NAS/External HD

dx052

Please bear with me on this one as I am not up to speed with this stuff! I am on the verge of buying a 1K external HD to record music on however further on down the road I am looking to get a NAS server, as this is all quiet new to me what HD if any can I get to incorporate with the server?so i don't have to spend money twice

bengalknights

You should be able to get any hardrive you want as all you would have to do is remove the drive from the caddy on the external and then slot it into the NAS.

diable

A nas can be slow.

dx052

Thanks, didn't know it was that straight forward. What is faster than!

doverswot

You also need to consider whether the NAS you buy supports the file format you use when you intially use it as an external disk. e.g., if you format the external drive as NTFS (microsoft standard), you'd need a NAS server which supported NTFS to read the exisiting data to avoid having to copy your data off, add the disk to the NAS and reformat.

In so far as speed, it will depend on the network connection between your devices and the NAS. For instance, if you have the NAS wired to a router but the connection from the PC to the NAS is Wireless, the transfer speed will be signficantly slower. This wouldn't be a problem if you're only streaming music files as throughput required is less the 1Mbps, however this could be probalamatic if you were streaming HD video. If everything is wired 100Mbps unlikely you'll gut aby perfromance problems, although transfer rate will be slower than if physicall attached to a PC.

dx052

I will be formatting it for Mac (what's standard do they use?) Using it for music files only.

kwikbreaks

If you get a decent NAS then the odds are it will be a raid device, take 2 drives, and it will automatically reformat any drives you put in it anyway. Cheap NAS caddies won't reformat but will be limited in what they support.

A decent consumer quality NAS raid on a gigabit network will deliver maybe 15MB/s if you are lucky and on 100megabit it will be down to 10MB/s.

Cheap NAS single disk caddies can be really slow.

USB2 will usually be around 30MB/s

You need to decide what functions your external device needs to perform before deciding what to use.

dx052

One thing I have noticed this morning after looking at some of this stuff online is that it seems cheaper to buy the drives already installed.

kwikbreaks

Are you talking about NAS or external USB?

Certainly just buying a USB caddie + HDD is usually more expensive than as a plain external USB hard drive but last time I looked there wasn't much difference when buying a halfway decent NAS. If you get the drives separately you can choose between performance and energy efficiency plus throwing lower noise levels into the options.

dx052

I was talking about the expense of the external usb drives & then buying a NAS without any drives. I hope I am on the right page! anyway it can have its benefits buying separately as you said regarding performance and Noise levels etc.

free4440273

I have the brilliant netgear stora //

http://www.netgear.com/stora