NAS - alternative to USB external hard-drives?

[iceman]

Hi guys

I'm currently storing my images on USB external hard drives, because I just don't have the space on my internal drives on my laptop.

I've got 2 x 1TB that I'm trying to keep going, storing on one and then (when I remember) backing it up to the other external.

It's a pain having to plug it in when I want to access an old image etc. and I'm worried that it'll just die and I'll lose all my images.

Was thinking a NAS system might be the way to go? Can't you get ones that sit on the WIFI and can be accessed from any computer?
Also would I be able to access it away from home if it was connected to the internet?

What are some good ones?
Cost? Benefits?
RAID or mirrored etc?

The external HD's still have their place at times, but trying to think of a better solution.

[pluto]

A friend of mine has one of these: http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS1512%2B&lang=enu
He has 15Tb of disks in it and with 2 drive redundancy he has 9Tb usable. It's very quiet and very power efficient and has an excellent web interface so you can administer it from a browser locally or via the net. It's upgradeable and expandable so I would see it as a relatively long term solution.
It's on my list... after a bunch of scope related stuff ;)

[ZeroID]

I'm going to have to look at one of those too. I'm heading back into Motorsports photography and landscapes along with the Astro stuff. My wife is in the industry with plenty of contacts so we'l do some research first.

[acropolite]

Mike, it's a good move but expect a dramatic speed drop, I use a NAS as ons of several backup locations. I've seen a backup USB drive die, along with the host machine HDD when a PSU failed, not the norm but it can happen, needless to say all data was lost.

I have a Dlink NAS, which I wouldn't recommend very slow and not terribly well debugged.

I recently installed a SeagateBlack armour NAS for a mate which was very reasonably priced and had a very good feature set, although I can't really comment on the performance as I haven't done any subjective measurements.

[RickS]

I have a QNAP NAS which works well but bulk file copies are very slow over WiFi. I use a wired connection if I have to do a full or incremental backup.

Cheers,
Rick.

[sheeny]

I have a NAS drive. I have to agree with Phil, there will be a speed drop c.w. USB, but to be able to access any image without having to plug in the appropriate USB drive, it will work.

Mine is cable connected to the wireless router, and has a internet interface though I don't use that.

Al.

[DavidTrap]

I've got a 4 drive Synology NAS. 4 x 2Tb drives in a Raid array so 6Tb of storage. Gigabit socket on the back. Ticks the boxes for me.

DT

[Steffen]

I've also got a 4-bay Synology (the 410), with four 2TB drives in RAID5 configuration, totalling about 5.6TB usable space. It has successfully recovered without data loss from a recent drive failure (as you'd expect from a RAID5). I also have an external 6TB drive connected to it via SATA and have the NAS run nightly incremental backups to it, to protect from wetware errors.

The NAS is very fast over our gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n WiFi.

Cheers
Steffen.

[Moon]

I've got a HP N40L (http://www.shoppingexpress.com.au/buy/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-nas-658553-371/658553-371) running NAS4Free (http://www.nas4free.org/) with includes a basic UPnP media server.

The OS is installed on a USB stick inside the case. It hasn't missed a beat.

The USB external hard drives are great for off site backups.

James

[michaellxv]

A NAS box is great for storing and sharing data amongst the family. I only have a cheap one but its the central store for all our photos so we can all see them.

I did have problems doing the initial upload of data as in the transfer kept crashing which made it hard to verify everything was there. This is a case of you get what you pay for and I didn't pay.

It is slower that a directly connected drive but once the data is loaded accessing is no problem given its really just the odd file here and there. I would not use one as a work drive, stick to an external USB drive for that.

I am also looking to increase my storage and backup capacity so i'll be interested to see what you come up with.

[noxidc]

i have a qnap t219 and its cool. its raid1. i will be sitting outside with the scope and i have backyard eos to just dump all the images and videos on the nas share over the wifi. works a treat.

[Shano592]

I bought one of these a couple years ago, for $39.00.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NETWORK-STORAGE-NAS-FTP-SAMBA-PRINT-SERVER-BT-CLIENT-/230446698861?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item35a7b1916d

Surprisingly, it works quite well.

Has 2 usb ports. You can even run a printer off of one, as a print server.

Plugs into an RJ45 port on the router/modem.

[SkyViking]

I have a NAS as well (Synology). Their products are excellent and very easy to setup and use. Mine is hardwired to my main computer, then I access over wifi from the obs and other places. I have never had a problem with it and yes you can assess it remotely over internet etc if you like.
Once you get one, you will never go back :)

[jamiep]

+1 for the synology NAS's ... I have one at home, running just a couple of fully mirrored 3TB drives at the moment - it has a great web interface (access when away from home), great speed over gigabit lan, ok over wireless (the limitation here of course if the wireless technology not the NAS).

It backs up to an external USB drive, emails me successful backups and any concerns it has, power failures, imminent drive failures etc... also has lots of software 'packages' you can install for various tasks (anything from email server to other basic programs) that can be run from this low power always on platform.

Also has apps so you can remotely administer or access files from your iThing ... if that's of interest to you...

They're a winner for sure.

[DJDD]

+1 on synology drives

see thread post:
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showpost.php?p=699459&postcount=2
and other comments in the thread

cheers

[cventer]

+1 synology

[The_bluester]

I have a Qnap TS412 with 4 X 2TB drives running RAID5, so about 6TB available space. It is plenty quick enough in normal use. Write speeds (On a wired GigE network) run up to about 25MB/Sec and read is considerably faster. We have all our media stored on it as well as PC and Mac backups.

So far it has been exactly the type of technology I like, it just works. The only operating issue is that it gets grumpy (Along with the rest of the network) in "Unplanned" shutdowns like a power outage. I fixed that with a smallish UPS that will run the modem, router, switch and NAS for somewhere over an hour (I did not test any longer than that) without falling over.

The only real issue I have had was ths weekend just gone. Suddenly it got a bit slow and flaky and it turned out to be a dead drive. I held my breath and hot swapped a spare 2TB drive I had into it and it calmly rebuilt itself overnight, while staying available and loosing no data in the process! RAID5 parity calculations to the rescue (It does sound odd though, reading good data from a dead drive as though it was still there!)

[badabing82]

I thought i'd add my 2 cents,
i have both the qnap t509 and t869 on running raid 5 with 2tb drives for 8tb useable space and the 869 with 8 x 3tb wd red drives in raid 6 for 18tb useable.

i've got certain directories that backup automatically to the other NAS so in the event that it dies ive got a backup.

i get around 70mbs write speed over gige which is plenty fast enough and runs way faster then my laptop hard drive if i'm pushing data to it.

they are simple to setup and you can have all sort of addon's running, which really add to the value i.e. i have a website + weather station that connects directly to the nas and processes and post graphs and logs.

Also if you have a smart TV you can connect to it directly and stream movies etc directly to the TV.

if you got data to store i'd highly recommend it. I had the motherboard die on the 509 and qnap took it back replaced the motherboard and i was able to restore the configuration and rebuild the array with no data loss. Although this is not always doable.

I went qnap as i got the 869 for a really cheap price from a friend but if i was to redo it, i think synology seems to be as good if not better at a cheaper price!

[rogerg]

NAS is the only way for me.

QNAP 419P with 4 x 1TB drives giving me 3TB.

I get up to 70mb/s over gigabit ethernet quite often, but of course depends what size files you're transfering (larger=faster). Much faster than I've received from USB drives.

Reliable, expandable, fast, engergy efficient, UPS smart, always on and available. :thumbsup:

Not cheap for the configuration I got :(

I bougth the qnap when I was tired of so called gigabit NAS units giving megabit performance (11mb/s for example).

[CJ]

I'm intrigued and a bit in the dark re NAS's. Assuming I have a pc that can support lots of internal HD's and is mostly on, what advantages does a NAS offer? Is it the raid capability or are there more?
Thanks

[iceman]

For me, it's the ability to share between PC's and other devices, as well as be able to access the content from work or elsewhere.

[badabing82]

CJ,

In it's simplist form yes it's just a pc but it's one designed and dedicated to do the job.

1. much lower power consumption as the processor is low power and your only running scaled down versions of an OS etc.
2. RAID you can get this in a pc both software + hardware but it's quite flawless out of the box and easy to setup, flexible
3. Its a stripped down linux kernel, less updating rebooting much much more reliable
4. footprint , the box is very small for the amount of hard drives used
5. fast, outside of a proper hardware raid card which are expensive
6. cost, it's not that much more expensive if not cheaper then a pc to run your storage
7. easier / less management then a regular pc / setup, much easier for a average joe
8. You can use it as a vmware / iscis etc etc
9 Huge amount of software can be installed with a simple click to do all kinds of tasks with all the advantages as above

I could go on and on in short your paying a fair bit of money for hardware and quality software to run everything, that could be had cheaper and even software that could do it for free for you (freenas) etc but your paying for a smooth well tested small, low power computer with a huge amount of functions and most of all is fairly reliable (very reliable without going to enterprise equipment) without paying a fortune for a high quality hardware raid card or two and skills required to setup and manage these setups.

[CJ]

Thanks Mike and Badabing!

I'll stick with humble wifi network shares for now!