Nas

billn

Hi. I am thinking of getting a NAS so I can store all my files on it to enable me to access these from any networked computers in the house. My question is do you store the files on the NAS or do you backup the files to the NAS sorry if this seems a stupid question but I do seem to be able to find the answer to this anywhere?

sillygoose

Either..

You could use your NAS drive to backup files on your PC by keeping a copy on both the PC and the NAS.

But if your talking of sharing files across PC's (and other devices) then instead of saving a file to your PC drive you would save it to the NAS drive, then other users could also access it. In this case the files are no safer than if they were on your PC - you must back them up to at very least one other drive for safety. (2 other is much better)

billn

Thanks for that, I had nearly come to that conclusion but was not quite sure. Can anyone recommend a reliable NAS? I have looked at the Synology DS212J but it is quite expensive and still gets mixed reviews.

closed

depends what the files are, whether they are likely to be changed (ie edited), or just media sharing

if there is no changing going on, then easiest is to save masters on the pc's, and copy the changed or new files upto the nas periodically, then you have 2 copies for backup purposes.

Alternatively, you could just stored the data on a pc/laptop, and share the directory to other machines, and backup periodically to a usb drive.

TrickyDicky101

I bought a NAS last year and it has been a fantastic tool. However, I do regret buying only a single bay NAS - now I have so much data on this drive that I am very concerned about losing everything if the drive dies. I really wish I'd bought at least a 2 bay NAS so I could have run in a RAID mirror configuration so I always had a back up.

billn

closed wrote: »

Alternatively, you could just stored the data on a pc/laptop, and share the directory to other machines, and backup periodically to a usb drive.

I have done that but I would like just the NAS to be switched on all the time instead of my desktop.

sillygoose

I can't imagine life without my D-Link DNS 320.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCenter-Network-Storage-Enclosure/dp/B004AIWOXY/

Less than £50 without drives but drives are quite cheap at the moment and its better to pick something decent yourself than buy one with any old cheap drives fitted by the seller. You can use 1 or 2 drives in it.

Mine has 2 x Samsung low energy ones in, they just literally drop in. With this NAS you can either configure the drives to be 'added together' with faster performance or in parallel - mirrored as a RAID drive so if one fails the other keeps going until you replace it (both drives are maintained as replicas of each other and the NAS monitors for failure).

I have 2 x 2TB drives in RAID format. The other thing to consider is your network performance, this enclosure has gigabyte ports and need to be connected to a router with gigabyte ports to give good performance and not get bottlenecked.

closed

One downside of networked and always switched on apart from the power costs, are a worm could one day come along an wipe out the masters and the backups in seconds.

sillygoose

closed wrote: »

One downside of networked and always switched on apart from the power costs, are a worm could one day come along an wipe out the masters and the backups in seconds.

It would have to be a worm with an angle grinder to get to the usb backup drives in the safe. ~(or the monthlies round at my sisters)

Lum

You can use a NAS for storage, or backup or both. Some of the fancier ones, such as that Synology, can also do other stuff such as transcoding media or downloading files for you while your PC is off.

In general accessing files on the NAS is a little slower than accessing files on your local PC, this depends on both the performance of the NAS and the performance of your network, if you are doing everything over wireless you probably won't have a good time.

It really does depends on what sort of files you are putting on it though, for example suppose you had a really slow setup that took literally a minute to fully load a piece of music, it wouldn't matter because it would still be loading faster than you can actually listen to it.

On the other hand if it's a bunch of Excel spreadsheets all linked together and sharing data then this sort of slowness may start to irritate you.

I would keep all my big files, such as music and downloaded films on the NAS. For documents try it and see what works for you, though keeping it local and running a backup from time to time my save you one day if you accidentally destroy your local copy.


For the record I'm using a Synology DS211J, an older, slightly slower, version of the 212J that you are looking at. I am connected to it via gigabit ethernet with jumbo frames enables. The maximum performance of such a setup is above 100MB/s. Reading and writing to the Synology I get around 68MB/s which isn't much slower than my local hard drive at 75MB/s, though my SSD is much faster.

It isn't my first NAS, I've had a Western Digital MyBook World (crap) and several PCs running as NASes. I'm very happy with the Synology.

billn

Thanks to you all for the replies. I know about the importance of backing up the NAS even if it has 2 hard drives set to mirror each other, I don't intend to stream music or movies from it so it would be used as a central storage to be accessed by all computers, maybe the Synology is a bit OTT for what I need, food for thought though.

Thanks