I'm not that up on IT matters these days. I'm looking to get a NAS drive and wondered if anybody knows much about them. I notice you can get them for just over £100 and you can also pay £800+. Presumably the £800 one is tons better than the £100. How? What are the features I need to look out for? I want to have a good backup for my photographs currently sitting on my Mac. I would like my windows laptop to also use it. All that I've read so far just wants to sell me something rather than give me the nitty gritty on the differences etc.
- Thread starter Marty2005
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rkde
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We went for the imogea personal cloud version. It backs up to S3 cloud so our stuff is stored even if the drive gets stolen, we can remote log in without a fix ip from anywhere in the world, our tablets can browse it as can all the computers. The sonos system can use it for the music supply without any issues. its a year or so old now and was an upgrade from our original nas which was a drive on a cable. Cost wise it was about £100 and it is fine to work from on small files but large file and heavy photos can be a little slow but I do mean little longer but that is to be expected.
All our computers are basically now dumb, all our information etc is stored on the nas and automatically back up to S3 which is a nice cheap cloud storage system from amazon. Means that if laptops are took non of our information goes with them except cache, then if the hidden drive is stolen we have our cloud back up which is also apparently on 3 different encoded clouds
Something like this http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-storage-desktop/ez-media/
All our computers are basically now dumb, all our information etc is stored on the nas and automatically back up to S3 which is a nice cheap cloud storage system from amazon. Means that if laptops are took non of our information goes with them except cache, then if the hidden drive is stolen we have our cloud back up which is also apparently on 3 different encoded clouds
Something like this http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-storage-desktop/ez-media/
Firstly, don't go with Pogoplug, I've found that poor.
The £100 stuff tends to be a desktop drive with network connectivity, it'lldo home things like stream media and be able to do some backup stuff . It probably won't be very robust. A mid level solution is one of the NAS boxes that hold a couple of drives. They offer better functionality and performance, some can be used to record feeds from ip cctv cameras (beware extra licence cost for multiple cameras though!) and use formations where if you're running two drives they can mirror each other, so if one fails then you don't lose data (RAID) you're looking at budgeting £2-300 for a unit and drives though. Further than that and you're getting to server territory, I suspect overkill for what you want.
Either way, for important data, like your entire photos collection, I'd still periodically back this up to a desktop drive and keep that stashed somewhere safe and secure.
The £100 stuff tends to be a desktop drive with network connectivity, it'lldo home things like stream media and be able to do some backup stuff . It probably won't be very robust. A mid level solution is one of the NAS boxes that hold a couple of drives. They offer better functionality and performance, some can be used to record feeds from ip cctv cameras (beware extra licence cost for multiple cameras though!) and use formations where if you're running two drives they can mirror each other, so if one fails then you don't lose data (RAID) you're looking at budgeting £2-300 for a unit and drives though. Further than that and you're getting to server territory, I suspect overkill for what you want.
Either way, for important data, like your entire photos collection, I'd still periodically back this up to a desktop drive and keep that stashed somewhere safe and secure.
brewdexta
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Depends on how many drives it can take, what level of RAID it supports (how much redundancy you have if a drive fails, i.e. how you recover any data on the disk that fails), whether the drives do hot swap etc. also some do other stuff like DLNA
I bought a cheap HP server with a £100 cash back and installed freeBSD and Freenas on a USB stick that it boots from. I then put in 4 disks. Freenas also allows you to use ZFS instead of or as well as RAID. it can take 24 hours to sync 2 disk with RAID, with ZFS its minutes.
I have two partitions, one for stuff I can reload like music and another for stuff I don't want to lose. Any updates to the stuff I don't want to lose is then copied using rsync to a more commercial netgear NAS with RAID in a different physical location in case there is a fire, it breaks or some git robs me.
I then occasionally take DVD back-ups of all the essential stuff in case the main NAS goes nuts and deletes all the stuff on the second NAS, shouldn't do but you never know.
You shouldn't need hot swap at home and although I have 4TB of storage, even with videos, photos, music I'm only scratching the surface and 1Tb of reslient storage after RAID/ZFS would have been more than enough.
I bought a cheap HP server with a £100 cash back and installed freeBSD and Freenas on a USB stick that it boots from. I then put in 4 disks. Freenas also allows you to use ZFS instead of or as well as RAID. it can take 24 hours to sync 2 disk with RAID, with ZFS its minutes.
I have two partitions, one for stuff I can reload like music and another for stuff I don't want to lose. Any updates to the stuff I don't want to lose is then copied using rsync to a more commercial netgear NAS with RAID in a different physical location in case there is a fire, it breaks or some git robs me.
I then occasionally take DVD back-ups of all the essential stuff in case the main NAS goes nuts and deletes all the stuff on the second NAS, shouldn't do but you never know.
You shouldn't need hot swap at home and although I have 4TB of storage, even with videos, photos, music I'm only scratching the surface and 1Tb of reslient storage after RAID/ZFS would have been more than enough.
brewdexta
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HP N40L server on sale here and lots of other places. Around 220 quid, and there is still a cashback deal unitl the end of the month, but I'm guessing it will be repeated. Stick some more disks in, a small USB drive, freebsd and freenas are er! free and off you go. It is a bit fiddly getting the right tool to write the freebasd operating system and freenas to the USB disk so it boots correctly, its a couple of years ago since I did it now.
Dev
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http://www.reghardware.com/2012/11/17/ten_four_bay_nas_drives/
Have a read of that. The cheapest option is just a single external hard drive and you can get single drives that will plug into your home router. The downside is that if it fails there is no resilience. In the multibay units any single drive can fail and you can replace it and recover all the data.
Have a read of that. The cheapest option is just a single external hard drive and you can get single drives that will plug into your home router. The downside is that if it fails there is no resilience. In the multibay units any single drive can fail and you can replace it and recover all the data.
Luke
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I've got a Buffalo LinkStation Duo Which has two RAIDed 1TB disks, supports DLNA (working with Raspbmc 
), it also support web access and Apple TimeMachine.
), it also support web access and Apple TimeMachine.
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