NAS Drives

[Cameron Ziafat]

Hi guys

We're all using macbooks in the office, and while they are great machines, they don't have the biggest hard drives (because they are SSD I guess). We use google drive for everything at the moment, but while that makes sure all of our data is accessible anywhere and safe, it still fills up our hard drives as it syncs. As our client base grows so does our folder size and a couple of our developers only have a few GB left.

Yesterday I decided to have a look at NAS drives and other options. It seems pretty complicated and I'm unsure what exactly we need. I'd think 2TB would do fine. We also need remote access including from iOS - anyone have any experience with NAS drives that could offer me some advice?

Cheers

 

[Squantrill]

I use the seagate black armour in the office it works great supporting samba and NFS (mac supports both) basically a NAS (Network Attached Storage) is usually a medium sized raid set of disks with basic operating system enough to store your files and give some form of authentication for users. So there is not a great deal of difference with hardware except the features and extras. Synergy are well known and respected as are qnap which also offers offline storage linked to the NAS for redundant backups. It really does depend what you want, it can be as simple as two disks raid 1 and a copy of free nas on an old pc in the corner or state of the art SAN.

What you could do is look at a nas big enough for the data you have now and wat space you need in the future (account for 3 years) then get a backblaze account for backups. You then have the data storage you need and the offsite backups for emergencies, make sure you get at least raid5 and buy a few spare disks of the same type and size for replacing when they break. if you need any more information please just ask ill try to help where I can Good luck..

 

[pcproblems]

I use a Buffalo Linkstation that both my wife and I can access whilst we're in the office. It just sits there plugged into a spare ethernet port on the router. I can access the control panel for it via the browser but never need to do so.

I've got it as a mapped drive on both of our computers and we use it as we would any other HD. I've never had the need to access it remotely although I believe that I would just need to set it up and access it via buffalonas dot com

It isn't set up as a raid array as it's an older single disk box.

 

[ExplorerBDM]

I also use Buffalo LinkStation, but I have to say that it does some weird, inexplicable things. For instance, presenting a file with no name, despite several attempts to name it (and seeing it named correctly when accessing from another device) and failing in the last second of a long file download, claiming that the file was either being accessed or already existed (falsely in both cases). I once lost access to the device altogether and had to risk losing all of the data on it by performing a firmware update... fortunately to firmware update fixed it, with no loss of data... but I count myself lucky on that score. In short, good for home use, but I wouldn't use it for business. If it was used for business, I'd take regular back-ups and just resign yourself the various nuances of the operating system.

 

[Karimbo]

it will work if you have lots of excess media on your laptops you dont need that you can just archive onto the nas (I prefer a window home server over a NAS as you can do other cool network activities on it).

But for the casual user your mailboxes, music collection, software would be the bulk of your data use and you may need these on a day to day basis.

SSD drives are cheap these days, if your laptop are out of warranty you might want to open it up and put a big drive in it.

 

[Cameron Ziafat]

Thanks very much for all the advice guys. I think I'll look into Synergy as they seem to have a good name

 

[ServiceByteUK]

Hi Cameron,

Recently I have tried the Synergy devices and found them pretty poor in all honesty. It could be a bad batch from suppliers but when I have switched my customers from Synergy NAS drives over to Seagate or Western Digital Devices they seem like them more and feedback I have had is that they function a lot better.

I spent 90% of my time installing NAS drives for customers and definitely won't be going back to Synergy devices.

James