NAS advice

Tim Robbins

Hi,
Thinking about getting NAS. Want it to be low power usage so I can leave it on all the time connected to the router.
Idea is I have all my mp3, videos on it and then can watch then on IPAD or PC.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

qwertz

What storage requirements do you have? NAS boxes come in all kinds of flavours, ranging from a single disk to dozens. Do you have a budged?

Tim Robbins

qwertz wrote: »

What storage requirements do you have? NAS boxes come in all kinds of flavours, ranging from a single disk to dozens. Do you have a budged?

budget - less than 300.
storage - 2 - 3TB.
Main thing is I am going to have it on 24/7 so want it to be very low power usage.

ScumLord

I'm interested in getting one too, I bought an icybox in the past and it never worked, it's sitting in a heap somewhere now.

I'd be interested in something with redundancy though as I'd mainly use it for backup. I think it's a bit pointless having one external hard drive as it's no more safe than one hard drive in your PC.

Komplett have a sale on some NAS at the moment
http://www.komplett.ie/Komplett/site/campaign/Top_storage/cms.aspx

The QNAP Turbo TS-412 looks like the ideal package out of that lot but way too expensive considering I'd need to fill it with hard drives on top of the €300 cost of the NAS.

hearny

Netgear ReadyNAS is a pretty good option especially for the price:

http://www.dabs.ie/products/netgear-readynas-duo-v2--2-bay----no-drives-included-7SJZ.html?src=15

There are no drives with that but it will support 2 x 3TB drives and can be setup as RAID1 for redundancy, there is a netgear RAID option but I prefer sticking with RAID1 which just mirrors the drives so if one fails just replace it and the data is recovered off the working drive.

Hard drives for it are usual 3.5" SATA drives:
http://www.dabs.ie/category/components-and-storage,hard-drives,internal-hard-drives/11154-42730000-52450000

I have a DLink DNS-323 which is similar but much less flexibility.
I might actually replace my Dlink with the Netgear one, USB 3 and backup jobs as well as one touch backup option, rsync and remote access all make the Netgear a better buy.

Tim Robbins

hearny wrote: »

Netgear ReadyNAS is a pretty good option especially for the price:

http://www.dabs.ie/products/netgear-readynas-duo-v2--2-bay----no-drives-included-7SJZ.html?src=15

There are no drives with that but it will support 2 x 3TB drives and can be setup as RAID1 for redundancy, there is a netgear RAID option but I prefer sticking with RAID1 which just mirrors the drives so if one fails just replace it and the data is recovered off the working drive.

Hard drives for it are usual 3.5" SATA drives:
http://www.dabs.ie/category/components-and-storage,hard-drives,internal-hard-drives/11154-42730000-52450000

I have a DLink DNS-323 which is similar but much less flexibility.
I might actually replace my Dlink with the Netgear one, USB 3 and backup jobs as well as one touch backup option, rsync and remote access all make the Netgear a better buy.

Was thinking of this 2TB NAS from Western Digital.


http://www.dabs.ie/products/western-digital-2tb-my-book-live-personal-cloud-storage-nas-77V8.html?q=nas%20western%20digital&src=16

hearny

It will certainly do the job, I only ever used an early Wester Digital NAS, it was a pain but Im sure they have made them more user friendly.

There is no redundancy and no expansion options but if your files are not that important it will do the job.

28064212

I'd suggest the Zyxel NSA320 from Amazon (€100, including delivery). Doesn't include any drives with it, but if you already have some external USB drives lying around, you can take them apart and slide the 3.5" SATA drive into it (although they do have to be reformatted). Has a lot more features than the WD, and is upgradable to 6TB, with an option to connect up to 3 more USB external drives.

qwertz

Bottom section of this link!

http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives

fergusb

I picked up a QNAP TS-412 last year and find it great.

I went for the slightly larger 4 bay instead of a 2 bay to allow for future expansion. When I first got it I just put in a couple of 1TB disks I had spare as didn't want to fork out on more disks. but recently upgraded to 3 larger disks in RAID5.

Power usage is fine, and you can have it automatically shutdown/restart at specific times if you want. It also automatically spins the disks down when not in use (standard enough amount nas's).

There are big speed differences between NAS's. So if you are going to be streaming large 1080p movies from them going for the cheapest may not provide sufficient throughput. There are plenty of sites with reviews worth reading before purchasing anything.