[Jim]

been covered a few times I know but all the threads are quite old.
I am looking at getting a NAS mainly for media streaming at home but also to store all files and with drive failure protection (RAID1?)
Probably will be left on 24/7
Any recomendation or good knowledge out there.
Thinking probably need 2TB of storgae (So 2x 2TB drives on RAID1), got some 1TB spinpoint F1's but quite old so will probably upgrade.
Budget, would like to be as cheap as possible but obviously not at the expense of usabilty or reliability!
Ta

[dave]

Sorry

[slackline]

Western Digital Red Drives are designed for RAID.

There are two versions, standard and "pro" the later costing a bit more.

I got 2 x 3Tb for my desktop server and when buying looked at the price/Gb so I could see what was the best value for money, just done this for you for four popular UK sellers...

Absolute Price...


Price/Gb


That said eBuyer have a Twin Pack of 4Tb for £260.80 which works out at £32.60/Gb and is only fractionally more than the 3Tb price/Gb.


I've no recommendations on NAS's only ever owned one and replaced it with a Raspberry Pi (if I stream/cast to my Chromecasts its from my desktop server which is on anyway).  Something you might want to consider is the CPU and whether or not you will want to transcode on the fly (I've never really seen much point since I rip my own DVDs to formats that I know won't need transcoding, if you download torrents you could transcode them before putting them on the NAS to avoid the need to transcode).

[Jim]

Great stuff, cheers Slackline.
A few miss labeled axis with Gb instead of TB but I'll let you off.
Think I will probably need some transcoded on the fly so will probably have to invest in a NAS with a half decent CPU.
Been using my desktop as a server for a while now but part of the long term plan is to phase out the desktop hence going to a NAS

[slackline]

Glad you saw beyond my glaringly obvious mistakes. 

[Johnny Brown]

Any recent advice on this? Both my laptop and desktop are stuttering due to full system drives, need to rejig the whole setup.

How do you do the wired connection to the desktop? I want a fast connection (ideally SATA speed) for editing photos etc. 

[Paul B]

Any recent advice on this? Both my laptop and desktop are stuttering due to full system drives, need to rejig the whole setup.

How do you do the wired connection to the desktop? I want a fast connection (ideally SATA speed) for editing photos etc.

NAS wired to (decent) router, desktop wired to (decent) router. My NAS (the readyNAS duo v1) would be too slow for this. Are cloud options not more cost-effective (less hassle) these days?

Are you on Creative Cloud?

[Johnny Brown]

How does that compare speedwise?

Not interested in cloud due to speed, unless it's a dropbox-mirroring-harddrive option. I'm also not interested in streaming music or video, so I could probably make do with a simple RAID box.

[unclesomebody]

I've got a QNAP TS453 Pro with 9Tb and a raid array across 3 drives. If you connect it via a gigabit router and your desktop has a gigabit NIC then you should be fine.

QNAP was expensive compared to the DIY options which involve buying a desktop and turning it into a NAS. I couldn't be bothered with all the faff and the inevitable minor niggles that it would come with. The QNAP has been great so far and it's connected to my TV so I can run KODI etc.

The biggest difficulty in getting it set up is accepting you need to spend the money!

[slackline]

None of this is likely to be useful as I've zero knowledge about NAS's these days *

How does that compare speedwise?

Depends what you're comparing it to.

SATA III is upto 6Gbits (600Mb/s), you'll be hard pushed to get this from a NAS as the bottle neck will (likely) be your ethernet speed, which, depending on your router is probably using 100BASE-TX which gives transfer of upto 100Mb/s, so to utilise SATAIII you need a router that uses 1000BASE-TX which gives transfer of around 1000Mb/s (see here).

You may not have SATA III in your desktop/laptop though, SATAII goes upto 300Mb/s, SATAI 100Mb/s (see here).

Which means ensuring the NAS you get has the appropriate ethernet adapter and that your router and your PC are all the same too (the PC may be problematic as its often welded to the Motherboard).  Still might experience lags in loading though, hard to say.

Not interested in cloud due to speed, unless it's a dropbox-mirroring-harddrive option. I'm also not interested in streaming music or video, so I could probably make do with a simple RAID box.

What about archiving off old stuff you are highly unlikely to touch to free up space on your current systems?  If there are pictures > X years old that you are highly unlikely to touch you could buy two external USB drives and fill the up.  Keep one at home should you wish to do anything and give the other to a relative to stick in a cupboard somewhere (i.e. off-site backup should your house burn down and you lose your drive).

I think tomtom has used some of the cloud mirroring services but is probably busy at the moment (his last thoughts are here).


* I ditched my ReadyNAS DUO (v1 the same as Paul B's) and just use a Raspberry Pi2 with 3 x USB drives attached for backup of music/videos/pictures to one each.  It then acts as a music streaming service (plus Wiki hosting, DNS with adblocking).

[Johnny Brown]

BOOM, raised Unc from his lurking!

Sounds good, I'll check it out.

Slackers, speedwise I don't want a speed drop from SATA basically. I need all photos accessible so cloud archiving isn't an option. Currently I even keep recent shots on the SSD to speed things up, moving them to the main HD once basic edits done.

The other option I guess is just a big desktop upgrade with a couple of big data drives in it. Only problem is my current box (that you built 2009? Unc) is dual boot with XP running my drum scanner on a SCSI card. I really don't want two desktop boxes, but I'm guessing a modern PC won't do this. Mac pro dustbin sat on top is one option, any PCs along these lines?

Don't mind dropping some £££s if it's all good for the next five years plus.

[Paul B]

New desktop doesn't fix the off-site conundrum though. I'd be looking for something with cloud mirroring built in. I was thinking along the lines of a mirroring type system rather than remote working.

How does Creative Cloud work? It's designed for this kind of thing surely (shirley).

[Johnny Brown]

Not really arsed about off-site access. Currently I've got a selects LR catalogue on the laptop with all the starred photos from my main archive hosted as smart previews. Works fine.

I'll look into Creative cloud but judging from their update 'helper' program I'm imagining it'll be shite.

[Paul B]

I wasn't talking about off-site access, more off-site backup i.e. the house burns down.

[butters]

I would be surprised if a 2009 era mobo NIC wasn't running at Gb speed but I could be wrong but if it isn't then a new NIC can be had for a couple of fuck alls (not sure what the exact rate is) but the important bit is that both the desktop and the NAS are wired as that would be the obvious bottleneck if one or both were connecting via wireless. As for speed drop  - I don't think it is going to be that noticeable judging by the very quick test I have just done by opening a folder of 51 pics (only about 1Mb apiece average though) - the most likely factor for any slowness here are going to be a lack of RAM.

[Johnny Brown]

My large format drum scans average about 350Mb each.

[Jim]

I think NAS will be noticeably slower than SATA II/III SSD.
why not buy a big SSD and then an even bigger HDD and just but them in your desktop - possible buy a SATA III header depending on what your currently running (Probably SATA1.5 or II)

[Johnny Brown]

Yeah, that's the simplest. Motherboard is old now though, I don't want to sink money into a system I'll need to upgrade anyway. Does anyone build pcs anymore?

[slackline]

Does anyone build pcs anymore?

I'll be building my own when I've put enough cash buy to upgrade CPU/Motherboard/RAM, the SSD/HDs/PSU I have are all perfectly functional as is the case its housed in.

Not necessarily the cheapest option but I'd rather not waste electronic hardware needlessly.

EDIT : I also built the current incarnation of my desktop/server, but that was seven years ago.

[butters]

Built the desktop that I am currently using. As Slackers said it's probably not the cheapest way of doing it but I prefer to do so because I get to put what hardware I want into it then.   

[Johnny Brown]

Definitely an option (Unc built this one, I've since upgraded bits), although I wonder what the newest motherboard is that will run a SCSI card and XP?

[slackline]

If you can sort the SCSI connection you might be able to use a Virtual Machine (e.g. VirtualBox) to run XP and avoid having to dual boot your system/worry about it booting XP.

[Jim]

be easy enough to run a dual boot with XP as Slackers mentioned above, the main problem will be driver compatibility ie backwards compatability with XP.
If you go down the new hard drive route, it won't be wasted money as you can always transfer to a new machine if/when you decide to get a new machine

[dave]

JB if your current box runs the Scanmates fine then just suck it up and dedicate that box as a scanning box. Get a KVM switch and stick the box under the desk, then while that scanner is running you can be doing other shit on your proper computer.

[Jim]

think I've finally decided on my NAS setup now.
Probably be getting:
QNAP TS-251 NAS £190ish
2x 3TB western digital RED 2x£93ish
nearly £400 but will be buying it bit by bit to spread the cost