MegaSack DRAW - 6pm Christmas Eve - LIVE on our YouTube Channel
Had a WD my book live for a couple of years and it was fine in an easy to use, just sat there working kind of way. It now seems to have stopped doing that. It'll work after a reset but stops connecting after a short while. It won't stay connected long enough to to do a hard reset and I can't seem to get new firmware onto it.
Just looking for something basic that I can send files to for back up and to read from various smart devices (TV, pi, etc). Tempted to just by a case and put the 2 Tb drive from the WD into it, assuming that isn't what has gone wrong.
what's cheap and works? Or what to look for as a good 2nd hand option on eBay?
There's a cheap Zyxel one that gets good reviews - called something like the NSA 325 v2.
I keep looking at getting one myself, but never getting round to it.
I am not sure that you can just take a hard drive out of one NAS, pop it in another and it'll work. Might be wrong, but seem to remember reading that this isn't the case.
Having used a whole variety of NAS boxes & server-based file sharing/storage malarkies over the years, I am hugely impressed with the Synology box I've now had for a year or so. 100% reliable, super simple to set up and maintain, and excellent support from the vendor and 3rd party add-ons.
I'd go with Synology.
A NAS you can't trust is a liability.
Trusting any NAS box / computer / bike / woman* / etc, is a bad idea. With a NAS box especially, its the wrong approach.
*except mine of course
I have QNAP that I am very happy with - it sits there quietly serving up video to my TV, audio to my squeezeboxes, works as a time machine backup destination for my Mac and I'm just looking at setting it up as a CCTV recorder.
I think QNAP and Synology are generally regarded as the better options over the similar DLink, Zyxel, etc equivalents. I guess the test comes with ongoing support and future updates.
I think moving your current disk to a NAS will result in the NAS wanting to format it so you may need to work out a way to backup your data first.
Well it turns out the WD had a 3 year warranty and they are going to replace it. At least I'll get a new drive (hopefully). What do the cheap ones not do that these expensive one do? I really don't need bells and whistles.
Edit...Result! You can ignore the rest of this.
I've got 2 x Qnaps; an old 209 and a new 269.
1) They aren't cheap.
2) Qnap's support isn't great though the forums are! Check out the forums for their lamentable ability to fix some blaring holes in the linux build they use. Synology are much better at this.
3) They build in lots of little "features" in their linux build that stop you doing things though that's only an issue if you want to start tweaking things outside the UI,
Having said all that, they are really simple, and they pack in lots of features (which you may or may not need). They're basically mini web and applications servers.
RAID 1 - This will halve your available storage and will protect you if one of the disks goes bang in the NAS. If you look for a single disk NAS, this isn't and issue (you need at least 2 drives). The chances are that if you have Data on a source PC that you then back up to the NAS, you might decide it's OK to lose the NAS and still recover all your data from the PC. (It's a choice, and usually down to budget).
The best thing you can do is take a snapshot of the NAS data and move it "offsite" In the event of something catastrophic like a fire you can't rely on a NAS for "backup". If it's got all your family photos on use a portable drive or something similar and leave it somewhere. (not at the side of the road though 🙂 ).
