Snap Appliance Snap Server 1100 NAS Device 238
~*77*~ writes "While taking up considerably less space than a shoebox, this little device seamlessly allows users to add additional storage to any network in less than five minutes. Today we review the Snap Appliance 80GB Snap Server 1100. This compact NAS (network attached storage) device has many great features including: 5 minute installation, a compact web and ftp server, or simply a network share. Most importantly it works in a network mixed with Windows, Netware, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh machines... "
SNAP (Score:2, Informative)
we use a snap server at my work (Score:5, Informative)
Does it support SMB ACL"s? (Score:5, Informative)
excellent (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.snapappliance.com/ is the company's website -- one might get more info out of it than the listed source. I visited as soon as the link went up and it was a slow load.
They work out (Score:5, Informative)
But I guess it's good for those that havn't discovered the advantages with snap's yet.
Re:SNAP (Score:3, Informative)
" Powerfully built; sturdy. "
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Informative)
I guess it does provide a ftp/web server, but I think I could get a suitable box set up in an hour with all those things with at least triple the disk space.
Re:I have a stupid question... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What are you going to do with it? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Of course, it's a word (Score:1, Informative)
Could you please show me the dictionary where you found "marketingspeak," "geekspeak," and "normalpersonspeak"?
Eric S. Raymond's "dictionaries" don't count, by the way.
Re:we use a snap server at my work (Score:2, Informative)
New slogan.. (Score:4, Informative)
"Twice the storage, half the reliability!"
Re:I have a stupid question... (Score:3, Informative)
Case in point - We have a remote office that's about ten miles or so outside of city limits. Way out in the boonies. There's about 6-8 users there at any time, max, and until just recently they had no connectivity back to City Hall. (Recently got Cable Modem VPN running...) How would adding a HD to our fileserver in City Hall help them? It wouldn't. Would it make sense to buy a proper server for a six person workgroup? Hell no. So we stick a SNAP server on their network. Then we forget about it. 80GB of storage is more than they'll ever need. We have quite a few offices like that one, with SNAP servers of varying sizes (the guys doing a lot of AutoCAD need a bit more than 80GB) and they're all better served by having a little SNAP in their wiring closet than us setting up a server that requires maintenance.
Re:$500 and no backup? (Score:4, Informative)
The whole idea is you're paying for a solution you can install and forget about. Can't say the same about full blown fileservers.
Re:Does it support SMB ACL"s? (Score:1, Informative)
Does it support SMB ACLs?
They suck (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But why so expensive? (Score:3, Informative)
You're paying that $300 for a motherboard, PSU, memory, NIC, CPU, R&D and labour. It's actually a great deal.
I have one (Score:4, Informative)
It is more or less a pair of IDE hard drives with a hardware RAID. You can run them mirrored for half the space (aka 240G becomes a mirrored 120G) or as a single drive for full space.
The SNAPs can interface directly to a windows domain controller for user login security. Very slick, took about 20 minutes to get it up and running from zero knowledge.
This is the second SNAP device we have had, the first was a 40gig model a few years back. THis is also the second SNAP i've had fail. The first lasted two years before the cooling fan on the CPU inside failed and caused the device to lock up under any kind of normal load. Since the unit was out of warranty and the fan was too small to find a "home brew" solution we opted to upgrade. I have since removed the drives from the old device and passed them down to desktop machines.
My current SNAP (the 2200) just this week lost the secondary mirror disk. The unit has only been in use for 5 months and has seen very little usage day to day. Thankfully I was running in mirror mode (and had tape backups) so no data was lost. The unit locked up when the drive failed but after a reboot discovered its error and reported the failed disk on the admin info screen. I simply FTPed the data off the remaining drive and called their tech support number.
Snap's warranty service seems well structured, after 10 minutes on the phone and sending the consultant a couple log files I was issued an RMA number and instructed to send the unit back, once received they would ship another. If I needed immeadiate replacement I could give them a CC# and they would ship that day.
The only bad part about this is that I had thrown the box away...Keep the box, they require 2 inches of solid foam, or 3 inches of bubble wrap else you void the warranty...no peanuts.
SO if you are planning on either the 1100 or larger keep the box, run in mirror mode, and keep the units well cooled.
I like snaps and will continue to use them, I feel as though I may have just found the 1 in 5000 bad drives.
DIY (Score:3, Informative)
I was looking at DIY something like this (since I am competent in building BSD/Linux systems from scratch):
- 3.5' IDE based HDD
- 3.5' or smaller form factor embedded linux/bsd based pc
- power supply
There seem to be a number of 3.5' ff embedded pc's, something like no less than 100-200mhz seemed ideal: just needs 16-32mb ram, onboard 100mb NIC and a serial port - anything else is a waste of money. Lots of taiwanese manufacturers making these. Some have inbuild 16mb SDRAM and inbuild CF or at least PCMCIA (for a CF adapter) to put the boot image on. The current drain on these systems I've seen a few quoted at ~4W, average seems to be 5-10W. Low power
Would be very interesting to hear anyone else who has done something like this, esp. re prices and suppliers, and appropriate CPU type/speed required to service ATA-100/133 + 100MB NIC, and whether 16mb SDRAM suitable.
Something like this I guessed would set me back no more than ~UK120GBP (incl. ~50-60 for 160gb HDD).
Cheaper Solution for Home/Small Workgroup (Score:3, Informative)
80GB HardDrive [newegg.com] $70
Gigabit NIC* [dlink.com] $25
Pretty Case [mini-itx.com] $100
Linux [gentoo.org] Free*
Total ~280-305
*Optional
^Requires Initial Work (Maybe there is a handy Distro for this type of thing I don't know?)
BTW Newegg.com says they will carry mini-itx soon so prices may get much better in the US.
You can always try another review site. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does it support SMB ACL"s? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:SNAP Experiences (Score:3, Informative)
All disk drives will eventually fail, whether they're IDE/ATA, SCSI or Fibre Channel. With IDE, you lose tagged command queueing, seek performance generally isn't as good (8-9ms vs 4-5ms for the latter disks), and you don't get 15k RPM spindle speeds (7200-10k is the maximum for IDE).
But, for a single-disk unit such as the SNAP server, those factors aren't all that important.
Re:Build your own snap server (Score:1, Informative)