Dad wants to upgrade his storage space. He currently has about 6gb on USB 3.0 drives of music movies and tv.

I’ve suggested a NAS setup, but don’t know enough about them to recommend one.

Mum likes the idea of being able to access all the photos for the past x years on her tablet, and watch the odd movie. Dad would listen to music, watch tv, and movies on his tablet, laptop and desktop. He may even consider a streaming music setup if he gets the NAS working.

Synology.

A 2-bay model will suffice with two 2Gb or 3Tb drives in it, one mirroring the other.

You can get a basic enclosure with about £100, drives about £80 each (for 3Tb).

That’s obviously quite an outlay but it would be a good setup. If that’s way outside of budget then you could buy a single drive, non-Synology NAS for around £100. Or go Synology but not bother with disk mirroring and have just one drive in it.

Synology – great product, it just works but the web based interface is excellent should you want to play about with things.

Silly question. Is there a need to mirror, or can they be as 6gb storage?

It could be 6TB, but then if one of the disks breaks you may lose all your family photos and your mum will cry a lot.

And nobody wants that to happen.

I had a buffalo linkstation, god for ages then it failed before xmas and I’ve just had to pay for data recovery. I wish Id backed it up and the replacement will be a dual disk affair defo as the disk it what failed.

Firstly, RAID is not a backup… so while mirroring can help in some situations, if you manage to corrupt your data, it’ll be corrupt on both. It does help protect against drive failures though.

Always back up to an external drive.

As for a NAS recommendation, I bought a Asustor 2 bay drive about a year ago, and it’s been faultless. Was cheaper than the equivalent Synology or Qnap, and is just as capable.

Why a NAS specifically? What enhancements is he looking for by upgrading?

If he just wants a media server he could run something like Plex on his PC/Mac.

If you want shared/cloud data then dropbox or google drive maybe? You get 15GB for free with google drive.

NAS can be a PITA. It’s basically a low power cut down computer with a load of limitations and poor admin capabilities, especially when you start using it as a server. Had various QNAP boxes in various configurations but now just use it as a TimeMachine backup and have a Mac mini as a server.

Also as has been said, have a proper think about your data and DR.

So what would be a better option for him, just a couple more internal drives?

What’s his current setup?

Does he really only have 6GB of data? That’s not much. Internal drives don’t really come much smaller than 1TB (1000GB) these days.

How important is his data? What does he do to back it up currently?

I just have my mac with a 1TB hybrid drive that I use as a server and desktop. Big enough for all my music/photos/etc. I do have a Lacie NAS that use purely as a TimeMachine local backup that contains two 2 TB disks in a RAID config (doesn’t really need to be RAID, it’s just what I had.) I also have a paid for Google Drive subscription (~10TB) which I use for cloud storage and also use with Arq to backup everything offsite.

Mum likes the idea of being able to access all the photos for the past x years on her tablet, and watch the odd movie. Dad would listen to music, watch tv, and movies on his tablet, laptop and desktop. He may even consider a streaming music setup if he gets the NAS working.

Do all of the above (except watch TV) on a Synology 213J, as he’s already got 6TB (TB or GB?) then maybe a 4 drive version would be preferable? I notice they’ve upped the specs this year so even the humble “j” models get dual core processors.

In synology naming conventions , the first number is the number of drives it can use, the second two digits are the model year and then there is a J – for the less powerful cheaper model, and a + for the more powerful more expensive model, with just a plain “215” or whatever for the middle of the range model.

I notice they’ve got a “Play” model as well which features more powerful dual core CPUs and hardware designed for video transcoding on the fly.

I’ve got Synology and would always recommend them to people. Their apps are excellent for mobile devices also.

Make sure you have some form of backup solution suitable too, losing all your photos, videos and documents would be rather annoying.

Funkynic, which asustor NAS did you get? The AS-202TE looks to be getting some great reviews, I’m almost out of space on 1.5Tb mirrored drives and have a 2Tb* limit on my (old) NAS

*I’m after a couple of 2TB drives to extend it for now, if anyone looking to upgrade there own 😉

It was TB of data, I checked tonight he has 4TB, not 6, he fancies another 6.

I suspect he will have amassed the complete collection of all music ever made between 1920 and 1950 this year if he keeps going.

I know where my obsessive side comes from.

Firstly, RAID is not a backup… so while mirroring can help in some situations, if you manage to corrupt your data, it’ll be corrupt on both. It does help protect against drive failures though.

This, this and always this.

RAID is just hard drive mirroring/striping/redundancy so whetever goes wrong on one goes wrong on the other wherever writing is concerned.

Backup should always be discreet and preferably off site if possible. No point having loads of backups only to lose everything in a fire.

I like the look of that ASUSTOR but can’t help noticing you could build a higher spec equivalent for less. Still, good for off the shelf convenience. And XBMC is always a win.

What’s his router like? Some have a usb socket, just plug in an external hard drive. Can’t be simpler than that.

He has 4TB of music and videos? Holy crap thats alot!

I use synolgy here, it works. I havent used a model that would hold 4Tb tho..

4TB of data and wants another 6 ? If that’s audio/video content then he won’t be able to watch/listen to it all so you do wonder what’s the point.

It will be expensive to store that much data and have a viable backup.

You don’t need a 2 bay one unless you have masses amount of data. I’ve just got a Synology DS114 which works brilliantly. For backup I’m going to get a portable USB drive that I can store somewhere outside of the house.

The DS114 can take up to 6tb hard drives, which equates to roughly 15000 albums, depending on the file size.

Edit: Oops, missed a few posts up there.

With a requirement for 10 Tb of storage..

A 2 bay NAS will give up to 12 Tb of storgage when configured as JBOD ( Just a Bunch Of Disks ) – there will be no fault tolerance.

A 4 bay NAS will allow you to put up to 24 Tb of data on it with current drives ( 4 * 6 Tb ). With, for example, RAID 5 you would get 18 Tb of storage with reasonable fault tolerance – a drive could fail and you would not lose data. 4 * 4Tb drives would get you 12Tb with RAID 5 and would be considerably cheaper than the 6 Tb drives, but if you needed more space in the future you’d be looking at replacing all the drives at once.

Synology have a good tool for visualising different drive combinations in a NAS here

With regards to brands – Qnap or Synology people swear by, some other brands people swear at.

squirrelking –
I like the look of that ASUSTOR but can’t help noticing you could build a higher spec equivalent for less. Still, good for off the shelf convenience

Like what? Interested in this, as the Asustor has a lot of good reviews, what alternative options would you suggest and do they come as well recomended?
(not a meant as a barbed comment)

No worries, I was looking at boards on Mini-ITX.com the other night and saw a few things that would come together on that budget. I think the less part is perhaps ambitious (buying new) but then again if you spent less on some components I dare say you could do it.

Gigabyte GA-E350N WIN8 Motherboard – £54 from Amazon
Thermaltake Element Q case – £51 from Amazon
Coolermaster Elite 500 PSU – £34 from Amazon
1gb DDR3 (double the ASUSTORE) ~£10

£149 total, cheapest 202T I found was £155

You could upgrade the case to a 6 bay Fractal Node 304 for £6 but then you would need an appropriate mainboard which would be about £80 more. Of course that’s not a significant saving but the expandability (especially in terms of RAM) could make it worthwhile.

Of course if you could still get Gen7 HP Proliant microservers at offer prices we wouldn’t be having this discussion 🙁

I’ve got the Zyxel NSA325 which takes 2 disks. Seems to work well and is reasonable value. I also use Logitech squeeze center for my music and this is built in which swayed me towards Zyxel.

I can highly recommend a NetApp 2520 (their entry level NAS) with 50TB of SAS disks (in raid 6), SATA if you’re on a budget.
Great if you have a 10Gb backplane.

£60 to you, sir.

60k that is.

As mentioned above the hp gen 8 microserver is worth a look especially at £167 from Misco. Needs disks added.

I’m still running the old n36l microserver with ubuntu, does everything i need, been rock solid for years. you might be able to pick em up cheap, then configure however you want.

Oops, my bad, the Gigabyte board has 4x SATA but only at 3GB/s. Not sure if it would make any odds though since the LAN would be the bottleneck. Nonetheless the Fractal case makes the basic (sensible future-proof build) come to £155, same price as the NAS and £12 less than the microserver (but to get the RAM up to equivalent capacities would probably make them equally priced).

FWIW I’d probably take the custom build as a media player combo and the Proliant as a back end server for streaming/firewall/whatever else duties.

I can highly recommend a NetApp 2520 (their entry level NAS) with 50TB of SAS disks (in raid 6), SATA if you’re on a budget.

Similarly I can recommend Nimble storage’s range, 8TB with 160gb flash at the bottom end to 450TB with 30TB flash storage at the top ranging from £12k to just under a million 😉

Similarly I can recommend Nimble storage’s range, 8TB with 160gb flash at the bottom end to 450TB with 30TB flash storage at the top ranging from £12k to just under a million

I’m in the market for a cheap NAS solution such as this, although 1 tier of SAS (50TB) will suffice… as long as the IOs are reasonable.
What can I get for around 50k?

I’m going to be boring and recommend Synology too. I have a 4 year old 4 bay unit and it’s great.

Raid will protect you from a single-drive failure, but a true back-up of that much data is going to cost you a packet. Without being too specific, I would ask how much of that 10TB could be “easily replaced” if it was lost? How much would he either bother replacing?

Ive got a QNAP ts212 and it does everything you want. Mine came from eBay, already set up with hard drives.

It’s easy to use, works easily with my smart TV, pc, tablet and phone. Plus ive got it set up so I can access it through the net/cloud when im away from home.

z1ppy – I bought the 202-TE and it’s been great so far… in fact it’s exceeded expectations as I hadn’t realised it had the Plex server app available for it, or that our TV had the Plex player.. it was a nice surprise to discover that one! Even my other half can find and watch films/TV on the box now!

It’s also got an hdmi port and runs xmbc (sp?), which came in handy when we went to the Lakes just before Christmas… could take the drive with us and plug it straight into the TV in the cottage.

Can’t actually remember how much it cost, but bought it with one of the WD NAS drives, thought it worth paying a little extra for the drive. I did compare it to building my own server, which am quite happy to do, along with hacking software about to get things working, but for the saving it just didn’t seem worth the hassle… plus the Asustor is running a cut down version of Linux, and the toolchain is available if I ever want to install anything else I fancy which isn’t on the app store. I do keep meaning to build get_iplayer for it, but never quite get round to sorting it out!

Heres a list of Plex supported NAS drives:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MfYoJkiwSqCXg8cm5-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc/edit

I gave up with NAS a few years ago as I had 3 (2xdisk, 1 controller) fail on me (yet I’ve never had an issue with single HDD inside my PC). Unless you want to replace you PC/workstation with a smaller device/less power etc. My PC is on all the time anyway, running Plex

I now backup to another internal drive for non crucial stuff (music/video) and all my photos to Google+ (unlimited storage for 2048×2048). Access your photos on your phone/tablet/pc anywhere. Uploaded 60GB over a few nights/days.
https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/4392268?hl=en-GB

Contemplating using google play for my music collection backup