NAS? Advice please

TechnoFreek

Hi guys,
 
I am looking for advice please regarding NAS. I'm not 100% sure if that is what I need for my setup but hopefully somebody can steer me in the right direction.
 
Basically I have a load of movies, music and to a lesser extent photos on a myriad of drives connected both internally and externally to my main pc upstairs at home.
 
All these drives are shared on my home network and the most common way I access them is downstairs in the sitting room through my WD TV Live media streamer.
I rarely watch or listen to anything on the pc itself.
 
What I would like to do is consolidate all these smaller drives into a couple of large hard drives (think Terabytes) - so one drive for movies, one for music and possibly a third for photos but photos aren't essential. 2 would suffice.
 
I currently have a 2tb drive for my music with plenty of capacity and this is highly unlikely to increase dramaically any time soon so that's ok.
 
Movies however is constantly expanding. They are split across several drives, maybe 1Tb total but this is increasing pretty fast. 2tb may not be enough in no time to come.
 
So assuming I consolidate all these drives, I want to get them onto my home network, accessible by my WD TV live and any other device such as smartphone, ps3 etc
 
The big thing is that I don't want to have to have my pc upstairs on all the time everytime I want to watch a movie. So could I get a NAS, install a couple of drives and leave the thing on all the time, accessible by all devices?
 
Other features I would be intertested in are:
Cloud / Remote Access
Ability to download
DLNA or other media servers
Scheduled power on/off
Ability to download files e.g. torrents
Backing up - probably standard enough but not essentail for my usage
 
Is a NAS what I need?
All advice on solutions, devices, recommendations, features etc welcome.

fergusb

From the sounds of it a NAS is exactly what you want. You have a big choice in functionality and sizes available but from the sounds of what you have, maybe a 4 bay NAS would be the way to go.

This means you can have up to 4 drives, which will allow for up to 12TB of data. (4x3TB drives). However by using a RAID configuration, you can provide internal backup in case a drive fails.

A lot of people recommend: QNAP which have a bucket load of functionality and supposed to be easy enough to use as well:
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=193
I think it covers all your requirements. You can get it for around 312 from dabs.ie, although does not contain any hard disks.

Cheaper NAS's are available but won't be as quick and potentially would not be great for playing HD movies from.

FSL

A NAS device would fit your bill perfectly. As long as the router and the device are powered on the NAS device will be accessible by any device on the network.

Make sure the drive is accessible from multiple operating systems. I bought one a few years ago which only has a Windows driver. I don't have any Apple devices and as I only use it for backup it doesn't cause me any problem.

Also I would forget about internet based storage the chances of you having a super fast internet connection with a genuinely unlimited data cap and living in Ireland are mutually exclusive.

vibe666

i went from a similar situation as yourself about 4 years ago, to a 7 bay Thecus N7700 with 5x 1.5tb disks in RAID5, which was very fast on a gigabit network (but a total PITA in the end, so don't buy anything with a thecus badge on it), to building my own freeNAS box with 8x 2tb disks in it using the freenas equivalent of RAID6 (like RAID5, but using 2 disks for parity).

anyways, yup you definitely need a NAS. I'd go for QNAP or Synology if you want something you can just throw some disks into and get up and running right away.

bear in mind though that most NAS's will use their own filesystem so any drives you put into it will need to be reformatted once in the NAS and then have the data copied over again, so you'll at the very least need one spare disk to copy to, before you start throwing your existing disks into it.

RAID is also a very good idea, with RAID5 generallly being the best balance of performance/redundancy/price for a home based NAS, although you'll want at least 3 identical disks for RAID5.

you also have to take into account though that with a RAID5 configuration, that you will lose the equivalent amount of space of one of the drives to something called parity, which ensures that if one of the disks fails, there is enough information stored across all the remaining drives that you can remove the failed disk and put in a fresh one and have the NAS rebuild the contents of the missing drive onto the new one using the remaining disks and the stored parity information to restore it to full functionality.

the good news is though (aside from being able to recover data easily when a disk fails) is that the more disks you use in RAID5, you still only lose the space of one of those drives to parity, so it becomes more economical, although you do also increase the risk slightly of another disk failing during the rebuild process (which is catastrophic for ALL your data on those drives) the more drives you use and also, as those drive sizes increase. i.e. 4x 3tb drives would statistically be more likely to fail a RAID5 rebuild than 4x 1t drives.

another option, if you really want to get your nerd on would be to build your own NAS from an old (or new) PC and a bunch of disks using freeNAS or something similar as the OS.

it's not that hard to set up if you're a bit of a geek and the bragging rights speak for themselves if you're mixing in nerdy circles, but it's no small undertaking.

there's a bargain alerts thread doing the rounds about a HP microserver which has 4x 3.5" drive bays and is perfect as a NAS and can be had for less than 200 quid with a cashback offer from HP.

sorry, i nerded out a bit there, that's probably far too much information for you to process in one go.

lostboy75

My Qnap TS-412 arrived last Thursday, just had a call saying the HDs arrived today, quite looking forward to confusing the hell out of myself with all the featurers the Qnap provides (the list is huge!),
anyway, my current plan is for 2x2Tb drives in, raid 6? (mirroring) as its a four bay units, can add 2 more drives in the futire when i require it. i have only ordered the 2 drives, is this a good idea? also ordered a 2Tb external to back the units up onto. (the Nas itself should not be cansiderd a back up on its own, if the Raid controller goes it can corrupt all drives) and seeing as i will no be keeping a copy of my movies on the PC, needed the back up.

had looking into FreeNas, and while i have some experence building PCs (2 of them) and the associated pain when what should all work (does not work), what put me of the build it yourself route was, trying to getting my hands on a suitable PC case with Mobo and chip for free/cheap, all the site said "you more then likely already have x,y,&z" well i didnt, has spare CPU, but was old and the mobo was not simple to find, no spare working HDs except 1, but its only 320gb. then realsising and that you still dont have hardware Raid, and the PC will use more power then a Nas, etc, and more

the off the shelf unit just got more attractive.

P.S. the Qnap are really nicely buil and finished! brushed tinted aluminium, yes i know this makes little difference, but its nice to see it, and reasures me on the internals.

as i didnt have the drives, not powered it up at all yet though,

SickBoy

You need at least 3 drives to use RAID5 and at least 4 drives for RAID6.
2 drives will give you options for RAID0(striping) or RAID1(mirroring).

vibe666

to help demystify (at least slightly) the various different levels of RAID available, here's a nice little animated diagram which shows you in very basic terms, how each type of RAID works with your data: http://www.acnc.com/raid

TechnoFreek

Thanks for the input so far guys, exactly what I was hoping to get from my original post.
 
So a NAS is what I want and to be honest two bays would be enough. I'm not too bothered with backups. If I lost my movies I wouldn't be too put out, music is a different story however so I do already back this up regularly onto an external drive.
Looking at the qnap 212 it allows the connection of an external drive via usb for one touch backup so that should cover that nicely.
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=192
 
I have yet to look at synology stuff but qnap certainly fits the bill on most things i had in mind so far. it even can download stuff from one click hosts such as filesonic etc
 
what is the max individual hard drive size that they take. is it 2tb or 3tb. not clear to me on qnap site??
 
vibe666, good advice on NAS's using own filesystem. would hate to stick in a drive full of movies to find the drive empty on first use! avoid a right headache there!
I would be nerdy enough to attempt to build my own NAS (built my own pcs for years) however I think in this instance I'd prefer an off-the-shelf and developer supported product.
 
lostboy75, i'd ben very intertested to hear your feedback on the 412 which i presume is just a 4bay version of the 212???

lostboy75

yes fairly certain the that is the only difference, the 4(12) indicating the number of bay.
so far have the unit built and connected, not gotten it working with windows yet, need to figure out how to map a drive to it.
it is quite, you will hear it in a room that is silent, but any back ground noise and you wont hear a thing, that said not heard it reading or writing yet,

and yes, said Raid 6, but ment 2, the mirroring option, a third drive and Raid 6, might have been a better option, but the cost so far has been enough, the extra drive can come later,

Blazer

Stated using Synology NAS's a few years back and love them.
Very easy to set up and the GUI is miles ahead of everyone else.
Built in DNLA/cloud/itunes etc and everything else you can possibly need...or don't need and you can use your android/iphone to access it via their apps for kicking off downloads etc.
I upgraded to the DS212+ which is basically an entry level business NAS...2ghz cpu +512meg ram etc so it's well capable of handling anything I throw at it.. I didn't bother with a 4bay one as my PC holds about 4TB anyway so it's a backup of the NAS and vica versa.
On a gigabit network I'm getting about 80meg read and about 60meg write thereabouts which basically means I could have upto 10 devices all streaming HD movies from it no problem.
They are expensive but worth it in my opinion. I paid €317 for the DS212+ on dabs.ie but they have cheaper models plus you can get 2011's 4 bay model for about €328..
Was looking at the QNAP but Synology's GUI is well ahead of it...in fact I think Synology now make QNAP's NASes

TechnoFreek

Thanks blazer.

I have looked at both the qnap 212 and the synology 212j. They seem similar spec and in my price range.

Can you tell me if synology let's you download premium links from file hosts such as filesonic, Megaupload etc

Thanks

Edit
After bit of research it seems that an add on app called pyload does that job. Qnap seems to support it fine but I can find very little info about running it on synology.
Anyone have experiences with pyload and either NAS model?