NAS Box Recommendation for my environment

zerok66 · Post by **zerok66** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 9:04 am

Hi Guys,

Been reading up on what raid boxes are avaialble and it seems the D-Link DNS-323 is a pretty decent choice. I have a stack of old SATA HDD's and so this could work well.

My home network is as follows:

Vista Home Premium PC - Acting as a Media Center
Apple iMac - Running both MacOS and Vista for office use
2 x Laptops
Xbox 360
PS3
Wii

What I would like is a NAS box to centrally store all of my media with raid so I have a safe reliable central store for all of my data. I am aiming to build a gigabit network at home, so GB LAN be good.

So far the D-Link ticks all the boxes - I just seem to recall reading something about not being able to stream media from this to my xbox 360? Is this right - or is there a work around (Map a drive on my Media Centre PC??)?

Not really interested in building my own NAS Server/PC. Although I always have components knocking about I am sick to deal of tending to PC's and just want a little box that runs silently, cool'ly & hickup free taking up as little space as possible.

Any alternative product recommendations welcome.

Thanks,

victorhortalives · Post by **victorhortalives** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:39 am

The Infrant Ready NAS NV+ is very easy to use and setup but might be too expensive now that Netgear has bought the company.

See : http://www.readynas.com/

If you can find a diskless version then it might well do what you want.

I have two of them and use one to back up the other. One has 4x 500GB in a modified RAID5, the other 4x 320GB.

cb95014 · Post by **cb95014** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:56 am

OK, I may get flamed, but I have moved away from RAID and now depend on replication for data protection.

The reason is that RAID protects (most of the time) only against disk failure, but a *much* more likely cause of data loss is *me* doing something stupid; I speak from painful personal experience...

Having independent copies of my data (preferably in different physical locations) greatly reduces the risk that one mistake will trash everything. The challenge is keeping copies synchronized, but there are some excellent HW and SW tools that make this problem fairly easy to solve.

I currently use a pair of QNAP TS-109 NAS systems with WD GP drives (completely passive and silent), SyncBack SE to replicate (with no deletions) from my various workstations to one of the TS-109s, and the internal QNAP mirroring utility to mirror every night from the primary TS-109 to the other. This gives me three independent copies of the data in three separate physical locations and has proven quite robust in the face of several "cockpit" errors. It was easy to set-up this configuration, and is also completely automatic.

The QNAP forums are full of people successfully streaming from the TS-109, so I know that works very well for your main objective. I have several colleagues also using the QNAP systems, and they are all very happy. FWIW, I also have a DNS-323, and after modding the fan I am happy with it for use as a 'public' data store for the network. The interface is pretty clunky, and it has a far more limited feature set than the QNAP systems. I have not tried streaming from the DNS-323 though, so I can't comment on its performance.

zerok66 · Post by **zerok66** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 3:45 pm

Wow... QNAP products certainly tick every single box under the sun!! The 209 looks like just the toy for the job. Possibly a bit overkill, but certainly some of the functions it offers I would take advantage of.

Thanks, would you mind if I dropped you a PM if I got one and got a little stuck? I would really like to build a bomb proof home network. I am hoping to create a mini home entertainment system (small budget as am renovating to sell on).

Thanks again

zerok66 · Post by **zerok66** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 4:00 pm

Right, looks like the TS-201 is the baby for me. I will take a page out of your book and try get some cheap and nasty device to do incremental replication backups to

cb95014 · Post by **cb95014** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 4:59 pm

zerok66 wrote:would you mind if I dropped you a PM if I got one and got a little stuck?

Sure, no problem.

Please be sure to check the QNAP forums for information on the TS-201 before ordering. That is an older model and may have limitations on firmware updates that you may not find acceptable in the future. Detailed comparison charts on current functionality are at:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6yd26m (TS-101/9) and http://preview.tinyurl.com/4krjxa (TS-201/9)

FWIW, I'd still recommend the single-drive TS-109. This being SPCR, the fan in the TS-201(/9) is definitely NOT silent...

zerok66 · Post by **zerok66** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 4:13 am

Thanks, gone with the 209 II and it will be mounted in a rack cab in my roof, so noise is not an issue.

Went with the 209 in the end for its Surveilence software which I think I would make use of in time

NAS Box Recommendation for my environment

NAS Box Recommendation for my environment

NAS box

A different approach to protecting data