Quote:
Originally Posted by iceman
How much was it Roger, and where did you get it from?
Do you just plug it into your wireless router so it's available from any device accessing the wireless?
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It was about $1400 all up from memory, which included the device and 4 disks. I think the QNAP TS-419P+ its self is about $750:
http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/...419P%2B&spos=3
The disks were considerably more expensive than their normal consumer counterpart. I think about $180 instead of $80 for the consumer equivalent. So you could set it up for about $1070. Still in a different price range to the others I mentioned that were models in the $300 price range (complete - including disks) but cheaper than what I did using the enterprise grade disks.
You plug it in to your LAN, so router or whatever. Via cable. I don't have anything plugged in to my ADSL router other than a switch, because those routers are almost all only megabit ethernet, not gigabit. So I have a set of gigabit switches running the network, and the router is plugged in to one of them, as is the QNAP and other computers/devices. The router does run the WiFi but WiFi is only 50 up to 100 megabit at most anyhow.
Once on the network you can configure shares and other services on the QNAP to be used by other devices, be them wired or wireless. I stream music from it using my iPad through the iTunes and the Media servers it has built in. It also has a web server built in, FTP, and a whole bunch of other capabilities for accessing files other than normal windows & apple networking.
I bought it from my friend's computer shop,
www.efficientchips.com, but you can get it from lots of places, see Static Ice link above.
I was at the point that I knew we were going to be consuming many more TB in the coming years already having used 1.5TB, especially with my data acquisition in astronomy ramping up, and the solutions I had at the time (smaller individual NAS units) and various computers weren't providing a consistent reliable or fast solution. I need all the data in one place, backed up to another one place. The convoluted network of various other devices was becoming unmanageable and risky from a data backup & management point of view, as well as speed and reliability problems. With the QNAP I can easily upgrade the disks as I need more storage, up to 3TB each at the moment (giving me 9TB in RAID5 config). So there's great expansion capability there. And the computers can barely process the 80MB/s speeds of the gigabit ethernet, so I think I am safe on speed for a few years.
If you don't need all of the above, then a USB external drive (or set of), or a cheaper NAS or just internal drives in a computer are fair solutions for less $$$.
It has built in UPS connectivity, so I have a APC Back-UPS 550 which the QNAP is plugged in to and data connected to so the QNAP will shut down X minutes after on-battery.
Oh, and final note on the backup.. the QNAP has a USB port on the front and button. You plug in a USB drive of sufficent storage and press the button, it'll back up the entire contents to that. That's the less frequent more secure backup option, I do more frequent local backups in other ways. You can also plug in external eSata and other drives which can invisibly become part of the available storage, to increase it beyond the 9TB.
Roger.