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.

NAS and USB 3? NAS is storage on a network. USB 3 is for connecting storage devices locally.

What sort of performance profile are you expecting? Are you doing high end editing work or just watching movies? If the latter, what size are they and what capacity do you need? What's your budget. You've given way too little information here for anyone to really give a good recommendation.

In terms of having the hard drives already, you're talking about a NAS and if you care about your data that means a RAID. As such, having the drives already doesn't mean much since you'd have to have them match to really use them. Consumer level SATA drives are cheap. Quite likely your best bet is a decent NAS with, say, two SATA drives in a mirrored setup. Just move your data onto it, wipe the old hard drives and sell them. It won't cost that much to have new drives. They'll have a longer mean time to failure than the drives you have. You could also spend a little more and get ones designed for NAS use.

Of course, all of this really doesn't give you much disaster recover, so a regular external USB drive as an offsite backup is probably your best bet.

There's also something to be said for not doing that. A decent RAID controller card is going to cost you as much as a commercial RAID device. Then you have to manage all of that software on an ongoing basis. It's a mess.

Dealing with linuxes (I'm using plural as there's not one) is a mess also. You have to deal with driver issues, front end issues, etc. There's a reason why it's free and next to nobody uses it.

I think I'll spring for a 4 or more bay Synology for the support and installed base. I'll spend around a grand for it and it will be a great relief.

Now, I back up various computers with external drives and even two external drives and Dropbox, but it's a kludge. And it doesn't serve me well because it doesn't let me really stream properly.

There are plenty of USB-to-network bridges (or routers capable of doing the same) and some of them work pretty well; the performance on the USB2 ones was underwhelming, but enough to keep up with most Wifi -- I haven't looked at USB3 ones to see what's out there but in principle USB3 is limited by the disk inside unless you go SSD.

Or an alternative to RAID that produces similar redundancy; Windows Home server, among other things, or ZFS/BTRFS in the open-source world all offer good ways of giving redundancy that aren't RAID.

Depends on the software used, and if you're not particularly performance sensitive (most home users aren't) "matching" just means "roughly similar capacities."

Sure, there's a learning curve involved -- potentially a steep one if you're non-technical -- and there's some time to physically set things up and to set up the software even if you know what you're doing.

There's absolutely NO reason to use a RAID controller card in a small home NAS system with 4 drives or fewer. Software RAID using the motherboard SATA will perform better, will be easier to manage in most cases, and no less reliable.

Even at 6-8 disks, it's questionable, but a 6-8 bay NAS system is getting rather pricier to begin with.

FreeNAS and similar products do a pretty good job of managing for you, and assuming the system runs at home and doesn't provide services out to the internet at large there's not a whole lot of updating that needs to happen.

Depends on how you look at it. There are differences in distribution (and for a non-technical person, a NAS-focused distribution is best) but it's hardly all that different, and they all have a community around them -- another benefit to using

At their guts, the command lines are all pretty similar, and most importantly -- unless you're working in a support role someplace they use more than one version, or out there apply to jobs -- you only need to know the distribution you actually use. If you build your home server with say, distro X (say, FreeNAS), differences between that and distros Y and Z (Ubuntu Server or CentOS) are absolutely irrelevant.

Linux (or FreeBSD for that matter) won't have any driver issues running on good commodity desktop hardware; if someone here were actually interested in doing this, looking at the various forums for home servers make VERY clear what hardware "just works" right out of the box (it isn't hard; unlike laptops, or high end graphics for gaming, the stuff you'd use in a home server are all very, very, very standard.)

While you'll find religious was regarding what GUI to use on Linux (or a similar thing; FreeNAS is BSD based) for a desktop, that's irrelevant for home server use. Something NAS-specific is as likely to have an all-text UI as a GUI, and tends to be narrowly focussed.

If I were building out a general Linux box for fileserver use, I wouldn't bother putting a GUI on it

*ROFLOL* Define "nobody."

If you mean "it's not very popular for desktop PCs or full-featured laptops," then calling that "nobody" is merely an exaggeration.

If you mean "nobody uses it for home NAS," well, ignoring companies using it under their proprietary skin, you're mistaken -- go look at some of the home server forums. Windows Home Server is probably about equally popular, but there's a sizeable number of people using Linux for exactly that.

If you mean nobody uses Linux for anything, well, you MUST be doing a leg pull.

Many large companies run their file services on Linux or BSD.

While some of the commercial home NAS boxes will use something commercial line QNX, an awful lot of them are just Linux or BSD under the skin. Ditto home routers. Ditto very LARGE network equipment.

Got an Android phone? That's Linux under the skin.
ChromeOS? Ditto (and a less heavily customized one at that, compared to Android.)

:rolleyes:

For what it's worth, my home NAS is an HP tower PC I got on sale at woot.com. I added two 3 TB drives, installed Ubuntu, and set up RAID. Works great. As a bonus, I can use it for other stuff too, since it's a regular computer.

The only real possible downside to that is that it probably uses more electricity and may make more noise than a small PC you might have built specifically as a NAS system (and those are only really downsides if you leave it on all the time, and have it somewhere where you care about the noise.)

OTOH, was probably cheaper, and being able to use it as a desktop and not just a NAS is definitely a nice bonus.

(Probably still uses less electricity than mine; even with a low-power CPU, 22 drives uses a lot of juice.)

What in the world do you store on 22 drives?

It's not quite as big as it sounds, since it's RAID6 and has sparing (and mixes 2TB and 3TB drives), and it's not by any means full (although it's about 3/4 full)

25 years of historical documents and source code
A LOT of photos and video I've taken,
A BIG media library
Full backups of my main laptop, my wife's laptop, and my travel laptop

My vote would be for QNAP. Similar to Synology, but slightly more professional grade. They also have a great support/dev community. QNAP also runs linux and allows users to run all kinds of applications.

As for content management, I've tested many, but found Plex to be (by far) the best (and it's free). It supports streaming to both iOS and Android devices. You can actually run it right on a QNAP NAS, but I run it on a separate debian server so I can support more users transcoding simultaneously.

How about QNAP? Much better build quality (aluminium instead of plastic), software wise exactly the same as Syno, price is also comparable. qnap.com

It's in the living room, and happens to be quieter than the smaller desktop PC it replaced. I don't care about the electricity; it probably costs a dollar or two a month to run. I should plug the Kill-a-watt into it to see how much power it actually draws.

It's plugged into the TV so I can watch media directly on the TV, and I donate extra computing cycles using GridRepublic to a couple of scientific endeavors.

I also use it for other server-y things...I play with nginx on it, use it as a torrents host, backup my photos and other stuff, whatever.

One of these days I"ll figure out how to configure it to email me if one of the drives experiences issues.

Sounds like electric rates may be cheaper there than here, although I have not checked on my more recent upgrades here have done for power efficiency and up til about 2009 when I got too many disks to do it I usually ran my server on my one-generation-back desktop (although it's kind of hard to point to exactly when between 1995 and the mid-2000s it went from being "my second desktop, which happens to run Linux and stays on all the time" and "my server.")

Newer machines have a pretty broad range of efficiency or inefficiency, but from the past few years most are good at idle; I'd expect it would be interesting try the Kill-a-Watt to see the idle vs. loaded power use.

Yeah, we've definitely got different perspectives on the electric cost. :D

Being able to do things like that is a very nice thing about having a full machine rather than a dedicated appliance.

Some dedicated NAS appliances can do some of these things (e.g. Plex on the QNAP as mentioned), but none will ever have the flexibility of a non-locked-down general-purpose OS.

Not the only piece to the puzzle, but if you don't already have it set up, check out https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools
(there are also RAID-specific tools that will depend on whether you're using md-based raid or LVM-based RAID.)

If you live in the US, your electricity is cheap compared to the rest of the World. Yes the West coast might be 10-20% higher than the East Coast, but both pale in comparison to other developed countries.

Given the percent-of-baseline rates out here, there's a big difference in how much it costs out here depending on how much you use. No idea whether they do that back east, but the difference between baseline (13.6c/kwhr) and 131+ (32c/kwhr) or 200% (36c/kwhr) is pretty huge, and the last is 3x the national average.

Prices are lower in the UK (after currency exchange) than above-130%-of-baseline rates here in California, and appear to go down with greater use rather than up:
http://blog.comparemysolar.co.uk/ele...ttish-and-sse/
http://www.ukpower.co.uk/home_energy...s-per-unit-kwh

Add in the "UK GBP prices are basically the same as US$ prices" and they look particularly cheap compared to California.

See also http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/avera...ity-prices-kwh

IOW, "pale in comparison to other developed countries" doesn't seem accurate unless you can restrict yourself to baseline or close to it.

Can Synology disks be encrypted easily? i.e., as an option during setup?

We use QNAPs at work for long-term backups of non-essential data, but one of them just died one day. We were able to swap the disks into the replacement box and nothing was lost, but I'm still a bit wary after that.

If you are looking to stream to your Roku, you might want to look at Plex. It can run on some of the higher end NAS. However streaming HD video can be a bit CPU intensive so you are better off using a PC for your Plex server.

I have a NAS, as my fileserver, and an older PC running the Plex server. The PC is dedicated to only running the Plex server, and my media is stored on the NAS. The NAS is connected via a Gigabit connection on the router and I have no issues streaming. The NAS backs up all the computers in the house and everyone has access to it on the network. If the NAS ever gets full I could put another hard drive on the Plex server computer and move media directly to it.

I am looking for this, yes. Thank you.

The plot thickens, doesn't it? I'd love to just have the NAS do the streaming of course. I wonder if the faster newer NAS can do this without the computer?

Absolutely, but you'll need a decent processor on your NAS. Transcoding requires a good amount of horsepower.

Great article from Plex on NAS limitations when running the plex server app.

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/art...nd-Limitations

Google Docs link on transcoding levels vs. hardware (community maintained):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=314388488

Here's an article from QNAP on how to install Plex on one of their turbo NASes:

http://www.qnap.com.tw/en/index.php?lang=en&sn=8901

any opinions on QNAP vs. Synology?

In terms of robustness, customer support, that type of thing?

I have no experience of QNAP. Synology products run on their variant of Linux and there is an active support forum on their website. They are known to implement new feature requests pretty quickly.

Plus, Anandtech recommends Synology as well as uses them to run their servers.

I've seen no other tech site test as scientifically as Anandtech.
They make other sites look like the National Enquirer.

Definitely. I've been running a Plex Media Server on my Synology NAS for the last year without any trouble, even when transcoding 1080p video.

The lower-end models, though, won't have the necessary horsepower. I'm using the Synology DS1813+ which has a dual-core 2.13GHz Atom x86 CPU. Most of the basic, residential-focused models use a less expensive ARM CPU that isn't well-suited for transcoding video.

Yowza; nice bit of kit, but that's a good size chunk of cash too. Pretty easy to build your own 8-drive server cheaper than that if you're comfortable building up from motherboard/case yourself (although it's going to end up being good bit less compact.)

I was thinking of the DS1813+ actually. It seems to be big enough and also not outrageously priced...8 bays should be enough for the forseeable future.

Is there an app that lets me use this storage outside the firewall? To stream to my ipad or use as a drive on my Mac if I'm traveling?

Yes, Synology includes built in VPN and streaming functionality - you just need to download their app from the app store.