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Falterings of Network Storage
Submitted by Blake Robinson on April 9th, 2008
The network storage sector is an incredibly important part of the future of storage, but it’s a market is currently lacking in a major way. While some routers are starting to include USB slots for network drives, there are few real SAN solutions available on the consumer market, with the Apple Time Capsule being the one, if not dim, beacon of light.
Full-featured USB/Firewire ports should be as standard on routers as the ethernet switches now standard. I suppose, however, it is an evolutionary thing. I remember my first home router was a simple Linksys device that required an external networking option. It was only capable of serving an Internet connection across a network and I think maybe DHCP.
It was a pain even then, but still a blessing to our all-night LAN parties. When routers started coming standard with built in switches (thankfully they didn’t waste much time with simple hubs), it was like the opening of a floodgate. Simple, yet robust, networking was available for the masses.
That said, now that these home networks are ingrained, I envision people will begin to demand a lot more from their devices. With many homes having multiples systems (desktops, laptops, etc.), a clear avenue for storage to go is in the direction of being easily networkable. Enabling users to easily establish media bank servers would really bring digital media to the next level.
That’s my two cents anyway.
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April 15th, 2008 at 11:11 am
It sounds like you are more interested in file serving functions than block storage – is that so? There are several low cost file serving devices that work for home. I used to have a one person office and I used a Linksys NAS unit that let me put in my own disk drives. It worked pretty well for me. It even fixed my network printing needs.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Marc,
Yes and no. The problem, I believe, is systemically tied to home networking, but it directly involves the home storage market.
On the networking side, I believe that current routers should have support for existing devices like flash drives and external hard drives. Some do, of course, but it should be proliferated on a wider scale.
Getting down to storage directly, these external drives should start supporting gigabit ethernet and WiFi. That would allow for adequate write speeds and near universal compatibility with existing devices.
A NAS is a great solution, but it’s one that a general consumer doesn’t necessarily considered. As you said, it was for a home office — not really a consumer product.
While those features are close to what we need, the industry needs to take it a step farther. Implement interoperability between existing platforms and then establish a roadmap for full integration.
It’s becoming clear that, while it might not completely usurp discs, digital media distribution is going to become a fundamental method of consumer media consumption. The market needs options that provide consumers with acceptable storage solutions out of the box and not as afterthought, aftermarket add-ons. – Blake
April 15th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Blake, just curious, what capacity ranges do you think are needed? Would a couple Terabytes be enough?
April 15th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Marc,
Terabyte drives would be sufficient for the foreseeable future. Just for some points of storage comparison “Michael Clayton” encoded in Xbox 360 HD WMV runs 2.6GB whereas a straight BluRay disc rip of “No Country for Old Men” in x264 with DTS and all is 4.42GB.
Taking that into consideration, I’d say that, at least at this current juncture, one or two terabytes should be enough for a typical household to store transient media and maintain an archive.
Audio data is negligible for most people and I doubt it’ll play as much of a factor in driving storage. The reasoning, I think, is that when it comes to fine bitrates, the average listener simply can’t discern a real difference between typical rips and lossless encodings. This is due both to the quality of normal home audio equipment and the listener’s attention to detail.
On the converse, however, virtually any viewer can tell immediately the difference between interlaced versus progressive video and varying resolutions.
Getting somewhat off topic here to reinforce my core point, HD video content is going to be the primary factor driving disk capacities. With 1000GB at 1TB only just beginning to enter consumer nomenclature, it’s going to be at least a while before people start to need, or even think of, multiple terabytes and it’s going to be some time before media demands larger capacities.
So yes, I think a couple TB would be enough for anyone right now (note for the bibliographers: this statement is not future proof in any way, shape or form). And to roundabout back to the prompt, it’s apparent that in the (near) future, storage needs to leverage networkability as a standard point, not an extra selling point. It’s clearly to the advantage of drive manufacturers as the sooner they implement options of this nature, the sooner people will start looking at drive solutions as viable alternatives to DVD/Blu-Ray collections.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Then what devices and systems need to have access to the storage? The interface and access for this is interesting. As it is unlikely that there will be a shareable file system among system and devices. I would assume the environment will have a mix of operating systems (Windows + MAC PCs and linux/BSD/whatever embedded in devices).
April 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Marc,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. I’m not sure how much of a concern this would be. Windows and OS X can already share files, for instance, I can mount a network drive from my PC on my MacBook Pro.
Nevertheless, there is probably a way to make it even more efficient, but I’m not entirely sure on what routes the industry should take in that area. Perhaps some sort of open source file system, or maybe something as simple as just making the drives run as FTPs.
Whatever the case, there is undoubtedly ways to achieve complete platform independence.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Hi Blake,
I wonder what your thoughts are on Windows Home Server?
I’ve not seen it, in fact I don’t know if it’s been released in the UK, but I understand it works well as a file- and web-server, and includes web based admin.
That way, the options for configuration (drives, ports) are almost endless, as they just depend on the host PC.
In fact, I’d guess that most users will have some kind of PC with the peripherals attached tucked away in an office, with the laptop closer to hand.
Ideally then, we need the network to leverage the functionality of the desktop PC, with the flexibility of the notebook.
I suggest that answers most of your needs?
April 21st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Ali,
Windows Home Server is an interesting product, I think, but one that falls short in a lot of ways. Now, I should note that my experience with the product is limited, but in my tests with it, its not nearly dynamic enough to support the growing base of consumers that I’ve been pulling for in this thread.
The main falters of WHS stem from incompatabilities with OS X and Vista 64 (a huge oddity to me). I find its redundancy system to be rather marvelous, but it’s not enough to make up for the shortcomings.
The other issue is that it requires a stand alone system to run it, this isn’t really compelling to average users (who are among the growing base of digital media consumers). In this regard, Time Machine is a far more compelling solution as it just doesn’t really require anything of the user.
And I really don’t like the Time Capsule all that much, so, going into broken record mode, I still don’t think that there are any viable solutions yet on the market.
When you get down to it, with WHS, you’re not really leveraging the functionality of a PC, because it’s truly just a server. It won’t act as a media extender or do any secondary functions. So in that capacity, I think the product isn’t really the greatest for home users. Home offices could benefit from it in a lot of ways, but we really just need routers with USB/Firewire that can run FTPs. It’s not a stretch.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
There are a few NAS boxes out there but I have found most of them are put in place and then end up replacing once you outgrow the storage. One interesting piece of equipment I’d like to try is the Drobo. I have some reservations about it connecting via USB to the DroboShare (in order to do network shares) as it breaks everything up into 2 TB shares. It’s also not exactly cheap.
The big selling pint of that to me to the ability to have different sized drives in an array while using as much storage as possible and being able to dynamically change that (2×500 once day, add 2×750 a year later, replace the 2×500 with 2×2TB a year after etc…). It’s also very user friendly.
Of course, I then decided in it’s current incarnation it didn’t meet my needs (limited to 3 TB with 4×1 TB drives which isn’t enough).
Ideally, I hope to see an 8 bay Drobo with direct ethernet to it. If only. For me, I’m forced to use ZFS with and external hotswap disk array for my home storage in order to provide the ability to grow year after year.
April 26th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Yea, Drobo sounds cool, but I think the impetus is really more for home media solutions.