Nas advice
 

I run a few macs and iPads and an iphone and a roku 3 at home. I want to be able to stream and view documents on the network. I don't care so much about access from outside the firewall. I do care a lot about security. I would like a box that can accommodate several hard drives with USB three. That lets me connect a few drives out and needs them available on the network. I noticed a lot of NAS devices that require hard drives. But I have the hard drives already. Is there a magic box I can plug into my router that will let me access several hard drives internally using USB three connections.

I use (and love) this one: http://www.netgear.com/business/prod...#tab-techspecs

Are your drives already inside external enclosures, and you don't want to open up the enclosures and place them inside a NAS? Have you considered a new router?

This Asus router is rock solid, and has two USB 3.0 ports built in:

https://www.asus.com/us/Networking/RTAC68U/

The performance of storage devices hanging off routers' USB ports is typically very poor compared to purpose-built NAS hardware though there are a few exceptions. Take note of the effect of hard drive formatting in the article referenced below:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wirel...owall=&start=1

I understand wanting to use your existing USB3 external drives, but as unmesh notes, this will significantly cut performance. The good news, though, is that you can easily pull the drives out of their enclosures and throw them into a NAS, preserving all existing data and eliminating the need to buy new drives.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Synology's products: they are reliable, have lots of features (media servers, backup support, etc.), and affordable.

Take a look at the Synology DiskStation DS411slim—it has slots for four drives, so you'd be able to add more space if you need it later.

Is this true? I'm pretty sure it's not on Synology NASes; it will reformat the hard drive during the installation process. There may be other devices that don't require this reformatting.

On Synology devices the preparation process also includes loading the OS onto the primary hard drive.

FWIW, Synology not only reformats every drive but loads the OS onto a partition on every internal drive to aid in recovery from a hard drive failure!

One thing the OP could consider is buying a single slot Synology such as the DS114, add a small internal hard drive to it to get it up and running and then attach his USB drives and share them on the network without reformatting. The NAS has only 2 USB 3.0 ports but Richard's use case might not suffer too much even if he has to use a USB 3.0 hub to expand the number of ports.

In the longer run, Scifience's advice to go with internal drives is very sound.

This is exactly what I needed, thank you so much. Thinking know about either the four bay or the one-bay Synology.

Just another vote for Synology. Good price, reliable, and the company is very responsive to support and feature requests.

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry8700c: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; HTC6525LVW Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.99 Mobile Safari/537.36)

I love my synology ds411j+. I've stuffed it with 4tb drives and will probably move to all 6tb once they reach mass market availability. It's super reliable and I can stream multiple hd streams over my Lan via the gigabit ethernet port.

Thanks for the correction—I didn't realize this as I'd purchased all new drives. Just assumed it would be the case as long as you didn't care about things like configuring a RAID array since external drives work fine without reformatting.

The Synology NAS can also act as a Time Capsule to backup your Macs, which is nice. The software isn't as rock solid as an Apple Time Capsule but it works pretty well most of the time.

+1 for Synology. I have the 213j running at home with a 3TB drive, one bay is still empty.

There's something to be said for building your own NAS with a small PC and software; you have to do more work, but you also have a lot more control, and a lot more ability to repair problems, and do more interesting things (deduplication, streaming, private cloud.)

Cost (eta: without drives) is comparable to a premium home NAS solution without drives, say around $300 for a 4-6 drive capable box (using various Linux versions, either general purpose or NAS-specific, or FreeNAS which is FreeBSD-based)... not hard if you know what what's involved with building your own PC.

There are several online forums intended for home server builders. Biggest downside, besides having to develop some expertise, is that even a system built to be particularly thrifty with electricity will probably a bit use more electricity than a purpose-build NAS device at least until you get into the serious professional stuff.

(My own setup is well beyond this, now, but I started with a cheapy Shuttle XPC system and two mirrored drives just over a decade ago.)

Synology can also function as a VPN server in reference to the other thread on hulu/Netflix/China blocking access.

Password based authentication in OpenVPN is very easy to set up through the GUI though it takes a little bit of command shell work to get client certificates working.