NAS for photostorage, plus and minus

Glyn, you are a real enthusiast.

Dunno, don't need SMART, this isn't mission critical. Having dealt with a contract with raid 1 servers on roughly 3000 sites I know the kind of incident and probability required to lose all data. Waiting till the disk dies is probably less of a risk than the house burning down or me having a stroke.

Having the disk tell me that its a little peaky might be good for business but I'm just killing two birds with one stone in as cost effective way I can. Cheap resilient network storage.

I'll keep an occasional backup and perhaps put that in the shed in a peli case.

I've got a life, somewhere I'm sure I saw it in the shed behind the peli case and the fishing gear and the kayak and the cultivator and the tool box and the BBQ ......

How much is your leccy bill running Glyn-net? I just got an image of you house built into a hill like the wikileaks host server in Sweden http://www.todayisp.com/news/MessView.net?IDMessage=9708

I'm sure its not as bad as wikileaks although I guess the climate in Sweden helps with the cooling .

I try and control the power usage a little. The general backup NAS only gets turned on for the scheduled backup times. The Photo Vault NAS is controlled by a little application on each PC/Mac and only comes on if one or more computers are also on. This does though mean that at least one PC has to be on to be able to stream the photos to the Apple Tv for display on the big screen in the living room. The Media Vault NAS is scheduled to come on at 7am and goes off at Midnight. The IP camera does not really work very well in the dark so it and its FTP server NAS are timed to turn off over night.

I also hate things being left unnecessarily on standby, and please nobody mention phone chargers , so we have a small collection of remote mains switches that that are used to turn a lot of stuff off when we go to bed or are away for the day. For example in the living room it all goes off expect the two PVRs and their associated ethernet switch.

Having said that though my son's bedroom seems to hum 24hours a day

Glyn

I don't think you'll find that's got anything to do with electrical power consumption.

The simple fact is that performance is largely directly correlated with power consumption, until you get to a processing power point of diminishing returns. However, for the highend yet still consumer grade NAS drives costing £600-800 ex disks that point is some sort of Core2Duo, with power consumption accordingly elevated.

In my view the more affordable NAS drives are useable for photo stuff, but if your interests extend to working with larger data (eg video encoding) the limited speed makes them impractical.

For me the best solution is to have a local raid setup, somehow backed up externally. But even if you prefer to work with laptops, this should be possible since many now have the facility to use two hard disks and come with some sort of Intel raid management hardware/software combination.

How about magneto-optical drives, or are they too small and too expensive?

600-800 is a decent lens or best part of a K-5. I think my idea of consumer grade and acceptable differs somwhat from yours.

I think so. I saw them "live" quite a while back but have not seen them in use since. I think the advances and falling price in HDD storage have meant they have limited applications.


Given the price of USB portable hard disks I'd guess having a couple or three of these and a regime would be as secure and less hassle than the NAS RAID option. And/or using a couple of home PC's with big disks and some synchronising software like the ones mentioned already in the thread.

Many routers now provide a USB port which can share a drive for when you want network access, e.g. BT Home Hubs.

Hi Dougf8,
Do you have a BT home hub2?
Have you used a network cable to connect into your hub?
Sorry for these questions but my existing nas drive is 80% full so thinking of getting an upgrade either larger disks or a complete unit.

The one that I use at the moment I can not use with a BT home hub2, so had to revert to my old ADSL router.

The unit I have at the moment has 2x250gb disks in, as separate drives, I think from reading all the posts, a raid array is better?

Any help and advice gratefully received.

Regards

Colin,

yes homehub2, network cable to NAS with RAID and then wireless for the PC connections. My laptop only has a 100Mb/s connection but the hub and the NAS are gigabit so there is room for a performance boost on a speedier connection. Over wireless I get up to 54Mb/s, not fast . Moving lots of data is slow. Hopefully I won't need to do it often.

As discussed with the contributors above there are pros and cons. The RAID is safer from a disk failure but you can still have a hardware failure in the NAS box. So even having NAS with RAID you must still keep other copies.

The advantage is for me now that we have PS5 on our iMac so I can use the decent 24" screen for editing but access the results on the laptop.


Things I would check in future. And as most things have manuals on line its should be possible to get an answer.

1. what is the fastest method of transferring data to and from. Is it N/W alone or is there a USB connection.

2. what is the cost of adding a 2nd disk. Some devices have a lists of recommended drives!!

3. what do I do if the NAS dies (how easy to find another chassis.)


An alternative might be to have a few 500GB USB disks. £35 a pop from the supermarket. Have a rotation backup system using something like sync toy, so you never loose more than a week's data and you'll have that on your laptop/PC. Or maybe a caddy in a PC you can pop backup disks in and out of.

Homehub2 has a USB port and you can put memory sticks and HDD in there and share them over the n/w. They just appear if you browse the n/w.

There are also network USB hubs for £20 or so.

Doug,
I would use cables to connect to our two PC's (I do this already). I have two external hard disks that I use for a backup of the backups.

My existing nas device I would use for a RAID back-up system, after installing the new nas drive.

I think this would safeguard the data that is stored any where.

Regards

Thanks, the Homehub2 is 100Mb/s not gigabit!!!! The NAS is giga.

networks are slow for moving data and USB isn't much better.

I've just moved the better part of 1.2 TB of data around this week and the most painless way has been eSATA onto the new 2TB disk. That runs at around 50MB/ session and two sessions concurrently is possible over gigabit and another eSATA drive. From USB it's 30MB/sec and from another server it's 10MB/sec. That's a huge difference in time taken for a terabyte....

From this disk it's going onto a RAID5 (or 6) server and that will be replicated onto a multi-terabyte software-raided multi-disk box on my desk via rsync and ssh. I can bring that box home for filling and the rest of the time it's also an off-site backup.

I also thought disks these days were pretty reliable.... until the new WD studio kept losing permissions and gave us a serious scare, the 750GB was killed by an idiot, a 500GB is "on its last legs" (you can hear the clicking) and I'm running on way too many single copies for my liking.

Anyways. Don't assume just because you've got another copy that everything is OK. Store it elsewhere, and check periodically that what you think is there really is there - and functional.

Bret

For a while I thought RAID1 was the way to go. That was until the NAS system software threw a wobbly and the data disappeared on both discs. Fortunately I kept a backup to protect against fire, theft etc. I concluded that RAID1 was more about availability. I'm not running a company which needs its fileserver available 24/7 so I now use the other drive bay simply to increase storage.

I find the NAS slow, especially for browsing and I concur that USB2 isn't much better. The NAS is on a Gige link to N router. If available eSATA is the way to go. I've no experience of USB3.

For viewing my results on the Macbook I use an AFP share on the iMac. This seems much more usable than my NAS.

Doug, If you have 2 disks in the netgear box can you "see" them both as individual disks?

The nas box I have (not sure as to make) lets me see one disk but not the other, its not raid.

Colin, there are lots of different raid systems but most seem to want you to add a new disk as a "spare pool" or something similar. You can then add the "spare" to the degraded array and rebuild it.

I'm not sure about changing array type, i.e. going to a mirror from a single volume disk.

I always talk to somebody before doing a live raid rebuild just to make sure my own logic is in order and I don't end up creating a brand new blank array from the new disk .

Mine has only a single disk at the mo but the manual makes it clear it is easy to add another as a mirror array.