Considering buying a NAS ... Need some advice

Both of mine are in RAID 1 but I have used one of them in one drive mode briefly with green drives - again there were no performance issues.
 
Sorry to steal the thread but im in the same boat as azibux, never had NAS before:

Im looking for a good stable NAS system that will hold all my blu-ray / dvds / music pics etc etc. Baring in mind my blu-rays are .MKV files and I have 2tb worth of movies so far.

I will be upgrading my router / network wires to CAT6 and getting a gigabit switch so that I can stream all my movies etc to my HTPC in the lounge and tv in the bedroom.

Do I go for QNAP 4 bay NAS or will the Synology 2 bay NAS be ok with 2x3Tb hard drives.
Is it worth RAID the hard drives?
 
azibux1 said:
Hmmmm are either of you running in a RAID setup so maybe it's faster? Or as they running independently? We will only be having one hard drive for now. My brother just doesn't want it to be too slow

Yeah webstation sounds quite cool :D

EDIT: Just so we can research, what hard drive is one step up from a green one?
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My drives are in Raid 1 - where they mirror each other thus the speed is as fast as one drive will go. I believe the next step up in hard drive would be a 7200rpm like a WD Caviar Black. Green drives will be more than fine.

scottman said:
Sorry to steal the thread but im in the same boat as azibux, never had NAS before:

Im looking for a good stable NAS system that will hold all my blu-ray / dvds / music pics etc etc. Baring in mind my blu-rays are .MKV files and I have 2tb worth of movies so far.

I will be upgrading my router / network wires to CAT6 and getting a gigabit switch so that I can stream all my movies etc to my HTPC in the lounge and tv in the bedroom.

Do I go for QNAP 4 bay NAS or will the Synology 2 bay NAS be ok with 2x3Tb hard drives.
Is it worth RAID the hard drives?
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Scottman - given how much stuff you have stored already I would strongly recommend a 4 bay enclosure to give you that head room assuming your budget allows. Otherwise 2x3tb is your upper limit. Also depends if you raid 1 them or use them as a pool ie 3tb mirrored (giving redundancy) or 1 6tb volume (no redundancy).
 
welshdragon said:
Scottman - given how much stuff you have stored already I would strongly recommend a 4 bay enclosure to give you that head room assuming your budget allows. Otherwise 2x3tb is your upper limit. Also depends if you raid 1 them or use them as a pool ie 3tb mirrored (giving redundancy) or 1 6tb volume (no redundancy).
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Which 4 bay would you recommend? I've just been looking at the QNAP TS-412 Turbo NAS 4-bay, didnt know what spec I will need...I know I wont need top end spec as I wont be video or photo editing every day, only watching movies, listening to music and other basic stuff.
 
scottman said:
Which 4 bay would you recommend? I've just been looking at the QNAP TS-412 Turbo NAS 4-bay, didnt know what spec I will need...I know I wont need top end spec as I wont be video or photo editing every day, only watching movies, listening to music and other basic stuff.
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That QNap one or a Synology DS411j are both equally specced and good performers. For me the Synology pips it slightly as the user interface is nicer, streamlined and more intuitive to use. Support is also better with Synology.

One thing to consider thoguh is perhaps a HP Microserver. £150 normally if the cashback offer is running. That with a copy of windows home server would be a very good alternative and probably a good shade cheaper. Although setting up is more involved as you need to hook it up to a monitor etc to install the os etc as you would really any windows machine.
 
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scottman said:
ok thanks for the help, do you know a good gigabit router with more then 4 ports? and a good gigabit switch?
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Either one of these unmanaged switches is very good for home use or the Netgear equivilant. No need to splash the cash for a Procurve

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-011-TP&groupid=46&catid=1626&subcat=

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-012-TP&groupid=46&catid=1626&subcat=

Not sure why your speccing a 4+ Gigabyte port router ,,,, but if get a single port run it to a 5 port switch then 4 LAN cables from that you achieve the same thing. Would not bother with Cat 6 either for home use, 5e will be well good enough.

:)
 
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importedforyou said:
2tb western digital nas or buffalo would be fine
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What? Considering you've started a thread asking for advice which on which one of those two to get, implying you've tried neither how can you recommend either? Particularly in this scenario. Neither of those will perform well here and difference between them and the recommendations in this thread are night and day in terms of performance, use, capability etc
 
A NAS on a network below 1Gbps is painfully slow. It will stream movies/music just fine but the write speeds to it are terrible. Small files are fine but a HD movie at 4.5gb will take hours to copy at 100Mbps.
 
Essexraptor said:
Switch details?
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HP ProCurve 1810G (24 port switch which supports link aggregation)

Re: DS1511+
Needed something that would replace my WHS box which was slowing down after a number of years. Looked at 4 bays but knew I would regret not buying the 5 bay version so I went for it.

Currently,
3x2TB (volume 1)
1x1.5TB (volume 2)
1x1.5TB (volume 3)

I've also setup link aggregation (don't know why but just did) - it hasn't improved speeds but if 2 locations are uploading at the same time it does not slow down.

Apologies for the long winded description.
 
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