The “Break it Down” Blog

So my current personal project is to build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. In the most vanilla sense, the purpose of a NAS is to be a little headless (no video card or monitor) network connected device that has a custom operating system on it usually and just holds a ton of hard drives in it (say like 1TB of disk space), usually in a RAID configuration to provide some safety (like RAID1 or RAID5) and then exposes that huge amount of space on your local network as a drive that you can map and use for whatever you want to store on it.

If you are thinking you could build a NAS out of any old computer and just throw an OS (usually Linux) on it… then you are right, you definitely can. The appeal of a commercial NAS device is that it’s built, from the ground up, to serve one purpose and do it well. The design of the case, operating system and management software are all purposed just for managing files and getting them shared on the network. There is no root access, no Samba config files to mess with, etc. You just throw some drives in it, hook it to the network and turn it on. Also the cases for NAS’s tend to be extremely small and quiet so you can put them places and forget about them, so they can just “do their job”.

For the folks out there saying “that’s stupid, I have 750GB of hard drive space on my desktop, who cares!”, I have to point out that you likely have not had a drive fail on you before and loose all that data. If you have, then the appeal of a stand alone (safe) array of disks on your network is very appealing.

Now that we have covered the NAS basics, let’s look at the real appeal of NASs. As it turns out NASs have been around for a while, and have been creeping into the consumer market slowly as well. The thing is, in the consumer market we don’t just want to store files… we want to do THINGS with those files. Namely, we want to stream them to other devices. Wether that be pictures, music or movies… we want our NASs to act like hubs of multimedia information.

Until recently NASs weren’t doing this and you had to get a 3rd party device that would be able to “look” at your NAS, and then turn around and expose/stream that information to a device, like a TV or stereo. There is even an entire standard based around hooking up networked devices easily for this type of thing, called UPnP.

Luckily, some of the newer NASs on the market are starting to change this trend.

ReadyNAS from Infrant Technologies is a line of NASs, both home and commercial that are drop-in ready to go NAS systems (just add the disks). And recently they have released their ReadyNAS NV+ NAS to rave reviews.

The key feature of the NV+ we are looking for here is the support for “UPnP AV”, the universal plug-and-play audio/visual standard. This allows the NAS to expose itself to the network as a media streaming device (pictures, music, movies) and any other UPnP AV compatible device to immediately recognize and enable streaming from that device.

This is all hunky dorey except for the fact that one of the most common almost UPnP AV enabled devices that we may have is an XBox 360.

The trick here is that the XBox 360 does not implement the full UPnP AV specification. It instead (per usual Microsoft planning) supports a Microsoft-custom version of UPnP AV, so forget any plug-and-play out of the box behavior. This allows Microsoft to keep a tight control over the whole “XBox 360 + Media Center = We Control the Living Room” pairing and not allow folks to throw in 3rd party replacements for the “Media Center” portion of that equation.

Fortunately there is a piece of software that you can install on the NV+ that will stream content to your XBox 360 seamlessly. It is a product from a company named TwonkyVision called TwonkyMedia.

TwonkyVision is currently working on the 4.2 release of their software which will resolve movie-streaming issues with the XBox 360. With their current beta release of it (4.2Beta3b) they seem to have the issue resolved according to the forums.

They should have a 4.2 release for ReadyNAS (they do special builds for the ReadyNAS systems) in the next few weeks that will fix all these issues. Overall I’m very excited. I’ve speced out a NV+ system on Newegg along with 3×320GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives to put into the device for starters. If you wish to extend the drives on the fly over the course of the NAS and want it to handle all that automatically and still give you failure-protection like RAID5, then you will want to use the X-RAID system (extensible raid).

X-RAID is a proprietary technology from Infrant that is patent pending. The way it works is more or less like a real-time extensible RAID5 system:

• 1 Drive: Acts like a normal computer
• 2 Drives: Mirrors Drive 1 onto Drive 2
• 3 Drives: Stripes Drive 1 and 2, and Creates a Parity Disk with Drive 3
• 4 Drives: Stripes Drives 1, 2 and 3 and also creates a Parity Disk with Drive 4**

With 4 drives that is my guess. It might stripe portions of the drives and create parities across all the disks or something to compensate and keep the geometry all the same across the disks in the array though. But either way it’s really nice, it does all this automatically as you plug more drives in.

So that’s my roundup of how to build a NAS for streaming to your network or to your XBox 360. If you just want to stream to other computers, you only need the NAS as it will handle most everything out of the box for you. It’s only when you specifically want to use the XBox 360 that you need to take some care.