Network Attatched Storage

Anyone here using a NAS in their home?
I've just ordered a 6tb Buffalo LinkStation from ebuyer and was wondering if anyone could give me some pointers before I install it.

I do, but not that one. I use a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 3 x 1Tb HDD's giving me 1.7Tb of storage.

I've purposely limited it to 1.7Tb because I consider backups to be very important. I have 2 x 2Tb Western Digital MyBook Essential drives attached to it for backup, which runs every 4 hours 24x7 with a 2 hour overlap. Worst case, I lose 2 hours work.

The first thing you will have to think about is how you are going to back it up.

NAS boxes are not immune to total loss of data. It's happened to me.

I had a failed drive (one of three) which I removed and sent it back for replacement under warranty. The NAS box continued quite happily with one failed drive. The replacement was sent to my son in UK and I collected it on one of my infrequent trips. Before departing for UK I turned off all my gear including the NAS box.

On my return, the NAS box would not boot. I eventually discovered that another drive had failed. It was working fine when I left, dead when I got back. Without a backup I would have lost 40 years worth of photo's.

RAID arrays, which is what a NAS box is, can suffer one failed drive, but not two (I use XRAID).

Now you just have to ask yourself one question, "Do I feel lucky?".

I have a pretty reliable dat tape drive I had planned on using to back it up with for now!

I have a Buffalo 2TB Linkstation which has served me very well for 18 months or so. Just follow the instructions provided with it and you should be fine. They give you a step by step guide which was fine for me and it all worked with no hassles.

Regards
David

Use a Buffalo Terastation 2Tb at work, along with a pair of expensive Quantum Snap Servers. Have had single drive failures twice, and a complete RAID 5 failure once

I've got a LaCie NAS at home, which isn't RAID but sync to two different locations.

Don't trust your DAT tapes unless you regularly retention them. You can find they're no good when you come to restore after a crash!! It's not a nice feeling when that happens!!

Do be aware that the bottle neck in NAS is usually the CPU, and you do get what uou pay for
In the end it wasn't fast enough for me, and I'm now on Firewire 800 from the Mac. That flies!

Matt

"Pretty reliable" may not be reliable enough, it needs to be totally reliable, and two backups are better than one, or none.

For the last 2 years or so I've been running a Netgear Stora (an el cheapo NAS) with 2x2Tb eco drives configured in RAID 1.

It holds my photos, film (video, not 35mm) and music collections, as well as nightly backups of my desktop data.

Even though the disks are mirrored, I appreciate I'm still open to loss from a failure of its other hardware; or from fire, flood or its theft. But it's considerably safer than just leaving everything on one HDD on the pc.

Read/write is not as fast as a local drive, but it's not so slow as to be a hindrance to anything.

As well as the desktop, I have a separate miniature media pc (running the superb xbmc ) linked to my AV receiver that reads it, as does the laptop and even the iPad.

Not sure what pointers I could give you except set it up, move all your libraries over to it, configure your apps to look there for their data, and never look back!

Editing image files over a network connection, even a gigabit connection, is paaaaaaiiiiiinfully slow. My advice, keep live work in progress images on the PC or a USB attached HDD, and backup to the NASbox.

Especially when one of them is off-site.

You ain't kidding. I'd never edit anything over a network connection. I'd either die of boredom or commit suicide due to frustration.

SATA3 internal drives here.

I have a Netgear NV+ with 4 1.5TB drives, backed up to hard drives. Two points.
1. I edit images on the NAS in LR4 on a Win7/64 machine with 6GB of memory linked to the NAS via gig ethernet and I don't find it painfully slow at all, but I will move some test images to local HD just to assess differences.
2. If your NAS functions as a DLNA server and you get a smart TV that can act as a DLNA client, you can look at JPG versions of images (and any movies on the NAS, and listen to Itunes music) via your TV. Which I thought was quite cool...

Paul

FWIW, I use Scooter Software's Beyond Compare for manually synchronising from the work-in-progress on the computer to the NAS/External/Backup

Matt

Perhaps you are not as impatient as I am
I use a quad core Win 7/64 PC with 8Gb RAM and Gigabit Ethernet throughout. Keeping live images on a USB2 attached HDD works much faster for me.

@Matt, I use FreeFileSynch to create mirrored backups. It works very well and I liked the price, the clue is in the name .

Not going to argue with the advice, but I haven't found network speed a huge problem with my workflow. I must do things differently. I use Lightroom and, once the 1:1 previews have loaded, they're locally cached (or at least they are in my configuration). Since LR doesn't actually edit the raw files those aren't loaded again unless the cache is purged, so it doesn't matter where the raws are kept. At least, that's my understanding of how it works. I haven't tried it the other way. Maybe if I did I would be astounded at the speed.

I also accept that storing on a NAS may have a greater impact on speed with other software though. It was late, and I was only thinking of my own workflow. My bad, as an Americans might say.

Hi Peter.
That's odd - lots of discussions and comparisons on the web, most say that GigE should be faster or at least the same as USB2. Can't find anyone who says it should be significantly slower, and mine certainly isn't. YMMV (and indeed clearly does).
Paul