What's the best NAS configuration?
On box for best, one box for everyday data
What NAS product or combination of NAS products would best suit the following home network requirements:
- RAID 1 storage for important media, eg. photos, home video, etc with minimum capacity of 500GB.
- RAID 0 storage for other media and backups, eg. TV recordings, DVD rips, music etc with minimum capacity of 2TB with the capacity for expansion.
The network is a Gigabit Ethernet link across several Windows PCs.
Out of interest what sort of real-world transfer speeds can I expect over 1Gb connection?
COMMENTS
QNAP NAS + USB drive backup
Personally I have a QNAP 209 with two 1TB drives, mirrored and then a seperate 1TB USB drive for a seperate backup (to protect against catastrophic failure of the QNAP). Good thing being that the QNAP has a one touch backup to USB drives so anytime I make a significant update to my video library I reconnect the USB drive and hit the backup button
you're going about it the wrong way
Use RAID 1 for all of the data on the NAS and then burn all your valueable stuff (photos, wedding video etc) to optical of some description.
RAID != backup !!!!!
Personally I have a DNS-323, not bad really. Just make sure you update the firmware to whatever the latest version is before putting any data on it. Soem of the earlier releases did nasty things.
>1Gb
Errr..I of course meant 2X1Tb, not a massive 2x1Gb drives.
Speed, thru'-put & bandwidth.
Rather than me re-inventing the wheel, see:
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/net/overhead/
and
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html
DNS-323
Does all of the above. I have had mine a year now without a squeak. It also has a built-in bittorrent client (if that is for you..) and it's price has come down a lot. I loaded mine with 2X1Gb Samsung drives for 1Gb of RAIDed safe storage.
See http://www.trustedreviews.com/networking/review/2006/11/20/D-Link-DNS-323/p1
