Ey up!

I’m considering setting up a NAS solution at home as I don’t like having everything on the laptop due to the PITA that is Windows loading times, and also for the risk of having the laptop go kapoot wiping all my music and family photos.

Ideally it would be a 2-disk solution with automatic back-up between the two. Android and Apple apps for access would be good too, as would spotify and iTunes support.

It all seems like a bit of an expensive minefield. I’d like to do it on as much of a shoestring as possible.

Any of the STW resident IT nerdsgurus got any advice?

Kevin

I’d say a Synology is by far the best recommendation and comes highly recommended on here. I love mine.

The only issue you’ll have is Spotify integration as not many of them do it.

Thanks – that’s the one I had been eyeing up. Gets reasonably expensive though. I’d need at least 2x2Tb, probably 2x3Tb for futureproofing…

Are there any cheaper outlets, or is it just the usual of Amazon and eBuyer?

Amazon and ebuyer are the best really.

They are quite expensive but the OS on the Synology units is well worth it, one of the few bits of tech I’ve bought and not once thought of selling.

To make it cheaper I’ve got a single disk one at home with a USB backup drive. Might save a few pennies.

Synology devices are pretty good and the DSM s/w they run is great.

I bought myself a cheap HP N54L microserver (£80 after a cashback deal at the time) and installed xpenology on it (which is basically the Synology DSM). Bung in 2x2Tb drives and I’ve got a cheap NAS.

Oh, I never thought of using a USB drive as the backup to the NAS. Does it do the backup automatically, or is it just a case of plugging in the usb drive every few months and manually copying stuff over?

Ideally it would be a 2-disk solution with automatic back-up between the two. Android and Apple apps for access would be good too, as would spotify and iTunes support.

It’s worth bearing in mind that most two disk solutions will use RAID1, to ‘backup’ between the two. This is not a backup. What this does read and write to both disk simultaneously, meaning should one disk fail then the other retains a copy of your data. This not not a backup, it’s data redundancy. Should you, a family member, or anything malicious delete a file from the NAS you cannot simply restore it, and thus it is not a backup.

You may have already know this, I don’t know, but I think it is a point worth clarifying on. A real backup should be off-site, too.

Thanks Daniel – I hadn’t quite made the distinction between backup and redundancy, so that’s very useful. The more I think about it the more I reckon that the USB drive might be the way to go (for backup of the NAS) – at least then the USB drive can be stored somewhere different.

Glad it helped! 😀

If you’re after doing it on a shoestring, get yourself an old PC, put a couple of discs in it and install a copy of NAS4Free on it (Formerly FreeNAS). There’s lots of documentation out there about why the ZFS file system is one of the best options for long term backups.

There is a steep learning curve, and it’s well worth doing a fair bit of research, but there’s plenty of XP machines going in the skip at the moment…

Ive just gone the old winxp box route..but installed a full copy of Ubuntu 1404 on it. Its running on test at moment before I start shifting data on to it. Easy enough to vnc into it from another machine to set new stuff up. Xbmc plays nice enough with it, don’t use spotify or itunes though, just google music.

Will be setting up shares for each family member, possibly using it as somewhere my in laws can remotely back up stuff too…but haven’t thought that through yet.

Not sure all these home brew machine swill offer the iTunes sharing, iOS and android apps etc that the Synology does.

Might be money wasted if it doesn’t tick the boxes you need.

http://m.wdc.com/en/product/1200

Got one of these. Windows access by network and cloud. Apps available etc. Maybe not shoestring but not mega money.

Oh a homebrew set up will be more faffing than an out of box set up I’m sure…..but it’s cost me nothing (apart from 6tb of hd) for something that should be super flexible…..and I hate chucking stuff out

My homebrew setup runs the same Synology software as the pukka kit so no probs there 🙂

Because Synology base their software upon open source with a GPL licence then they’re required to publish the source code of their derivative works. There’s an internet project to build their software and make it available for bog standard PC hardware, free.

http://xpenology.com/forum/index.php

This is geek only ground however, you can buy a Synology chassis for just over £100 so that’s the way to go for the majority IMO.

I was looking a while back and almost got a Zyxel one. It was one of the cheaper ones, but gets good reviews and the user interface gets a good write-up too.

Ended up realising it wasn’t really a priority at the moment with all the house stuff that needs doing. But will definitely consider getting one in the next year or so.

Stora here – mirrored 1tb disks. V.basic but it has worked for 18months to store all types of media

I second nas4free and ZFS is a very resilient file system too.

It’s not only cheaper and more satisfying making your own server but it’s more flexible. Also if there is a failure of any component it’ll be easier to replace than an out of the box NAS. I love the fact I can remotely turn it on with my phone which I guess you can with out of the box solutions but it can easily be taken for granted when the NAS is far out of reach, like in another country!

The HDDs are the most expensive part of any nas though. Got 6 x 4TBs plus one 120GB ssd for the OS which needs nothing like that capacity but I had the ssd lying around dormant. I did buy a dedicated case, psu, mobo and one extra sata card but you could decrease the cost by getting an old computer and chucking in some better value hdds. Obviously the largest capacity hdds will cost more but you may not need that much. Bear in mind you’ll need to consider redundancy in case of hdd failure so make sure your case can hold the number of hdds you need to install.