NAS my drive

Internet can be found in almost any home today, and as the demand for wireless access rise, so does the demand for portability rise. As a result, electronic manufacturers prefer using flash drives than using standard rotating drives.

Why?

• Ultra-fast response time and speed – You can check out my experience using Solid-State drives and see how fast they really are.
• State of the art technology – Standard rotating drives and SSD drives have been around for more than half a century, but while rotating drives have changed very little over the years, SSDs were an ever changing platform, which brought into consumers mind only a few years back. Let’s face it folks, as we see it today, we’re marching into an SSD world, so using this kind of tech seems only logical
• Shock resistance - Since handheld computers (tablets, netbooks etc.) are constantly moving, they’re more likely fall once or twice during their lifetime. While rotating drives can absorb up to 350G while operating and up to 1000G while not operating, SSD can withstand up to 1500G in either case.
• Weight, power consumption– A standard SSD weighs approximately 50% less than a rotating drive, and consumes less power because it has no moving parts.

Why not?

The only trouble with SSD drives is their capacity. The bigger the capacity, the more it costs to manufacture it, so electronic companies tend to leave the user high and dry with a mere 64GB tops. In such cases, users would probably use another drive (external hard drive, flash drives etc.), but this beats the whole purpose of becoming completely portable.

Enters NAS – Network Attached Storage

A NAS unit is a computer or device that provides file-based data storage services to other devices on that network.

NAS Implementation

There are several main ways you can implement NAS at your network:

1. Dedicated Server
2. Standalone NAS device
3. Wireless Access Point with NAS capabilities

Dedicated Server

Placing a dedicated NAS server on your network seems logical only if you’re an enterprise client tries to implement a NAS solution or a user with very high demands.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Complete control over configuration	High maintenance overhead
Expanding NAS array easily	High cost: 200$ and up (depends on speed/capacity)

If you consider setting up a dedicated NAS server, you might want to check out a project called FreeNAS – an open source NAS operating system, based on FreeBSD

Standalone NAS device

For those of you who don’t want to mess around, this is the perfect solution.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Easy to use interface	Features may vary depending on the vendor
Almost no hassle with equipment	Limited capacity
Connects via Ethernet & Wireless	Price range: 140$-2500$ depends on features

For many, this is the ultimate solution for NAS. It has most of the required features, it can come with a RAID enabled configuration, and fairly easy to install. The only concern is the cost, which can sometimes go up to 2500$.

If you’re after a cheap solution, check out Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage

Wireless Access Point with NAS capabilities

Since the vast majority of users already own a wireless access point, it’s safe to assume most of them already have unexploited NAS capabilities.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Integrates to your current network	Internet speed can be influenced
Low cost: 140$ to 500GB	Basic interface
Support several drive sizes	Storage capacity is limited to 2TB
USB port exist in most access points	Mostly USB 2.0, sometimes not enough

Because of the floods in Thailand, most hard drive vendors suffered damages. The price should drop in the next few months, allowing this option to become even more appealing.

Sometimes, USB 2.0 is not enough, and if you used a high speed hard drive, and want to exploit the full benefits from its speed, you’ll have to invest in a wireless access point that comes with a USB 3.0 port. Just to get you started, you can check out D-Link media router

Cheers q[^_^]p

TRIM For the masses

A TRIM command, allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally. TRIM was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative to traditional hard disks. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from traditional hard disks, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. TRIM enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, that would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.

More recent SSDs will often contain internal idle/background garbage collection mechanisms that work independently of TRIM; although this successfully maintains their performance even under operating systems that do not support TRIM, it has the associated drawbacks of increased write amplification and wear of the flash cells.

What’s it for?

The TRIM command is designed to enable the operating system to notify the SSD of which pages of data are now invalid due to erases by the user or operating system itself. During a delete operation the OS will not only mark the sectors as free for new data, but it will also send a TRIM command to the SSD with the associated flash cell to be marked as no longer valid. After that point the SSD knows not to relocate the data in those flash cells during garbage collection. This will result in fewer writes to the flash enabling a lower write amplification and longer endurance. Different SSDs will act on the TRIM command somewhat differently so the final performance can also be different between different SSDs. As the command completely purges the data it affects, typical data recovery is made impossible.

TRIM was firstly introduced to Windows users back in 2009 along with the release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

If Windows detects the presence of an SSD drive, it should automatically disable several services in order to optimize performance. While this may be true, users keep argue about which settings should be changed to optimize performance.

Tips and tricks

After owning three SSD drives (two OCZ Vertex2 and an OCZ Agility3), I thought it might be a good idea to share some insights and some of my experience in configuring those settings.

1. Make sure you have the latest firmware – Drive vendors often don’t take any responsibility for data loss while upgrading firmware. Also, if you consider making the SSD your operating system drive bear in mind, you won’t be able to upgrade your firmware since this operation is not supported, so this should be the first thing to do. There are sometimes issues with the Intel Rapid Storage Managerso make sure you read the firmware release notes before making any changes, some versions are better and more compatible then others.

2. Set your disk controller to AHCI mode – AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface, allows using legacy IDE or ATA mode in SATA drives. Usually this prevents from installing proper disk controller drivers which in many cases will result in reduced performance, so this step is crucial.

3. Install the latest storage drivers – if your system includes an Intel SATA controller, you should use the most recent version of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver, which is located here

4. Install SSD Tweaker to automatically configure all related settings and optimize performance.

5. Although the TRIM command should work automatically with Windows 7, it sometimes can be a bit “lazy”. For those of you who have Windows 7 with SSD and feel the drive could use some freshen-up, check out a little app called ForceTrim. This tool is not supported with RAID.  ForceTrim will force the drive to go over all free flash cells and use the TRIM command on every cell that is marked for deletion. It should work on any vendor. Make sure you run ForceTrim as Administrator.

6. Monitor your drive’s health using a monitor tool such as CrystalDiskInfo

Final notes

If you’re like me, and want to keep the drive in ship-shape at all times, you can schedule the program to be launched every week from command line using:

schtasks /Create /SC WEEKLY /D SUN /TN ForceTrim /ST 00:00 /TR "C:\ForceTrim.exe C"

This will schedule ForceTrim to run every Sunday at midnight and optimize drive C

Cheers q[^_^]p