Network Drive Question

[geoffw]

A friend of mine has just bought A Belkin Wireless-N router that has a USB connector for a Network Drive. The router lives in the loft so the USB network drive would have to be there as well. This means manually powering down the drive is not a convenient option.

I was wondering about whether the hard drive attached (in its enclosure) is continually 'running' while the router is switched on? ..... or is it 'started up' whenever a computer on the network attempts to access it?

My reasoning is this. The router is on 24/7 so IS the network drive also 'turning' 24/7. If this is the case the I would assume the life of the drive would be limited.

Comments would be appreciated???

[steve]

I'm not familiar with this specific type of drive, but I would assume the drive would spin down after a period of inactivity, as most drives do. It's the same situation that anyone who runs a server 24/7 has. My server runs 24/7 and has Cumulus writing to the disk every few minutes, so it probably doesn't even get chance to spin down, and the drive is several years old now.

[nking]

To add to Steve's comments – I would be very surprised to if the drive did not spin down , probably after 15 min of inactivity but the specs will probably show this. There is the train of thought that the stopping and starting of the drive is in fact more damaging to the life of the drive than being left on all the time – It’s the initial power surge on statup that really causes the problems, a bit like the light bulb that blows when you turn it on.

[Gina]

I've got a WD MyBook World NAS drive connected by ethernet (RJ45) to the router and that appears to run continuously - every time I feel the drive there is a slight vibration (could be a fan though).

[geoffw]

Thanks for the comments folks. Looks like worry about hard drive wear is not such a problem, however I have had pointed out to me that running the router and hard drives in a loft space may create over heating issues.

Thinking of my own loft in the summer it gets very warm up there!!

[steve]

running the router and hard drives in a loft space may create over heating issues.

I suppose it might, if it got very hot up there. Typically, the inside of a PC case can be 40 to 50 C, so presumably hard drives can cope with that.

Edit: A quick trawl of HD specs shows that most seem happy up to 65C, and some up to 80C. Modern routers seem to be spec'd up to 55 or 60 C.

[nking]

Heat can be a major killer of hard drives. The problem of the loft is that there is going to be significant temperature variations summer/winter. I'd look for an alternative location for the router and hard drive if I were you.

[geoffw]

His previous router Belkin Wireless-G apparently worked fine for three years in the loft, summer and winter ...... and he agrees his loft is very warm on sunny summer days and bitterly cold in mid-winter.

He is keen that the router is tucked away out of sight (Wife is averse to techy kit cluttering the house) so I might suggest he uses an old hard drive in a spare Icybox enclosure I have, and backs up its content regularly......

[geoffw]

Well we set it up and it works a treat. We had to update the Router Firmware, but after that the new drive appears straight away on all his computers (after we had installed the Belkin Stogae Manager software on them.

I'm very impressed!

[nking]

Sounds good. Does the drive need proprietary formatting or does it work ok with NTFS or old FAT? My only disappointment when I setup a NAS drive at home was proprietary formatting and the speed of data transfer, I really needed a gigabit network.... something for the future

[geoffw]

Sounds good. Does the drive need proprietary formatting or does it work ok with NTFS or old FAT? My only disappointment when I setup a NAS drive at home was proprietary formatting and the speed of data transfer, I really needed a gigabit network.... something for the future

It is working with NTFS but we tried it with a FAT formatted drive and both worked fine.

[Gina]

My NAS drive is very slow! Slower than sending data to a drive on another computer - strange

[nking]

My NAS drive is very slow! Slower than sending data to a drive on another computer - strange

I guess you're meaning its always been slower, if so, does it use proprietary formatting/software?

[TNETWeather]

I've spend a large amount of time coming up with an external storage device that I could use with all the computers in the house as well as access to the several servers that I have in my home office.

I tried a number of USB drives to routers at first thinking that made some sense but in the end they were buggy, slow and didn't offer the support I needed.

Several years ago, I setup a FreeNAS system which is basically an old computer box, with 4TB worth of disks in it using the FreeNAS software. The drives are mirrored so there is 2TB available to use. It sits on my internal GB network and allows me to make NFS connections to my servers for storage, access to my winbox weather workstation and access via wireless network to all of the notebooks etc...

It has been flawless. The cost, was really just the drives and the controller card (Sata drives) as the software is free. I already had more than enough extra computers just sitting around to acquire and use for the project. I did have to get a good network card after having some issues with the NAS dropping off the network using the internal card it came with.

I am getting ready to update the whole thing as I want to have ZFS file system support for daily, monthly and quarterly snapshots as well as a way to make a snap shot before doing a development update.

FreeNAS is built on top of a FreeBSD platform, but you really don't need to deal with that part much. You can use a FreeNAS LiveCD to get it started, built and configured, which from that point on is simply a menu structure.

It is FAST... solid and I forget that it is actually there sometimes. I used an older 486 based Compaq tower that sits on the floor in the corner of my office purring away.

http://freenas.org/



Just checked the uptime...

12:00AM up 576 days, 4:33, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

It is rather stable...

[nking]

Hi Kevin,

I have been considering this as an option since I too seem to accumulate a lot of hardware. I've read and heard good things about Freenas, I've also toyed with loading WHS as the supposedly intuitive backup process is also attractive.... Projects for the future