Spec me a NAS set-up!

Meatball · 2 Nov 2008 at 16:05

With the money I received this month I'm looking at purchasing a large (500gb+) NAS drive to store all my music, videos and documents on. I want all the computers on my home network to be able to access the files stored on the drive 24/7 and be able to write to it as well. My home network set-up is the following:

ATM all my music & pictures are stored on a cheap old external hard drive. Could I simply buy a NAS external hard drive and plug it in to my router via Ethernet? Ideally I would like the NAS to show up in My Computer as a shared drive where all computers can read/write data to it 24/7. Also, my PS3 is hooked up to the router. Will that be able to see the NAS drive? Would be cool if I could browse through my pictures on there to show people on the TV

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Can anyone recommend an external NAS drive suitable for the job? I was looking at this: Freecom 1Tb NAS drive

Pandobear · 2 Nov 2008 at 16:44

Any of the home NAS drives will be able to do as you describe, ther eare also some routers that have this facility via an external USB drive. The only things that you need to consider are size, speed and any requirement for redundancy. The one that you mention seems very low end, most have the ability to run an ftp server and other simple applications, however it is a good price if you just need unsecure storage.

Meatball · 2 Nov 2008 at 16:46

Pandobear said:
Any of the home NAS drives will be able to do as you describe, ther eare also some routers that have this facility via an external USB drive.

Thanks for the advice

. Any links to routers that do this? I've been meaning to upgrade my router so I could kill two birds with one stone! If I could get a Wireless-N router that will do this it'll be ideal as it'll speed up transfer as well.

Pandobear said:
The only things that you need to consider are size, speed and any requirement for redundancy.

Trasnfer speeds will be limited by the 54Mbps router I used for my network

. I was looking at a minimum of 500gb but ideally 1Tb. Physical size is not an issue, it'll be hidden away so it can be bulky and ugly

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Pandobear said:
The one that you mention seems very low end, most have the ability to run an ftp server and other simple applications, however it is a good price if you just need unsecure storage.

I really don't need anything fancy, all I need to do is be able to read/write data to it from all computers 24/7

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Pandobear · 3 Nov 2008 at 19:31

I am not sure if the site sponsor currently has any of this type of router, Linksys Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link is one that might suit you.

The speeds that you are looking at are around 6 - 12 MB sec on a normal NAS box wired, where are you are likely to get three times that on USB2. Something to think about.