Nas

[Piff]

I've had a search through old threads and the problem is that technology moves on and the threads become dated!

Number 1 son has used a USB drive for media storage and the drive is now full.
We have a home network and TV is DNLA compliant.
Son wants NAS with a minimum of 2 x 1tb hard discs.

Any suggestions?

 

[danch]

What price range, raid/non-raid ?

 

[Piff]

What price range, raid/non-raid ?

As always as cheap as possible!
He is currently looking at this

Raid - not sure

 

[Mrhanky]

I bought this for my business six months ago and its been very good. Accept it doesnt come with two seperate drives but its easy to use and cheap.

WD 2TB My Cloud Personal Cloud Storage - NAS: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

 

[danch]

I would recommend this then : http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00FOKN7FG/?tag=amazon0e9db-21

I have several WD products & have lasted well

 

[jazzyglobe]

I Like synology

 

[moonloops]

Synology as above or QNAP. I'm using a QNAP with 5*2TB drives. Will probably upgrade to 5 * 6TB drives soon. QNAP can do almost everything you need including media serving, web site host, bittorrent client etc etc. Even can mirror to remote QNAPs for backing up.

 

[John]

I started with Iomega boxes which use Seagate hard disks. Whole experience has not been a good one with poor support to back it up. To top it off, they can only sync with a 2008 (non-R2) DC even though they were bought in 2010 - with "no plans to support R2". Joke.

Bought Synology after that and recently bought an even larger pair of Synology boxes. Excellent products, great support and very reliable so far.

WD have also been very good in my experience and are normally the hard disk manufacturer I opt for first.

 

[whitenemesis]

Netgear ReadyNAS with 2 x 2Tb mirrored. Works well in my experience

 

[kingdave]

I've had my readynas for about 5 years and still works very well. I run it with 2 x 500gb seagate drives mirrored. I would have made it bigger but there was a promotion when I bought it to get one of the drives free. Running mirrored means that I know my family photos are safe (I take a regular backup to leave elsewhere too).

I need more space now but undecided between growing the current nas and going with synology or qnap next time. Those two sound good based on what I hear from other techies at work.

I had a bit of a nightmare recently with a friend's buffalo linkstation (lsvl). For some reason he had to upgrade the firmware but it went wrong and it couldn't be started up, I spent days reading about how to make them work and ended up having to break the case open connect the drive to a linux machine, back-up the data manually before rebuilding the partition structure on the drive and restoring the firmware onto it. I wouldn't go for one of those.

 

[websavages]

Kingdave,

I was having the same dilemma a couple of months ago. Do I expand my current solution or buy an extra nas. I opted to get an extra nas (synology in my case) and redeployed the original nas box as storage for the caching service.

Not the cheapest solution but it made sense in my case.

Cheers ws

 

[markjay]

I agree that it is too easy to 'brick' a Buffalo NAS.

QNAP and Synology work well.

 

[Sp!ke]

My brother in law had a fancy NAS box with 5 drives configured with Raid 5 (striped with parity). It cost rather a lot of money but his data was safe or so he thought.

The cleaner accidentally tugged the mains cable with the hoover pulling the NAS box off the shelf onto the floor. The shock killed all 5 disks and he lost every photo he had taken for the last 10 years including all the pictures of his children growing up.

I can't stress the importance of backing up photo's to the cloud somewhere in addition to having local copies.

As for what NAS to get, I would google NAS security issues before making up your mind - especially if you intend to allow web access as the security on some of these is next to useless.

Have a look at SHODAN - Computer Search Engine (you can register for free) and you can search for all sorts of interesting http headers from traffic light cameras to power station control panels ... all sorts. Anyway, one of the things you can search for is the HTTP headers of NAS boxes. You can narrow your field of search down to a country or even a city and even key words of files contained within the NAS itself. there are tens of thousands on NAS boxes in London alone that people think they have secured by bolting the front door with a password but the back door is left wide open and all of their private files are openly advertised to the world. What I am saying here is be very careful if you put your NAS in your DMZ and even if you don't deliberately make it available online, don't assume that your Routers firewall is adequately shielding your internal network. Some routers have no fix or patch that solve the issue and frankly they should be consigned to the bin.

Here is one of many interesting articles highlighting the router issue.

Asus, Linksys router exploits tell us home networking is the vulnerability story of 2014 | PCWorld

 

[danch]

Seriously advising to backup to the cloud ?

I have over 15000 photos & I gain an average of 1000 a year, those raid discs could be recovered via a specialist, best way is to have a NAS but also backup pictures monthly To another drive to be safe.

Cloud is still early days & as we have seen things are not safe even in the cloud.

 

[Doodle]

My brother in law had a fancy NAS box with 5 drives configured with Raid 5 (striped with parity). It cost rather a lot of money but his data was safe or so he thought.

The cleaner accidentally tugged the mains cable with the hoover pulling the NAS box off the shelf onto the floor. The shock killed all 5 disks and he lost every photo he had taken for the last 10 years including all the pictures of his children growing up.

It's amazing how often DR contingency fails to take into account base level brute force and ignorance.

This was the problem with the VF outage in early 2011...while there was redundancy and failovers built into the centre, nobody had accounted for the local pikeys crashing a Transit van through the wall of the building and ripping a load of racked equipment out.

 

[Sp!ke]

Unless you are backing up naked selfies to the cloud, whats the problem with having your photo's stored there, especially if protected by two factor authentication as is now being offered?

 

[Dryce]

Unless you are backing up naked selfies to the cloud, whats the problem with having your photo's stored there, especially if protected by two factor authentication as is now being offered?

USB 3.0 portable drives are ubiquitiously cheap and rather faster.

There are good reasons to use the remote storage over internet and not so good reasons.

If I wanted to put my archive up on a cloud service over my 20Mbit/s connection it would take several weeks. If I wanted to then recover it then it would take just over a week.

There are things that a cloud type of service is good for and depending on circumstances and requirements - not so good for.

 

[wongl]

I use a Drobo NAS and set it up so that one of my folder is synced to Copy.com (a Dropbox competitor). The advantage of the Drobo is that it does not force you to use the same size drive in a RAID configuration, thus allowing the user to upgrade one drive at a time. Also it contains a small 'battery' which allows it to flush its cache on to the drives in the event of a power cut.

The disadvantage is that the Drobo uses a proprietary RAID protocol which means that should the NAS fail, the drives can only be read by another Drobo.

 

[Sp!ke]

one thing to be aware of is that copy.com or any other dropbox type affair should not be relied upon as a backup.

I say this as there is no versioning so if you screw up, you cannot go back to an ealier version.

A great example of why you *need* versioning is Cryptolocker. Lets say you fall foul of cryptolocker and it encrypts all your files... what happens next? Well... your copy.com folder or your dropbox folder becomes encrypted and before you know it, the folder has replicated to your remote copy.com files or your remote dropbox files and has encrypted all those too. Since you have no versioning you can kiss goodbye to your data.

Another point to note is that cryptolocker encrypts files on any mapped drive. So if you've mapped your NAS drive as E or whatever, it will encrypt its entire contents as well including your backup files. Better to set it up as a network place as these (currently) aren't targeted by Cryptolocker.

 

[Sp!ke]

If I wanted to put my archive up on a cloud service over my 20Mbit/s connection it would take several weeks. If I wanted to then recover it then it would take just over a week.

Your restore time will be infinite if your house floods, you have a fire or get burgled and your USB drive and all your computers are under 6 inches of water, have been burnt to a crisp or have been stolen.

You should have offsite backups and the simplest most fool proof means of doing that is to use a cloud service in one shape or another.