Ok so I have my laptop which I download hirez files to and I use for playback. I am of course worried about hard drive failures so I do periodic backups. For the first time I am seriously considering a NAS. Does anyone here use a NAS? Any advice? I do have a WD drive (over 1tb) I wonder if that could be used as a NAS. I know it's not much space but It's still twice the size of my laptop HD.
You can buy a NAS without HDD, but most cheap ones come with a drive, like WD My Book Live. In the cheap price range you shouldn't rely on NAS for data redundancy because the NAS hardware is consumer toy quality and less reliable than the HDD. Some more expensive NAS are multi disk arrays using RAID for data redundancy. This is what I use, I did have a disk failure and it was easy to fix. But I still keep a backup USB drive, unpowered, in a safe place to backup the NAS.
For convenience, the NAS is nice to have your own file server running all the time. They are self contained fileservers with processor and OS, so they can usually do other network jobs also, like host music server software, print server, web server, DHCP, DNS, UPnP, whatever.
You could attach your existing 1tb drive to your laptop with an fanless external USB drive enclosure. But that does not have a processor or networking, so it is not a stand alone file server. It is just a peripheral accessory of the laptop.
Get a quiet NAS if you intend to run it in the music room. Get a reliable NAS with RAID if you don't want to keep a backup.
Quote from: richidoo on April 23, 2013, 01:19:52 PM
... Get a reliable NAS with RAID ...
I totally agree with this. Be aware, however, that configuring and running a NAS is more complex (and periodically more irritating ;-) than just hanging a big HD off of your notebook. So it really depends on your expertise, patience and pocketbook. But if you're comfortable with all three, I'd pop for a solid NAS that can handle multiple RAIDed HDDs. And, even with that, I'd consider a service like Crashplan+ to backup into the cloud anything that you cannot replace (music, pictures, etc...). I've been using Crashplan+ for nearly 2 years now and love it.
Rich, do you know of a good quiet NAS? I've been using a Roswell RAID 4-bay box hanging off of a PC via eSATA that I keep running 24/7. But it's gotten flakey of late (occasional raid rebuilds even though the drives check out fine) so I'm contemplating next steps including switching to a NAS if I can find something similar at a good price.
Quote from: jimbones on April 23, 2013, 06:34:49 AM
Ok so I have my laptop which I download hirez files to and I use for playback. I am of course worried about hard drive failures so I do periodic backups. For the first time I am seriously considering a NAS. Does anyone here use a NAS? Any advice? I do have a WD drive (over 1tb) I wonder if that could be used as a NAS. I know it's not much space but It's still twice the size of my laptop HD.
You would be well advised to think carefully about your reasons for considering a NAS. If you just want another whiz bang cool piece of technology to plug into your network then by all means go buy one and enjoy it. I'm not saying there aren't any benefits to a NAS, but I am saying that a lot of people who buy them for home use don't really need them, and they implement a NAS when other, more cost effective and sensible solutions are close at hand.
I'm an IT consultant and I don't have a NAS or a RAID. But I do make backups of all my data religiously and I also do periodic test restores of my data to make sure my backup sets are actually good. I have no fear whatsoever of a hard disk failure. At worst, a disk failure is an inconvenience that I can endure. It might also be worth mentioning that I have not had a hard disk fail on me in over 10 years, and I typically use a drive for 3 to 5 years. My systems are powered on and in use 24/7, 365 days per year.
If you are considering RAID then you generally will pay more per gigabyte of storage than you will for external hard disks with the same capacity. And with single disk 2.5" portable external hard drives topping out at about 2TB of capacity, you should consider these inexpensive external drives. You could buy two, one for your data and another for backup. Of course, if you need a lot of storage, say, more than 4TB then a NAS is probably going to be the only practical solution for you.
Consider a NAS if you really must have your storage in a location that is separate from your laptop. I would strongly advise you to buy one with a gigabit NIC (which also means that your LAN should support gigabit speeds). Moving server message block traffic over TCP/IP is very inefficient, especially over high latency networks. A locally attached USB 2.0 drive will typically perform better than a NAS. A USB 3.0 drive will eat a NAS alive in terms of performance. But that said, you don't need a ton of disk performance if all you want to do is stream music and video over your network.
If you do go for a NAS with RAID, don't make the same mistake that a lot of home users do and think of the RAID as a backup. A RAID is
not a backup. A RAID will protect you from the failure of a physical disk that is part of the RAID set (unless you are running in a RAID 0, which I would not recommend). However, it will not protect you from data corruption, accidental file deletion, or loss of your RAID...only a proper backup made to another storage device can do that.
Also, if you are going to go the NAS route consider your choice very carefully. Some NAS devices do not support a number of security features in Windows 7 and Windows 8 file sharing. A friend of mine locked his Windows 7 computer down by turning on SMB packet signing in the local security policy. Several months later he added a ReadyNAS and was having fits getting his computer to see the NAS on the network. He called me for help. I resolved his problem by changing the policy to only use packet signing if it is supported by the server, but he wasn't too happy about making his network a little less secure in order to use the NAS. So do your homework before buying and expect to have to do some tinkering to get things to work.
--Jerome
Wow :shock: some great advice.
My concern is loss of data from a HDD failure. I know there are different ways to recover from HD failure. I already have a 1.5 TB WD external HD that I believe can be added to my network via the router (ethernet) Could I just use that to back up all the computers in the houes? (MAC &PC?) Again my main concern is loosing data and I would want good backup software as i would really like to do an image of my machine and then if the HDD fails I am covered. Should i start with this?
Well, if you need to backup both PCs and MACs on the same network then I am not aware of any cost effective solutions for the home using a single backup software package. Most of the software in the space that I work in is meant for enterprise class backup, and the entry level price is typically $3,000 and can go up into tens of thousands of dollars from there.
I think the most cost effective solution would be use locally attached USB drives unless you have a lot of PCs and MACs on your home network. You can get Retrospect for Mac and Acronis Backup and Recovery or Acronis True Image for your PCs. There are a lot of choices in this class of software and most of it is pretty affordable.
You could also put a NAS on your network and carve out dedicated blocks of storage for your PC and MAC environments (if your NAS supports that), or alternatively you can create one big Windows shared volume and use the MACs built in support for Windows SMB file shares to connect to it. This would allow you to make backups of your PCs and MACs over the network. But be careful here, as some consumer level backup products will not support network backups. This is generally a more complicated, and potentially more costly, way to go.
I like to keep things simple and manageable. In my environment I have two Windows 7 PCs and one Windows 8 Laptop. I use Acronis True Image 2013 and make backups to a pair of USB 3.0 Western Digital 4TB drives that are attached to my workstation. My workstation has most of the data (4TB of virtual machine data, SQL Server databases, and working data sets). Since the bulk of the data is on my workstation making a local backup is much faster than it would be over the network. The other two computers have a relatively small storage footprint so backing them up over the network is not a big deal.
You could ask 10 different people for advice on this subject and get 10 different answers that will work. It comes down to your degree of computer literacy and your willingness to manage and deal with technical complexity. Using local external drives will be simpler, and using a big NAS may hold more convenience for you if you have the technical acumen and patience to deal with it. Just don't expect world class performance from a consumer grade NAS.
--Jerome
If you have multiple computers and you want to make sure they're all backed up, as Jerome said, there are multiple approaches you can take. Certainly buying hard drives and being religious about backing up is viable. Buying a NAS and automating backups to it is another.
I mentioned this earlier, but a solution that's worked well for me is using a service like Crashplan+. I've had a family plan now for close to 2 years and all of my family's computers have their files automatically backed-up into the cloud routinely. That includes 3 computers in my house, as well as 6 others owned by my grown kids and wife's parents. Now, to be clear, it's a file backup and restore system, so it doesn't give you an easy way to restore your operating system disk if it crashes, but it is perfect for things like music files, pictures, and whatever other files you feel should be backed-up. It even offers rudimentary version-control if that is of value. File restore is extremely easy whenever you need it (including the ability to restore files from that directory you just inadvertently deleted only to realize after you emptied the recycle bin). It does cover all the major OSes.
I'm sorry if I sound like a commercial. I'm just a very happy customer. They're one of the few services that has an affordable unlimited plan as well as a family plan (up to 10 computers). In the long run, I suspect it would prove more expensive than buying a bunch of drives, but it is a slick service that takes a lot of the backup worries away.
Cloud based backups are fine unless you have to recover a lot of data at once. Restoring 4TB of data from a total loss with 15mbps of bandwidth from a cloud based backup service would take anywhere from 100 to 450 hours, depending on how compressible your data is and the network latency between your computer and the cloud based service. If I had a lot of data to protect and was considering a cloud based solution I would talk to the service provider about my data protection payload. I would specifically inquire into what sort of recovery performance I can expect with the available bandwidth and types of data I needed to protect in the rare event that I might need to restore everything.
I really don't have strong feelings about any particular solution, but I do think it is very important for people to know what they are getting themselves into.
For example, most people don't think too much about how poorly integrated SATA RAID controllers perform on writes until they set up a big RAID5 using slow 2TB SATA drives, and then have to rebuild a failed disk and their system slows to a crawl because of all of the I/O overhead. It's the big reason I don't use RAID on my home systems. In order to get the sort of performance I require I would have to go in for a dedicated SAS RAID controller and a RAID10 with at least four 10,000RPM drives. It becomes very cost prohibitive and I would just as soon stare a 4TB restore from a backup in the face than pay a performance penalty in order to save money and settle for less.
Naturally, someone else might have a different experience or different performance expectations.
--Jerome
I'll throw my two cents in. I have been doing NAS in my house for about 8 or 9 years. I also have been in IT for about 20 years, so I might be willing to go an extra step for the NAS.
To me a NAS is just ridiculously covenant. I have a ReadyNAS that is RAID 5. With about 10TB of storage. It has dual GB nics as well. In agreement that it is more expensive than just buying external storage, but the extra price really just comes from the NAS unit itself, after that you are just buying storage at whatever the going price is. As far as read/write speeds, I get 70MBs over my LAN, so that is pretty good for pretty much anything I ever need. Not as fast as USB3 but other than copying 3TB of data at a time, it's not a noticeable slowdown on most things.
That said, it is used ALL the time. I have all my music, videos and pictures on the NAS, as well as backup all my PC and Laptops to it as well, Also keeps a copy of my Dropbox files too. The NAS is available as media storage for anything on my own network 24/7, meaning that all my devices, Media PC, phones, music players, TV, PC etc, all can see and access my files, music and video anytime. It makes it very easy and convenient. My TV can play music or look at pictures, same as my iPad and android phones. At this point I could not even fathom just having locally attached storage as the only means of getting to my files.
I have been using the ReadyNAS stuff since before they were acquired by Netgear, and to me I still think it is the some of the best consumer stuff you can get for your money.
JBNY - Good info on the ReadyNAS! I'll definitely be looking at that.
jsaliga - I think I agree with you on the Raid5. While it seems like a great concept (I've got 4-1tb drives in a Raid5), it is slow and prone to raid rebuild issues (or at least in my case). Before I go down the NAS route, I may just switch to JBOD since the drives themselves have been solid.
Regarding cloud-based backup... I do have backup locally and still use Crashplan for worst-case disaster (house burns, lightning strike, zombie attack, whatever) as well as for one-off file/directory recovery which is actually pretty handy. I'd never want to restore TBs over the internet, but they do have a disaster restore service where you ship them a drive, they restore your files to the drive, and then ship back to you. I hope I never need it.
But to be honest, the biggest benefit of Crashplan for me is just peace of mind with respect to helping my grown kids and wife's parents. They don't live with us nor would I ever get them to manage their own backups (hard enough getting them to keep their virus-protection running). So for them (and me) Crashplan just takes care of itself. Ask my daughter in college who already asked me what to do when a class paper on her computer "just disappeared". :duh
To be a little clearer on my RAID 5 it is the ReadyNas version of RAID 5, Allows for hotswap, and dynamic rebuilding of the array both if you add larger discs as well as if a disc goes bad. Over the years I have had two discs go bad, both times I just ordered a new one and put it in and the unit took care of the rest.
It won't be too long before dirt cheap high capacity solid state drives become available.
They are still too expensive for large data stores in the home. Right now they are really popular with enterprise class SAN solutions where the highest performance available is required.
--Jerome
I agree with JBNY about the convenience of a NAS when you have the need for all of it's capabilities. If you will just use it to stream <1TB of music to a laptop then NAS value compared to USB drive is questionable, considering the cost premium. But removing the drive and fan noise from the music room may be worth the premium to many audiophiles.
I too have an old ReadyNAS NV+, which I bought in 2006, pre Netgear. It is a very well designed machine. Overall I am very happy with it's performance, especially now that I have it's MTU turned down and can get the download speeds that JBNY describes. On the downside, The power supply has failed twice, easily replaced with OEM part from Amazon, and I did lose a drive once, likewise easily replaced, and the RAID 5 rebuilt itself with no user input. My old version is too loud to be in the music room. Maybe the new Netgear ReadyNAS units are quieter.
I agree with Jerome, that RAID 5 is not a backup strategy. Harddrives are the common failure mode, so RAID makes drive failures quickly repaired, nothing more. ReadyNAS is a proprietary RAID, idiot proof, so don't expect to play RAID doctor with it. I keep an external USB drive in the safe to backup the important things.
My NAS is linked to the PS3 so the kids can view the home pics and videos, and play music. That's the nice thing about NAS, it's your own cloud, available anywhere on the network. My point is that if "the network" is just you and your laptop, NAS might be overkill. But you would find other uses for it in the future.
Thanks all for the ideas, recommendations and advice. I think I will get some good back up software (maybe trueimage) I have a couple of decent size external HDDs. Eventually I'll get one that I can hook up to my router and just back up to it only for backups.