News: NAS Buying Guide

PC World has a good article on how to buy a NAS. Now the article is mostly centered on buying a NAS for a business, but we feel that a lot of the advice they give pertains to the home user as well. Most people don't realize they actually need a NAS solution for their home. Anyone that has multiple people accessing a network, multiple computers on a network, or a large amount of files that need to be alway accessible, a NAS is an easy way to achieve all of that.

We have always been a big fan of a central location for commonly accessed files as well as a repository for important backups. Just having a USB attached hard drive makes sharing with the rest of the computers on your network reliant on your computer being turned on and the drive being recognized.

With a NAS drive you will have storage that is always on and assuming you were smart and opted for either RAID 1 or RAID 5 you will have a secure location for all of your files. It is not enough to just back up your drives, you need to make sure that the back ups are safe and protected from drive failure. One thing we have learned over the years is that drives will fail and along with them your data goes the way of the Dodo. The PC World article makes an important point. There is a big difference between NAS systems and Filers. Filers are specialized computers that have the sole purpose to share files with the best possible speed. These systems are usually very expensive, have a good deal of maintenance involved. A good Filer has an OS behind it that has been designed to optimize file transfers and while this is a good thing it is often overkill for the small business or home user.

For the basic home user a simple NAS setup is usually all that is needed and the setup and maintenance is usually a one time affair. There are less features available to the home NAS user then to the person using a full blown filer, but again, most of these features are overkill for the needs of the basic user.

What the home user needs is just a place to store files that they can access anywhere and that won't be lost in the case of a drive failure. With a RIAD'ed NAS setup the home user is protected against the inevitable crashing of one of their drives. It only takes one failure and the loss of all the data you have collected to realize the power of a backed up NAS setup.

We can tell you from personal experience that having a system of always accessible storage is a huge boon and a easy way to offload storage from your personal machine. We store all of our movies, music and photos on our central server so that any computer on our network has access to them.

The major advantage of using a Filer instead of a NAS setup is that the Filer is better at data transfer and will have better throughput. The Filer option will give you a device that has an OS dedicated to transferring files around a network, but you will end up paying a hefty premium for that convenience. For the standard home user looking to store their media in a central location and in such a way as to prevent data loss using a filer is pure overkill.

There are plenty of basic RAID servers on the market for home use, all of them with their own advantages and disadvantages. Some will allow you to run basic media servers on them, allowing you to consolidate a lot of your resources to one device.

We decided to use an old computer we had and install FreeNAS on it. We dumped a bunch of 500GB disks in there and setup a nice RAID 5 system. We are now protected against data loss if any of the drives fail ( which they will ). We have had this system running for a long time now and so far( knock on wood ) we haven't had a problem.

The great thing about having a central place for your data above the security of knowing you won't lose it, is that it simplifies so many aspects of the connected home. So many of the devices that we have allow you to stream multiple media types so the ability to tell it one server where all of our data lives is a time saver. That might seem like a small benefit, but trust us, it does make life easier.

So we babbled on about a lot of nonsense just now, but this is one of our favorite areas of networking. We are storage junkies! Sure no one in their right mind needs a Filer at their house since the price points are so far above the average budget, but we just wanted to put out a good comparison and maybe shed some light on the benefits of a NAS system in your home.

OK, we will get off of our soapbox now and go back to tinkering with our NAS server. Hope something in this article helped you.

August 31, 2007

News: NAS Buying Guide