NAS Box or Standard External Hard-drives ?

[Replicator]

opinions, pros and cons ?

I am considering a NAS box for 2 drives instead of standard externals.

Anybody have this configuration ?

Any thoughts or comments appreciated . . . !

 

[briankb]

Are the two drives setup as one plus a mirror (RAID Level 1)? I purchased a NAS a few years ago and set it up originally as RAID 5 with four 500gb disks giving me (N-1) or 1.5TB of redundant storage. It is great but my two design guys have issues with it, and so do I because of Photoshop. So now it's just a network backup drive.

For each workstation now we have a total of 4 drives and have 2 paired up for mirroring so C is OS and D is documents/files and then an external USB 2.0 + eSATA drives which are at least 1TB. All the working files we keep on the local drive and have it backup to the external. We barely use the NAS now. I used to also have Quickbooks files on the NAS and that just doesn't work. It now has it's own Windows server where that file sits and is shared using the QB server setup.

So...

NAS Pros - network share that everyone can access
faster 100mb to 1GB network connections
redundant using RAID 1-5 or higher on the newer models
NAS Cons - network share that everyone can access
- expensive 500-900 for the case plus the cost of your drives

External Pros - using eSata the data access speed is the same as a local drive
- low cost: 1TB 7200rpm drive plus case is under $150
External Cons - requires a little more work to setup as a network share and may be offline if that PC is down or the drive is not attached.
- single point of failure. if the drive fails you have lost data (there are now 2 disk eSata cases which support RAID 1 mirroring)

that's what I can think of at the moment. I'm about to build a new graphics workstation to replace a 4 year old one. It will have Win7 x64, 16gb ram, 4 drives setup as two pairs RAID 1, and an external drive for backup or pushing off older working files.

What is your primary need or purpose for the NAS or external drive?

 

[Replicator]

I'm running Windows 7 32-bit now and getting a new system with 64-bit tomorrow.

I have been having issues with my external drives on Windows 7, as Windows wants to check those drives whether I'm accessing them or not.

In otherwords, if i attempt to do literally anything on my PC, Windows wants to try and access the externals for some reason only known to Microsoft.

I was told this was Microsoft's way of adding the "its all connected" harmony to the Windows 7 experience, but obviously not without flaws.

I was hoping to be able to run a Synology DS209 with 2 1.5TB drives under a RAID-1 mirror and not have this access attempt problem anymore.

I also figured I could run several programs off of the NAS, but now I'm realizing that if the NAS is limited to "let's say" 256 memory

the programs might be very slow.

Thanks for the knowledge Brian . . .

 

[choucove]

One thing you have to be careful with any external hard drives connected directly to your computer system is Window's tendency to start storing temporary or important files onto the external drive for some unknown reason. Now this doesn't happen frequently, but I did have an external USB hard drive in an old computer once that was plugged in constantly with the system. That external hard drive failed one day and lo-and-behold Windows failed to start up because of missing critical files that were, for some reason, moved from the main C drive onto the external drive. I ended up having to do a repair installation of the Windows XP OS to get the computer up and running again.

Given the cost of NAS systems, I would generally just suggest an external drive for backup purposes. However, if you are planning to use the external drives as a main point for data storage (and not just a backup copy) then I would not suggest a simple external drive. There is no data protection in any form. If the drive dies, your chances are your information is gone.

So the real question is whether you intend to use the device as a primary point of storing files and being shared, or as a backup of an already existing data storage location such as a file server or workstation computer hard drive.

 

[briankb]

I'm not running any external drives on my Win7 machine at the moment so I can't comment. I hope it's not as bad as you suggest at this point with their released version.

I tried to run a plugin for file source control to my ReadyNAS+ with the previously mentioned 4 disks and it was so painly slow I quit before I even completed the first upload.

If you need a higher level of service from your NAS you should probably build a little NAS device using the smaller motherboards and appropriate case. It will probably be the same or cheaper than an actual NAS case and have a lot more flexibility. Check out this episode of Systm where they talk about building a NAS http://revision3.com/systm/freenas

I'm sure you know but I would buy my parts from NewEgg.com.

 

[Replicator]

Thanks !

 

[javila]

We have a readynas and we love it. It's split between three machines, everything from quickbooks to driver sets are on there.

It's a huge pain to have that much data tied to a single machine (in the case of a simple external). That's what he had before, now we can shut down machines not in use.

 

[ZsVinylInc]

At one point we had a water pipe break right over top of our main system and wiped it out. So after that we moved to a Linksys NAS System. and moved it to an up stairs office. (that way if anything every happened again we could just pick up a cheap system and start running right away) It is a dual bay system. We are running two Western Digital 500gig Green Drives set up in a mirror raid. What is nice about the Linksys is that if you have the IP address you can set it up to access from the internet no matter where you are. It would be set up with a password protection. We use it for our main design files as well as Quickbooks and anything else we would share among any of our computer systems.

 

[Replicator]

Who's running programs from a NAS ?

 

[choucove]

I'm not running any external drives on my Win7 machine at the moment so I can't comment. I hope it's not as bad as you suggest at this point with their released version.

I tried to run a plugin for file source control to my ReadyNAS+ with the previously mentioned 4 disks and it was so painly slow I quit before I even completed the first upload.

If you need a higher level of service from your NAS you should probably build a little NAS device using the smaller motherboards and appropriate case. It will probably be the same or cheaper than an actual NAS case and have a lot more flexibility. Check out this episode of Systm where they talk about building a NAS http://revision3.com/systm/freenas

I'm sure you know but I would buy my parts from NewEgg.com.

This is really great advice really. Most NAS devices are just very very simple computer systems built to support a large amount of drive space in a simple RAID. You can build your own file server for just the same cost if not less than what many NAS devices sell for and have much more flexibility and performance options. If you are feeling somewhat adventurous you can even eliminate some costs by running Linux on the NAS and not have to pay for a new license of Windows.

The big thing with most NAS devices is the ability to 'plug-and-play' compared to building your own, but they are pricey. If you have multiple people accessing numerous files at the same time from this storage device (and it will be used as your primary storage space) I would say go beyond a NAS even and look into a basic file server for the security, performance optimizations, and flexibility. The NAS was originally designed just as an external backup of a file server. They generally lack the processing horsepower to handle numerous file requests and transfers from numerous users at the same time nearly as efficiently as even a basic file server.

Most of the time the reason why people have such difficulty saving stuff to a NAS is because their network only runs at 10/100 Mb/s which is a very slow data transfer rate. Storage to and from a NAS is only really feasible if your network is completely compatible and running in Gigabit speed (10/100/1000 Mb/s) otherwise it is more of a hassle than a help. A couple years back we switched our network to full Gigabit speed and it allowed for saving and retrieving of files from the server more than three times faster than on the 10/100 Mb/s network.

 

[iSign]

I have a Buffalo terastation. My network seemed to eat NAS drives for some reason... seriously I burned through 3 or 4 MyBooks, 2 or 3 simpletech's & a few Maxtors... nothing lasted. All were backed up... but the time I lost was always worth more than the drive, so I spent $2K for the 4TB RAID 10 set-up. It has worked perfectly with no hiccups. I love it!

No programs though, just shared data storage & auto backups!

 

[cptcorn]

I have a Buffalo terastation. My network seemed to eat NAS drives for some reason... seriously I burned through 3 or 4 MyBooks, 2 or 3 simpletech's & a few Maxtors... nothing lasted. All were backed up... but the time I lost was always worth more than the drive, so I spent $2K for the 4TB RAID 10 set-up. It has worked perfectly with no hiccups. I love it!

No programs though, just shared data storage & auto backups!

Buffalo Terastation here...

Don't edit files across the network, you're asking for trouble... Don't run programs across the network unless you're running the appropriate servers, such as a citrix server.