Backup of NAS using eSATA

[wphelps]

This seems to be about the only place where anyone even mentions the eSATA ports; so, hopefully a few here have experience actually trying to use them.

Have you noticed that many vendors which include eSATA ports seem to ignore the obvious application for backup and instead configure the port for 'extra shares'? If one needed more share space, why wouldn't they just buy a unit with more bays or use higher capacity drives?

Which leads to my questions:
1) Which NAS boxes have fully functional eSATA ports, including hot plugging?

2) Which NAS boxes allow direct backup - i.e. copying from internal NAS drive(s) to external drive(s) without going through another PC?

3) Which NAS boxes with either or both of the above features, support UPS triggered shutdown?

One would think that there would be many dedicated storage devices with such capabilities since any Windows desktop can do these things.

 

[Dennis Wood]

The QNAP TS509, as of yesterday's firmware update supports eSATA for both scheduled backup, as well as allows a share that you can define permissions on. Write speeds over the network to the TS509 attached eSATA drive are in the 14 to 20MB/s range (SMB2, Vista SP1), with reads at 58MB/s. Writes are slower than if direct attached, where we're measuring 30MB/s write and 60MB/s read on the same drive/enclosure.

They also support USB drives attached in the same manner.

 

[wphelps]

That's still faster than if the drive were treated as a share -- nas_internal_drive>pc_over_net>nas_over_net>external_drive.
But, is the TS509 the only one on the market?

 

[Dennis Wood]

It's the only one that I could find...hence it's presence here Just building a box using an eSATA equipped motherboard is the other option.

 

[wphelps]

The TS-509 would almost work...

I think my primary focus was on consolidation of data from several workstations to a NAS device and then local replication to ONE external drive (of an alternating set) which is carried offsite for disaster recovery. Somewhere down the v4 timeline, Samba will probably be able to do it; but, for now, to maintain very fine grained NTFS attributes, I probably need something like WSS -- which should also be able to handle the eSATA issue. Have you seen any pre-built WSS systems that don't have a dozen or more drives in a rack chassis? I don't mind some assembly or software configuration; but, I really don't want to (and shouldn't have to) design my own hardware. There has got to be a huge market of those with more than a few gigs but less than a server farm.
BTW: If anyone finds solutions to these problems, even months later, please reply; I am always looking for better solutions.

William

 

[Dennis Wood]

Rsync is an opensource util, part of the QNAP NAS builds, and I'm sure other products are using it. It would allow you to do incremental backups (and using highly efficient delta binary comparisons) offsite via the net, with no carting around of physical media. There's a tutorial on this site to set it up with Windows.

We haven't tested this yet with the TS509 but the idea is to have another offsite NAS that is a replica of the working one. Because rsync does not copy a whole file over, just the changed parts of it, it's fairly efficient, providing that you do one sync locally. I worked with a company called Telebackup (purchased by Veritas and renamed "NetBackup") nearly 10 years ago building the RAID server, portmaster modem array etc. for a local franchise. It worked pretty much the same way and at the time was efficient enought for use with 56K modems.

How it behaves with NTFS is a question I can't answer...but there are windows ports of the software: http://www.itefix.no/i2/node/10650 and
http://www.gaztronics.net/rsync.php to name a few.

Cheers,
Dennis.