In this post I'll share few basic tips for all newbies looking out to get into the world of NASes for the first time. I'd be more than grateful if I had an opportunity to get few basic tips what to observe when buying an NAS for the first time. So just to make things clear now - this is a newbie oriented post, but who knows maybe some experienced user might find it useful too. Also information presented here are intended for home users mostly, but can be useful for small and home offices (SoHo) too. Most of you probably heard of NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems and why are they so handy. When I for the first time decided to buy NAS I was doing it with two main objectives - for DATA BACKUP and MEDIA STREAMING. Maybe the second option was even more important to me.
Nowadays this decision isn't that important anymore (you'll soon read why not) as they can be simultaneously used for both purposes. But first you have to understand what NAS actually is - it is a small sized embedded computer based on Linux operating system with almost all the features as any usual desktop or portable computer, just on a smaller scale. As they are specialized devices at SoHo level they don't have that much CPU (processing) power, but more than enough to take care of various backup and multimedia tasks. And when I say multimedia it means nowadays NASes come filled in with a lot of value added features like presenting your photos, movies, running VPN servers, surveillance, web server, cloud storage, WebDAV, CalDAV, sharing printers (Google Cloud Print support included), transcoding and a lot more.
When I take a look back my first NAS was made by company named Promise which is quite known for it's RAID cards, which actually was a quite fair reason for me to think their NAS can't be a wrong decision. And it was working (and still is) just fine, but after some time I started to explore more as it wasn't so rich filled with features. Since my network player supported only
CIFS/
SAMBA (natively Windows oriented protocol) sharing and I had old tube TV it was quite OK regarding media streaming, but as new HD quality formats got widely spread I found out how CIFS/SAMBA just wasn't enough as a lot of stuttering seemed to occur. Then I got new network player which had support for
NFS (natively Linux oriented protocol) file sharing via custom firmware and my Promise NAS just got too slow as it couldn't support it. The point I want to make here is that both network player and NAS are Linux based devices, therefore there is no need for them to use CIFS/SAMBA protocol whilst communicating to each other as they both can do much better using native NFS protocol. As a result of this comes my first recommendation/tip to you:
- TRY TO SEEK OUT FOR NAS WHICH SUPPORTS NFS PROTOCOL (MOST OF THEM DO)
Next main purpose of NAS of course is an easy way to accomplish network data storage and collaboration even between different operating systems, but unless you're going for single bay NAS, and you need it for for BACKUP (media streaming not excluded), even you might not have only important files on it. Starting from 2-bay NAS systems they all should provide support for RAID 0 and RAID 1. What this basically means is that you can configure NAS to go for security (RAID 1) or speed (RAID 0). Since there is always a network speed limit (nowadays most SoHo users have 1Gbit/s networks) unless you have at least 4 HDD's going for speed is not a very good idea, regarding the fact if one HDD fails you will loose all data. Therefore my next recommendation/tip to you is:
- DON'T GO FOR SPEED (RAID 0) UNLESS YOU HAVE AT LEAST 4 HDDs IN YOUR NAS
Also when talking about NAS a great importance is what type of HDDs you use in it. It is highly advised NOT to use desktop HDD in such systems due to their construction. Server HDDs are highly advisable, but they are way too expensive unless you do have business oriented NAS. Recently WD introduced Red series of its HDDs which are made specially for use in NASes and are just a bit more expensive than regular desktop HDDs. It can be said that they're actually sort of hybrid between desktop and server HDDs. Server HDDs are made to work 24/7 (in another words they're not made to be switched on and off several times in a day) and do produce larger amount of heat than desktop HDDs. But if you NAS will be placed in your home or in your work environment you'll probably want it to be as quiet as possible. On the other had you'll want a quiet HDD and not the server one, even more today you can buy 5,900rpm HDDs which are declared for multimedia storage. Another secret behind NOT USING desktop HDDs lies in TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) - you can read more about it
here. Generally all of new NASes have power management so they probably will put your disks to hibernate if they're not used for certain amount of time to save power and/or reduce noise. This option can be deactivated but I found it to be very useful. Based on this I'm giving you my next recommendation/tip:
- USE NAS (better) OR SERVER DEDICATED HDDs OVER REGULAR DESKTOP HDDs
Also regarding to my previous recommendation/tip do inform yourself about fan size in NAS you're interested in with a general rule - bigger fan higher air flow, but more importantly LESS NOISE! So my next recommendation/tip is:
- GO FOR NAS WITH AT LEAST 80x80mm OR 92x92mm FANS
And finally do take into account how many (if any) additional USB 2.0/3.0 or even eSATA ports, card readers and similar external ports does certain NAS have. Even you might not think so at the moment, they can come in very handy and enable you to turn your regular external HDD enclosures or printers (even without network interfaces) into network enabled devices by attaching them to your NAS. Some manufacturers like Synology officially do not support attaching USB hubs to their NASes, but it can be done and is working without any problems allowing you to attach even more external storage devices, printers or IP cameras (remember surveillance option I've mentioned before).
- MAKE SURE YOUR NAS PRODUCT HAS WIDE SPREAD USER COMMUNITY AND SUPPORT AND HAS FEATURES YOU NEED
I'm not keen to recommending anything if I haven't tried all of it, but from my personal experience I would recommend Synology NAS solutions. There are other manufacturers too like QNAP, Netgear, Seagate, WD and many more, but even some very sound names are in the game I prefer ones dedicated just to manufacturing NASes.
These are general recommendations/tips which should help you assembling your NAS, but you might also have some specific requirements, so I suggest you to check every single NAS manufacturer and product to make sure it will provide you with the feature you need.
If you'd like to try an alternative approach and configure your own NAS you might want to
read this post.
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