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So I found this and was wondering if it would be any good or not? https://kobol.io/helios4/ I could not figure out whether or not it is hardware raid or software either. Any body know anything or have any other suggestions?

The supported NAS software is OpenMediaVault, which runs on top of Debian Linux and includes a software RAID solution (almost certainly based on Linux "md" RAID).

Are there any decent small NAS boxes that are hardware based and not too spendy?

I don't consider software based RAID to be a drawback. Modern CPUs (both x86 and ARM) have enough horsepower to power the RAID array, and use of a standard software RAID implementation means if the device dies, you can still access the data by plugging the drives into another system. You're not relying on being able to acquire a replacement device with compatible hardware RAID implementation, from a vendor which may or may not still be in business.

Edit: Also... what *is* the definition of "hardware RAID" anyway? Basically, it is a RAID implementation running in a dedicated piece of hardware, with its own firmware. Devices like this blur the line. It's a dedicated piece of hardware, running what would've historically been considered to be a full-blown server OS as its "firmware".

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand the hardware requirement either. Not to mention hardware RAID can get really expensive, really fast.

Have you looked at the smaller Synology and QNAP boxes? They're both decent enough.

edit: FWIW, I figured OP meant things like the Dell PERC cards or the old LSI RAID controllers that we used to see a lot more often. Modern NAS boxes (like QNAP and Synology), SATA features, and software RAID from Intel have all made these kind of boxes a lot easier than they used to be.

Another way to look at it -- from the end user's perspective, devices like this are essentially a hardware RAID controller with an Ethernet port.

When I said "hardware raid" I was thinking of the older LSI controllers. A friend of mine and I bought a lot of 4 LSI controllers off Ebay once. I never had any problems, but he had a power supply take out his motherboard. He was not sure if it also took out the raid controller and/or the drives themselves. We put the controller and drives into a different PC and it would not work. We swapped in a different controller and everything was there. I have never seen that work with software raid, but it has been a long time since I have messed with any raid.

not@home wrote:

When I said "hardware raid" I was thinking of the older LSI controllers. A friend of mine and I bought a lot of 4 LSI controllers off Ebay once. I never had any problems, but he had a power supply take out his motherboard. He was not sure if it also took out the raid controller and/or the drives themselves. We put the controller and drives into a different PC and it would not work. We swapped in a different controller and everything was there. I have never seen that work with software raid, but it has been a long time since I have messed with any raid.

As long as it is the same OS, software RAID arrays should be portable across systems. Hardware RAID is hit-or-miss.

just brew it! wrote:

As long as it is the same OS, software RAID arrays should be portable across systems. Hardware RAID is hit-or-miss.

Even outside of the same OS, as long as it's the same software (mdraid or whatever), it should work.

Waco wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

As long as it is the same OS, software RAID arrays should be portable across systems. Hardware RAID is hit-or-miss.

Even outside of the same OS, as long as it's the same software (mdraid or whatever), it should work.

While factually accurate, I'm not sure this is relevant unless you're only moving between different *NIX variants. Are there any truly cross-platform software RAID implementations?

just brew it! wrote:

While factually accurate, I'm not sure this is relevant unless you're only moving between different *NIX variants. Are there any truly cross-platform software RAID implementations?

ZFS does a pretty good job.

mdraid is fairly portable too (at least with *nix variants) - and if the need really arises, both run well enough in a VM for data recovery purposes. You can run it on a Mac with some effort as well. I never tried making it work on AIX, I imagine that'd be pretty difficult for many reasons.

I thought ZFS for Windows was still pretty much alpha quality?

just brew it! wrote:

I thought ZFS for Windows was still pretty much alpha quality?

Pretty sure that's a no-go until someone ports it directly or FUSE support is added.

I'm mostly talking *nix variants, where software RAID of various flavors is portable across a huge range of kernels and distributions.

Someone's supposedly working on the Windows port, but it isn't feature complete yet.

"it isn't feature complete" is pretty generous.

Yes, I agree it is generous. But a "proof of concept" port has been created and demoed, so it is at least getting some attention.