobile that lunchtime, it is all just *there*

I can sit on any device anywhere in the house an access any file, I don’t have to get up or use another pc or anything, but, some jobs are nice to break up that way, for this bit of the job I need the high resolution and a 46″ screen and a hot i7 CPU, for this bit of the job I can sit there with the stinkpad on my lap and type away.

Pick up that box, and I know I have everything I need to start again, nothing lost.

With it all on gigabit LAN (except for the mobile android devices that use the wifi) everything is in reality just as fast as if it was on a spinning rust hard disk in the machine you are sat at.

Obviously, for security purposes ( and you should have a proper router, not the freebie shit the telco will give you) the NAS box is locked down hard, totally inaccessible from outside the LAN, and the LAN itself locked down pretty tight so even if someone plugs in a patch lead or manages to sniff the wifi keys, they find themselves on their own little vlan that doesn’t connect to anything.

It’s also physically secure, you can come here and look around every room, and you won’t see the NAS boxen, because they aren’t in any of the rooms, or under the floors, or in the attic… you don’t need to physically touch them from month to month, so you don’t need them on show in the front room.

In the old car I also had an auto sneakernet, there were three sites that the computer in the car would log into via wifi and vpn, this being one of them, and each site had the same directory in the tree, and the car would auto sync every one, and itself…  who needs the fucking cloud or dropbox….

I got that idea after building the same thing for a digital photographer, PC built in the car, with a multi card reader, all the DSLR’s synced to that, and an office PC at one location, and his SOHO PC at home, and he never had to physically do anything except maybe wait 20 minutes and drink a coffee and smoke a fag while the systems synced up automagically, those high res RAW images were big, he’d easy shoot a few gig at a time..

A pukka home NAS setup is, in short, absolutely everything that is advertised about being fantastic about my butt, that shit is all just *there*, with none of the drawbacks, nobody else has access to it, nobody can cut your access to it, it doesn’t need an internet / WAN connection, it doesn’t have any months fees, it is on an ethernet connection that not even fairly large commercial concerns could afford as a WAN connection, speed wise, and best of all, SHTF, you can pick it up as easy as a gallon of petrol, and walk away….

October 30, 2013

Windows file copy dialogue

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:20 am

It’s a simile, or a metaphor, or an allegory, or maybe it’s just a fucking example.

Back in the day you could bring any NT machine, no matter how high the spec, to its knees, just pop a floppy in the drive and click FORMAT.

As long ago as 1985 the Acorn RISCOS had a “pause” and “resume” feature in file copy/move, something to this day winders does not have.

So, we have a scenario, Disk F: is empty, Disk G; contains;

  • Folder 1 – 60 gig in size, 1.1 million assorted small files
  • Folder 2 – 90 gig in size, 127 large files
  • Folder 3 – 120 gig in size, 650,000 assorted files

You want to move everything from, Disk G to Disk F because Disk G is dying.

What’s quickest, do each folder in sequence, or do them all simultaneously?

Well, it depends, and then the “having a wimminz in your life” analogy pops up, Folder 4, 642 gig in size, 1.9 million files, including many os/system files that will require confirmation, many same name files that will require skip/overwrite, and many file names inc path that are too long for the system to read / write.

Your brain on MGTOW is the same, the wimminz process fucks up everything else, it’s a resource hog out of all comparison to what it actually achieves, if anything…

The old Microsoft Windows home server wasn’t a bad OS, Home server 2011 still has a bad rep because MS removed Drive Extender which was included in the earlier version of home server.

Drive Extender (DE) is a way of making all your disks in your NAS box appear to the rest of the network as one big disk… which people liked.

It did it by creating a “DE” folder in the root of each HD in the NAS, and then creating a mirror of the entire NAS file directory STRUCTURE (not content) in every HD.

So, “Folder 1” on your NAS which contained “file 1” and “file 2“, you might find that in fact while all four disks on your NAS had a root “DE” folder, and all four root “DE” folders contained a “Folder 1” folder, when you look at the four drives (for example in a 4 bay NAS) on a drive by drive basis you would get stuff like

  1. DE\Folder 1\
  2. DE\Folder 1\file 2
  3. DE\Folder 1\file 1
  4. DE\Folder 1\

Which means to extract all that shit to a new system, or to recover it, you have to merge folders into a new location.

For my money I think MS were entirely correct to lose DE in WHS2011 and go back to RAID1, and for my money the commercial replacement Drive Bender is just another DE, eg something that sounds great 99% of the time when everything is going really well.

(My personal take is that RAID is seen as scary, quite rightly, and DE was seen as cute and fluffy, quite wrongly…)

When things are going well, that Folder 4, the “wimminz process” above just bogs things down, it’s fucking annoying and yadda yadda yadda but at least processes 1 to 3 inclusive are still running.

When TSHTF however, that wimminz process does nothing but churn and bog the system and turns a potential data loss scenario into a major entire NAS fucked and corrupted, you’re data is hosed bro and so are you, scenario…. when a wimminz process runs it wants priority, a high nice value than everything else, what’s that NT server, you’re running the accounts and live office for a 5 million turnover firm that employs 20 local people, here, have a floppy to format, fuck you very much…

I do have potential cuntstomers (sic) etc ask me about this shit, can I have a quote please,…. no, now fuck off..

Because after I go to the effort y’all will say HOW FUCKING MUCH???!!!!

So here are my rules for speccing a NAS.

  1. Gather up all your optical disks, loose HD’s and PC etc, inventory it all and come up with a total data capacity in gigs.
  2. We will call this number N GB
  3. Your NAS data pool needs to be 4 x N GB in capacity on day one.
  4. Your NAS installed capacity needs to be double this, or 8 x N GB on day one if you are going for RAID-1 mirrored drives.
  5. NAS isn’t a backup, nor is RAID, so you need ANOTHER NAS of equal capacity +25% for a backup… thankfully this can be a slower cheaper one, but, it has to have the capacity.
  6. NEVER USE ANYTHING EXCEPT 2 TB HD’s in your NAS, no exceptions, ever. never ever ever ever ever ever ever, fucking never. got it? Never.

I can tell you now, I can count how many I have built and sold to SOHO customers on the fingers of one hand.

I’ll tell you something else, every single one of those customers was a single male.

Whenever there was a wimminz *anywhere* in the picture, we never got past item #3 in that list above, lets start with something smaller and see how….. yadda yadda yadda… why don’t you fuck off to ebay and buy a used radynas duo… cunt…

Incidentally, item #5, if only there were commercial DLT tapes that worked out affordable and reliable and practical enough, optical just doesn’t cut it on any level, practically your backup device is going to be NAS#2… spinning rust.

So, WTF started AfOR off on this shit?

Basically, loads of posts in the man owe sphere from guys claiming to have swallowed the red pill and seen the light, y’all are like the two in house IT cunts I met on a job yesterday, bright eyes and fluffy tailed, hullo clouds hullo sky.

I said to them y’all are either new to this game or not very experienced, they both denied both options, full of bright eyes and optimism that the install was going to go well, repeating words and phrases that the backbone cable/EFM guys had told them that should have made them quake with awwww and phear, as though they were just words and phrases.

So I do my bit and rack up the new router, patch in the EFM box and amazingly connecting a router to the LAN side of an EFM box doesn’t make the red idiot light on the WAN side of the EFM box turn green… I call my counterpart at the telco and suggest we aren’t going to sign this baby off today as there is no working EFM circuit, he agrees, book the cable/ backbone guys to re-visit, not much else for me to do but pack up.

I say to the now deflated fluffy bunnies as I hand them my paperwork to sign,  “and have I managed to destroy your optimism?”… they agree, I have, I grin widely and say “then my work here is done!” and leave the dumb shits to it.

It’s like my 6 rules above for speccing a NAS, those who obey them all to the letter, yeah, sometimes they have issues, that’s life, but I get to hear about it after they solved the problem themselves, no fuss, no drama, no panic… just awww shit, not another fucking dead disk… and then remedy it.

Those who don’t…..

Those two fluffy bunnies yesterday, they remind me of the MGTOW’s patting themselves on the back for swallowing red pills for 4 whole years straight now.

They chided me for my cynical attitude when I walked in the door, laughed at me when I said I am not cynical mate, just experienced, after all. had they not got the cable guy to move the EFM circuit down the hallway to the new office where we were all sat….. and the cable guy’s awww and phear inducing utterances that they quoted to me when I walked in the door, utterances that ran off their fluffy little bunny coats like water off a ducks back?

“what’s the point in moving a dead circuit”

Now I’m not trying to put you down, you young red pillers, any more than I would put these two down for their IT knowledge, which was indeed leagues ahead of 99.9% of the population.

The lesson is that 4, 6, 10 years of popping red pills is waaaaaay too short a time to get actual experience, y’all are like these fluffy bunnies yesterday, you think your knowledge and skills and experience and your firewalls and anti malware apps and project plans and flowcharts actually amount to shit.

You are acquiring knowledge, which is a good thing, but you need to be acquiring experience, and that is empirical shit where the proof of every pudding only comes after you have eaten the last drop, left the restaurant, digested it, and seen it as an old friend off to the coast from your favourite bog seat.

May 23, 2013

I see cunts everywhere

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 11:23 am

In some ways I must be careful what I say for obvious reasons, but in my day job I go to all manner of workplaces, from the local tyre fitters to government offices, and it was at one such quasi governmental office last week that I saw something.

A moderately fuckable late 30’s early 40’s slut, no bra and a gratuitous view of her cleavage as she bent over to grab the server room key from the bottom drawer and hand it to me.

She was dressed as all wimminz are at “work” nowadays, appropriately for being on holiday, or relaxing at home chilling with a bottle of wine, but it was when I returned the key after my work there was done that I noticed the bitch was barefoot.

It reminded me of a gig I had about a year ago where I was contracting for big blue at another office, this time a personal finance / insurance joint, again mainly staffed by wimminz, dressed like they were on holiday.

This dump had a “dress down friday”, so of course all the wimminz came in dressed like sluts, and all the niggerz came in feeling very rad in their stonewashed 501’s.

*my* job was humping desktops out of storage, deploying the OS and software bundle and adding them to AD etc etc, then putting them back into storage ready for install, some 2,000 desktops, boring repetitive work at minimal money but hey…

So one of these bitches dressed like she is on holiday pulls me about wearing jeans on a tuesday, I just looked at her and said “I’m a contractor, not an employee, and you know what you can do with your dress code”

Predictably, she didn’t like this answer, and made threatening noises, I told her straight, “There are 2000 desktops to build, the job is already 6 weeks behind schedule, and you think big blue are gonna delay it even further and can my ass for wearing jeans while carrying boxes?”

She stomped off, never did know if she took it further, but I never got canned…

So I was thinking about the barefoot bitch, driving home through my home town at around rush hour, and I notice something.

Most of the faces behind the wheels of the cars coming the other way are wimminz, and without any doubt whatsoever, all of them were commuting from “jobs” as valid as the barefoot bitch and the dress code nazi, in the economic sense I am sure they are a huge proportion of what passes for the economy, but it in the productivity sense you could line the lot of them up against the wall and shoot them, and then dynamite the offices they “work” in, and nothing of value would be lost to the TRUE economy.

I wish I felt at liberty to post pictures of the things I see at work, being an old hand, I take pictures of everything, as I found it, what I did, as I left it, because we all know the last bloke out the door was the one who broke it, and nothing covers your ass quite as well as extensive photographs and other stuff such as putty logs.

The reason I wish is because years ago you could gain some sort of notoriety for posting a pic of a particularly nasty and messy server room or cabinet.

Now, it is the norm, and the standards are dropping, FAST… so far in 2013 I have seen ONE properly done, neat, tidy, workmanlike rack, and bear in mine some days I can be at two or three sites.20130523_095410

Server rooms used as dumps for boxes of papers, tables, chairs, cabling like snakes on acid fucking, things just thrown on job of one another or leaning against other stuff, no power conditioning, no HVAC, sprinkler valves sitting DIRECTLY above racks, HVAC systems leaking water that is running across the floor…..

I can’t post the pics because sooner or later someone would identify the locations, and soon after that, me, and I’m out a cushy little no responsibility job.

There is something DESPERATELY fucking wrong when the average guy’s home setup is far more workmanlike and neat than a so called commercial installation, and no, the added complexity of a commercial installation makes no odds whatsoever.

Of course if you want to see a fuckup of things that barely work plugged in at random and so on then go to any wimminz house and look at the tangle behind the flat screen telly / sky box / pvr / etc

Pic above is a recently acquired second hand HP Media Smart EX470 NAS, I paid not much more than beer money for this, it’s actually a nice little bit of kit (which is why HP stopped making them, HP, run by a wimminz…) and runs WHS which again I have to admit actually works very well indeed, so I bung three WD 2 TB disks at it at 75 quid each (these old ones won’t run larger than that) and hey presto, it is a good little NAS box.

So, the past day or two I have been running freefilesync sync jobs between my older and more obsolete NAS boxes to this thing, so this thing becomes the main online NAS and the others are now snapshot backups that can go offline.

I am now where I wanted to be, which is a single small portable box that contains all my digital shit, for around 250 notes I have 6 Tb (expandable to 8) of fairly responsive NAS storage.

It’s not seven sigma / five nines or any of the other crap out there, but in sheer functionality terms, and indeed in terms of how quick and cheap can I get back up if it all falls down, it blows away anything I see at work.

My home network uses two cheap gigabit switches, neither is fully populated with RJ45 cables, and neither is cable of running the entire network of available RJ45 end points, but if one dies I can just move a couple of patch leads and everything essential carries on running, until I go out to the local hardware store and buy another cheapo gigabit switch.

Make no mistake, I have surplus Cisco kit here, ranging from obsolete 877’s (obsolete but still being deployed…lol) through brand new 887’s through 1920’s to high end stuff, but none of it is real cisco, it’s all made in china or eastern europe, and so 50 quid TPlink / DP stuff does me fine, and if / when it dies I pop out and buy another one.

See, my guiding principle, and I employ this at work as well as in my home, is before starting any task I look at what could go wrong, and take steps to ensure that in the worst case scenario I can roll back to where I started, not think I can, but actually be able to do it.

Put me on a job with cisco kit and the very first thing I do is take a copy of the running config and the contents of the flash (the IOS and patches in other words) and sure it takes a few minutes, but what the fuck, I’m not paying for the time.

Contrast this to some of the younger engineers, who buy into all the gung ho GO GO GO GO GO corporate wimmiz and niggerz bullshit, and they dive right in and do a write erase and then try to apply the new config, which just happens to be broken, or apply the new IOS patch, which just happens to be corrupted (yes, it happens) and suddenly they find themselves with a site that is hard down and no way to get it back up without looking like an asshole and involving others finding and sending them the required files, assuming they actually have them, often they don’t.

Which all brings me neatly back to the barefoot bitch and cars full of wimminz driving home from the McJob at rush hour.

There was an old axiom that was drummed into me in my engineering days.

The differences between theory and practice
are far greater in practice than in theory.

But it doesn’t just apply to engineering, it applies to everything, except we now live in a world where thanks to the wimminz and niggerz, everything is theoretical to them, when it comes to practice and something fucks up, well, you make a support call and I turn up, and you STILL DON’T FUCKING GET IT, because you haven’t been made to clean up your own mess.

I can remember being about 6 and playing with a penknife, my dad warned me, “all knives are sharp“, which is theory, practice was me being a smartass and saying “this one isn’t” and proceeding to prove this by running the blade across my hand, only to find out that it may not have been sharp, but it was sharp enough to break this skin and draw blood…

Dad just looked at me and shook his head.

I’m sure my lip trembled a little and my mouth scrunched up, but you DO NOT CRY OR SHOW IT HURTS when you fuck up like that in front of your dad…. because you didn’t want him to see you as a baby, or worse still, as a girl, bad enough you just made yourself look stupid.

Bitches be protected from ever coming into contact with practice, they live in a world of theory, a world of make believe, a world of no consequences, or if there are any, it ain’t your fault baby.

I work for a company that is starting to disappear up it’s own ass with paperwork and tracking of this and tracking of that and forms to fill in, so I fill em all in, and bitches in the office send me an email asking me shit that was written on all those forms and photos I submit at the end of every job, not every day, every job, because it is fucking easier than looking at what I have sent in.

Then when my (eventual, I feel no sense of urgency) response points out that all they had to do was look at what I sent in already, they coo in wonder about how I am all organised and shit.

Cunts

April 11, 2013

All bitches be crazy

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 11:45 am

Can’t really go into details, fuckbuddy and her bestie, her bestie is as usual in all kinds of shit, now bear in mind I have NEVER MET THE SKANK in question, so I sit there on the phone talking to the FB, saying “and then she did this” and “and then she accused the guy of this” and “and then the police did that“, basically a blow by blow account…. in very great detail…

Every last fucking thing was spot on, 100% success rate.

Now, either I am fucking psychic, or AWALT, you decide.

All I did was replay in my head what my own psycho skank ho ex did do, and would have done in those circumstances, it is a thing I do all the time, and it works all the time, so really, what are the chances my psycho skank ho ex, or the FB’s bestie, or any other skank ho out there, is a NAWALT?

——————————————————————–

In other news I am umming an aahing about upgrading my NAS box and network…., technically I do not NEED to do this now, but on the other hand, there may not be a better time, so it is a subject that I sort of return to every week and look and and umm and ahhh and put off for another week…

Being in the UK, the offerings are basically Build-It-Yourself, and buy ready made.

For £343 from mini-itx.com I can get;

  • Jetway JNF99-525 Dual LAN 1.8GHz Fanless Long Life Expandable Mini-ITX Board £139
  • 2GB DDR3 1333 SODIMM for Selected Mini-ITX Boards £20
  • Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis 120W (UK Plug) £119
  • £8 carriage and £57.20 tax for the total of £343.20

Or I can go to the likes of Scan.co.uk, and their nearest cost 4 bay NAS

At this point note these are all excluding HD, which by choice would be WD Reds

So the two Qnaps have 256 and 512 meg of RAM, now sure, a lightweight headless server / NAS OS don’t need loads of headroom, but neither of these babies has anything left to buffer read/writes, and a lot of the cheaper or last years model commercial NAS boxes leave you stuck at a 2 Gig HD limit per bay… but it is all a bit “which mobile phone should I buy” where there are 999 very similar products and none of them even mention the features you actually want to know about.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews isn’t a lot of help.

So, what the fuck is the difference between the qnap 412 for 245 quid, and the qnap 419 for 407 quid?

Going the mini-itx build it yourself route you can at least see exactly what you are getting, wanna say fuckit and put Windowsxx on your NAS box and make it a PC?

You can with the jetway / build it yourself route.

You can also see in any detail you want, the precise specs of any single area of the NAS you are building, want to put a card reader or external USB3 / esata port on your NAS box, at least the DIY route you can see what is doable.

I dunno, I have difficulty believing that the qnap 491 is going to be able to give me the claimed 100 megabyte/sec read / write speeds over gig-e LAN in the real world, sure, it might do it on a LAN consisting solely of the qnap and a single PC, and with the only traffic being 10 x 10 megabyte TIFFs, and this is even before I enable all the extra “features” that all have to share that measly 512 megs of onboard RAM.

Hell, my crappy goflex 3TB NAS will do 50 mbytes/sec under ideal conditions, I think I have seen that maybe three times for around 60 seconds a time in all the time I have owned it.

I *know* the goflex is a crappy wee home box and not a real NAS, but the fact is the bloody qnaps are not real NAS boxes, hell, my day job every day is looking at racks of Cisco / Juniper / Poweredge / Thecus / Synology etc and making it all talk to LAN/WAN etc

If you want to bring the goflex down to 100 kilobytes/sec, or less, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is map network drive and try and write one folder full of small files, such as a website mirror, and read one folder of larger files, such as your mp3 collection… and frankly the 400 quid qnap won’t fare much better… despite being three times the price of the goflex.

In my REAL world of one main PC, two laptops, two mobiles and an occasionally turned on workshop PC and the odd customer PC, with scheduled backups and so on, the 400 quid qnap is NOT going to provide reliable fast access without serious slowdowns.

I know this for a fact, I have seen them in real life.

So in reality you could call both the 400 quid qnap and the cheapo 3TB goflex “NAS boxes”, in reality they are NAS boxes suitable for unattended backup and who cares how slow it is, not NAS boxes per se.

Enter the “pukka PC with dual atom” stuff like the jetway, chuck 2 or better still the full 4 gig of RAM at the bastards and they actually start working like a NAS.

I have a friend with one and he started to convert directories on the mapped NAS drives that contained thousands of small files, e.g. complete FTP mirrors of CMS websites, into rar archives, and the little bastard saturated his full duplex gig-e network.

More than this, it multitasked, the mp3 stream continued, and he was able to browse a photo directory… what’s more all of this shit was on the same disk on the home built NAS box.

He now has a mini ITX box that stores basically all his shit, grab it and a laptop and he is gone, with all his data intact.

and now we come to the true role of things like the qnap and goflex, they make a good, slow, unattended backup for the mini itx NAS, so there you go.

So now I just have to umm and ahh a bit more before splashing out the wonga for a £340 DIY NAS box.

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March 9, 2013

Network Attached Storage

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 2:52 pm

I’ve gotten to that place again where all my bloody hard disks were filling up, and it was time to add to the NAS…

…and that’s where it got bloody, since it has been a while I went on a trawl of the major online vendors, and the answers were not nice.

I could buy a shitty and cheap unpopulated 2 bay NAS box from the likes of Dlink, or the next option is an equally shitty but not cheap 2 bay NAS box from Qnap, and as soon as you look at a 4 bay box, or god forbid a 5 bay box to run raid-5 it gets bloody expensive bloody fast…

So the stopgap was go out locally and buy a 3 terabyte seagate go flex jobbie, for it has to be said not a lot more than the cost of the 3 TB disk inside it.

Down sides is the bastard is fairly slow, but freefilesync and walk away means I don’t care too much and it is the initial big wad that takes the time, not daily use, so lets run some numbers.

MB = megabyte which disks are measured in, mb = megabit which transfer speeds are measured in, and there are 8 bits to a byte.

USB2 can pull a consistent 10 MB/sec on decently sized files

100 mb Ethernet is theoretically able to do 100/8 = 12.5 MB/sec, but again you’ll see nearer 8/10 in reality.

10 MB/sec is piss slow compared to even what a spinning SATA2 hard disk can handle, a good SSD SATA3 should give you 250 MB/sec easily, gigabit Ethernet will give you a theoretical 125 MB/sec, but there it is, so how long does it take to fill up a 3 TB NAS drive at say 8 MB/sec?

8 MB/sec = 480 MB / min, which equals 28.8 GB / hour

3,000 / 28.8 = 104 hours, or around 4 days, and this is ideal speeds, in reality you can add 50% easily.

Just as a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, data transfer is only as fast as the slowest link, so there isn’t a whole lot of point having a high end NAS on a 100 mb network, if you are looking at speeds alone.

In day to day use 8 MB/sec is enough, it will transfer a 700 MB CD in one and a half minutes, or a 4.5 GB DVD in about nine and a half minutes.

8 MB/sec is not enough if you are imaging hard disks for example.

A quick way around this is the NAS box we discuss below with gig-e and a crossover cable, or use one of the hot-plug bays.. >;*) 100 MB/sec here we come…

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So what my “price of the bare disk inside it plus a 10% premium” 3 TB goflex is buying me is neither speed, nor reliability / quality, what it is buying me is some breathing room at a reasonable price…. it will do in the interim, but the fact is I need to do something about an upgraded NAS box.

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WD do a red label disk WD30EFRX especially for NAS boxes, the bare 3 TB disk runs about 120 UK pounds a pop, one of the things you have to take in to account is your NAS disks dying or suffering data loss, RAID is not a backup, but a good RAID/ZFS setup spanned over enough disks can help you avoid using your backup.

If I build a 5 bay box with hot plug SATA drives, I could get 6 TB of useful storage (no point striping because a single modern SATA3 HD will push between 50% and >100% of gigabit Ethernet capacity depending on if it is doing sequential or random reads) mirrored with a “ready hot” spare in place….. I could start with just two disks, for 3 TB of useful storage and no hot spare, and add the other 3 disks later…

So we are looking at a copy of NAS4free, which is free, two disks which is 250 notes or thereabouts, and my “box”

The box itself doesn’t have to be much horsepower wise, in fact it shouldn’t be because we want low electrical power consumption, so an Atom based system will do nicely, another 100 or so, Icy Box do a nice 5 bay back plane IB-555SSK for another 100 or so, and add another 100 for a case and incidentals.

The basic bare box thus works out at about 300 quid, populate it with two disks and it takes you to 550, populate it with all 5 drives and it takes you to around 925.

The cheapest bare 5 bay NAS box I can find is the Qnap 569 @ £570

That’s (our 925)  a lot of dough, but, the closest to a 15 TB or greater commercial until (and the commercial units always count capacity by adding up individual disks) I can find is the WD sentinel @ £1,422, and the closest to a 5 bay or greater is the netgear 6620 @ £1,950.

Neither of the commercial offerings have the virtue of you just being able to go out to any PC hardware store and buy some generic replacement part WHEN something dies, plus the interface is open source.

Frankly the “value added” bundled software with all these commercial things, from the lowly goflex I just bought, up to the thecus / syntology / qnap kit, is a load of bollocks… it is not the fucking job of a NAS to stream your fucking itunes shite to your ipad via VPN  while you are sat on a beach somewhere..

It is the fucking job of a NAS to look after the hard disks inside it, and look after the data being read / written to those disks, one way of aiding this is a fucking dust filter and a couple of nice but silent 120 mm fans, which none of the commercial offerings will give you, but which you can do yourself.

Nor will any of the commercial offerings allow you to add another 5 drive bays for 100 quid, swap out the main-board for something more powerful, add some extra gig-e ports etc etc.

Nor will any of the commercial rigs do anything other than lock you in to that vendor.

Perhaps the biggest limitation of the commercial rigs is however that you have to buy them with one big wad of cash, but the home built solution can be purchased in 100 quid lumps over a few weeks or more.

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Certainly the goflex has bought me some breathing space, and will allow me to tidy up some of the nested directories and file structures, preparatory to starting the next NAS build, and I won’t wake up tomorrow as I did today to find two overnight  “add to archive and delete” operations stalled out because of lack of spare disk space on the last added mini NAS..

If I think about upgrading my main PC, currently a core 2 quad q6600, for a nice socket 2011 / i7 3820 build, then I am already looking at everything except the Icy box 5 bay backplane and WD red disks, a saving of 200+ notes… again options that do not present themselves once you have tied yourself into proprietary devices…. it wouldn’t kill me to break open the goflex and pull out the 3 TB SATA HD inside, or to break open the 2 TB WD elements and pull out the 2 TB WD green SATA HD inside, they are essentially not much more than caddies…

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