NAS-4220
7 March 2008I recently bought a NAS-4220 from Raidsonic. Its a nice piece of hardware with a lot of punch, low energy requirements and a cheap price. I’ve been looking for a NAS/home-server for some time now but hadn’t found a suitable solution so far.
My requirements were:
- it needs to be linux based so i can also use it as a flexible home server.
- it needs to be able to handle encrypted volumes.
- it shouldn’t be too energy hungry as i intend to run it 24/7.
- it should have at least a bearable IO performance.
One possibility would have been to buy a Barebone-/Shuttle-PC. The biggest benefit this approach has is that they are standard X86 systems which can run any standard linux distribution. They also have enough raw CPU power so encrypted volumes are handled reasonably well. The downside with this approach is that they aren’t really cheap and that they need more energy than i would really like them to.
The second solution i came across would have been to buy a NSLU2 device from Linksys (or one of the many clones). They are dirt cheap (40 to 50€ on Ebay). They have been on the market for a few years so they are very thoroughly hacked and there are several specialized linux distributions to choose from. They take less than a watt per hour to run. The disks are attached using USB. This is not really nice (one additional power supply per disk) but also not a showstopper. What rules these devices out for me is that they are not really capable of handling encryption. They normally sport a small ARM-based CPU clocked at around 200Mhz. Some brave souls have actually managed to get dm_crypt running on these boxes but the IO performance is not very encouraging. You get around 1MB per second.
The NAS-4220 is based on a relatively new SOC (SL3516) made by StormSemiconductors. It is also ARM-based like the NSLU2 but sports a number of additional goodies (encrpytion accelarator, TCP-OffloadEngine, …) which are really enhancing the platform. On the IO-side there is Gigabit-Ethernet and SATA (with hardware support for some RAID modes). It’s cheap enough (around 125€ ATM) and relatively economical energy wise. It is linux based and RAIDSonic is smart enough to provide a mechanism by which customers can deploy there own software to the device. That said it’s not hard to see that i had found what i have been looking for.
