Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler External Hard Drive Rec's

I went with Synology. The reason was that they have one of the best user interface out there.

But sadly, to get a synology, you have to pay for it. I have had a USB and a Firewire hooked up drive. but the fatal flaw with them is:

1. they are only hooked up to one machine and only work when they are hooked up.
2. they tend to be proprietary in the way they work that locks you into their solution
3. was a single point of failure as there was no redundancy within it's solution.
4. look at point #1 again.

The reason I went NAS was that it's just there. it allows for me to forget it was there and automate a backup function so it worked without me needing to remember to do something. I wanted something that will give me the solution beyond just what I needed now but could also do the level that I could grow into. I wanted stability and expandability that was not tied into a propriety package.

if I was going with a USB solution, I WOULD NOT get a plug in drive case.. buy something like this:

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=14_679&item_id=068681

what do you need a case for.. it's just extra packaging. You need a dock that a hard drive plugs into to put the data onto the drive. full stop.

But it only works when you remember to back up your data, and there is ZERO drive redundancy. it's just a point in time backup that is a second copy.

Once you put in a Mirror (RAID 1) then when you copy to that drive, the backup is sort of backed up to cover you for disk failure. But that only covers the side of hardware fault. If you need to hook up a drive to backup, then you still have the human error of forgetfullness to deal with. It its always there, then you can automate so that your computer wakes up by itself and backs up without you needing to do anything.

Just something to think about.

Thanks Guys!

Matt - I was following you, up till the last paragraph. I am a computer idiot.

I am sold on the NAS solution however. I just need to figure out which magic box to buy. I think 4T is about all I need.

I work from both my office PC and my laptop. Having a networked drive is very handy, when it works anyway. I use my laptop for tuning vehicles, calibrating my video equipment and other things that don't tie me to the office.

The beauty of most NAS solutions are that they BOX is independent to the choice of the drives you put in that box. So, you make the choice of the size of NAS by two factors.. How many drives you want to put into the unit, and how big those drives are.

A single drive is just the size of the drive minus any overhead for the NAS O/S.

But what if you want larger and don't want to buy a really big capacity drive. Then you get into RAID. (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) What this can do for you is either expand the capacity of the drives, give you drive failure redundancy or both. Depending on how many drives you have, RAID can give you many options.

With 2 drives, you have either RAID 0 or 1.

Raid 0 is striping where part of files are written to one drive and another part to the other. You get the capacity of both drives added together and a bump in drive performance, but with a risk. if either of the drives dies you loose everything as there is NO fault tolerance.

Raid 1 is drive mirroring. Where whatever is written to the first drive is automatically done on the second. You only have the capacity of a single drive, but if one of the drives fails (hardware failure) you don't loose any data. In such a case you can replace the failed drive and the RAID will re-copy all the data onto the new drive to restore the fault protection. You can use this method to also increase the size of your drives buy replacing one of you drives with a larger new drive and having it rebuild then replace the other.

If you have 3 or more drives then you can go RAID 5, that takes the idea of raid 0, but adds in fault tolerance buy writing a parity block. In raid 5 your capacity is (n-1) where n is the number of disks you have.. so for example I have a 4 disk raid 5 with 3tb drives. So I have (4-1)x3tb=9tb of drive space. If one of the 4 drives fails (hardware) the parity block can be used to figure out missing data from the failed disk.

The only thing that you must remember is that RAID fault tolerance only covers you for hardware faults. If you have a RAID 1 and you delete a file off your NAS, it would delete the files off both drives. If your computer barfs while writing to the NAS and the files is written corrupted, then it would be written corrupted to both drives. RAID is not the same as duplicate backups. So dont think of a RAID solution as well I have a backup of that as I have two drives in my NAS.

I have 3 NAS units. One NAS is my main drive where I store all my Media, Documents, Photo's, CD Rips... Then the other two NAS units backup the really important stuff that is on the first NAS. As the data is really stored in 3 different places, I have backups. Also, each of the NAS units have fault tolerance so the data saves on them has hardware failure protection as well.

I also have a SATA dock hooked up to the first nas where I will periodically backup all my important data for archive and take it off site (to my parents house) so that just in case of a fire/fload/breakin my important data is protected.

I looked at it as the cost of trying to re-produce my work would be multiple factors more expensive than the cost of hardware that went into this solution. But it's been bought over a 3-4 year period.

Wow, thanks! Great explanation! I have a 2T hard drive on the main computer. I have less than 1T on it now. But, I do not mess with any HD videos, yet. I suspect I may get into that eventually.

You have 3 NAS boxes? Are they for just personal stuff, or do you run a business out of your home too? Just curious.

I really just use them for personal stuff.

I have close to 1.3tb of music files (CD rip in Flac) I have quite a bit of movies and PVR tv shows that I watch.

I also store all my DSLR camera raw files along with the processing images, .PS files etc..

My first NAS was a cheep Dlink unit (that I still have but don't use). it was junk and learnt me that you get what you pay for. You can make your own NAS pretty easily but you sort of need to know what you are doing and get ZERO support.

I went with Snyology as the forum was pretty good. The user interface was the best out there and it's geared towards a higher end home user.

I started off with a 2bay, then got a second 2bay then this past year picked up the 4bay.