What NAS?

Jano

Jano

Jano

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Basingstoke, UK
Sorry for the slightly broad subject, but I've been a bit bamboozled by these. I recently went into my local store of cataclysmic nuclear explosion technology, and was totally shocked when they replied to my question about NAS'. The guy was going on about expandable Ram and processor speeds and things I had no idea were even involved in NASiness.

What I want is to be able to have storage available that can be mirrored to hopefully prevent any potential loss, this is mainly for the huge store of photo's we have - so I've been looking for Raid 1.

After that, I want to be able to stream music and movies to any of the 5 pc's in the house, possibly expanding in the future to a media centre for each tv. I have a rather large collection of DVD's I want to turn into MKV's which would then also be placed on the NAS.

My initial ponderings lead me to the Synology DiskStation DS211J, and I was going to plonk in 2 Samsung F4 2TB's in Raid 1, and I can't see any reason why this wont do what I want? Possibly even overkill?

Do I need to worry about things like the ram inside the box, is it just a case of plugging in the HD's and away you go?
 
For what you want it for, yeah all it's going to come down to is simply about maximum storage space. You're going to want to expand the storage at some stage so as long as new drives will be recognised then you're golden.

Most will have a NIC capable of gigabit speeds but definitely make sure before purchase.

Depending on how important your backups are to you, consider Raid 5.
 
Not massively worried about the backups, as it seems to have a usb port for an external hdd, which means I can also backup the backup? :P

While I have about 100gb of music at the mo, I think I'd be hard pushed to fill the rest up with movies and photo's, so should be good to go for a while on storage.
 
Do you want your NAS to be the media server or just use it for filesharing? If its the latter a Synology is probably overkill. I recently picked up a D-Link 2 bay NAS from an e-shot from a well known online supplier for 60 quid.

2 Bays in which I put 2x2TB. It will do RAID 1 and has an auto-rebuild function when you plug a replacement drive in.
Gigabit ethernet
USB port on which you can share the device which is plugged in

Works a charm.
 
Cannot recoommend enough the Synology DS211J.
Not the cheapest device out there, but really easy to use and the web interface is just excellent.
Installed a couple of 2TB drives in, RAID 1.

Really is a nice piece of kit.
 
I did look at the D-Link ones, but I just had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that theres a reason it a lot cheaper than the Synology's. This would be (at least at the moment) just for streaming media over the network, but that it does look like these can do a lot more than that.

Eventually I can see this being used to stream media to three tv's. I've already seen that a PS3 can possibly pick up the media from these? Which would count for one of the tv's, I now have an HTPC hooked up to mine, and theres also the main living room tv which may be integrated into this in the future.
 
PS3 will not play MKVs currently. You would have to transcode, which would require a PC.

Wouldn't be able to guarantee that simultaneous streaming would work from it, hopefully someone that has it can test and report back.
 
I have a synology DS211 with 2 Samsung 2Tb F4's. its an awesome unit, however I get stuttering when trying to stream large movies from it.

have ordered another gigabit switch and repalcement ethernet cables to ensure everything is running right. However I have read similar issues on the synology forum about this issue without any successful conclusion
 
synology kit is by far the best NAS kit ive used.

i wouldnt rely on RAID1 for the only copy of your data however, its not invincible to corruption, deletion, fire or theft. id get a USB drive and run regular backups to that from the USB port on the synology. and then keep it in a fireproof safe :)
 
Raid isn't a backup. It really, really isn't. Particularly not when its implemented inside a NAS which may well die before the hard drives, leaving you with an array which you can't rebuild on another system, or taking the drives with it.

I wholeheartedly recommend western digitals my book live. It's very cheap for a nas, as it's a single circuit board plugged directly into a hard drive, and it only has an ethernet connection to the wider world. 800mhz ppc / 256mb ram / gigabit nic, and a single 2tb hard drive, for about £150. There's a link in my sig about it which probably wont be very comforting, so I'd like to add that there's no reason to mess around with the supplied OS. Windows shares and so forth work out of the box.

For home backup, a second hard drive which spends most of its time disconnected from the mains and any computers is probably the most secure approach. Short of fire or earthquake it'll survive anything that kills the master copy. If both drives are in the same enclosure a fair few things can kill them both at once.

Further, raid of any sort does bugger all to protect you from accidental deletion or data corruption.

edit: considering how cheap the WD system is, it may be reasonable to buy one, try it out, and if it doesn't perform as well as you'd like, use it to backup a faster replacement NAS.
 
Another vote for Synology. I got a DS211 with 2x2TB Samsung F4s. It is an awesome piece of kit. The OS is absolutely great and so easy to use. I have it set up with RAID 1 for redundancy but as mentioned above this isn't for backup.

I use the NAS as my main storage but I back up from the NAS to my windows PC. You need to have at least 2 copies of files to have a proper backup. Having everything ONLY on the NAS is not good. If it corrupts both disks or goes on fire you have nothing!
 
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