Whats are Pro and Cons connecting a external hardisk to wireless router

[stevech]

Thanks all, I learn that its better to invest on NAS than a just a external hard disk. Can you suggest me a good NAS which can hold upto 4 TB disk space, capable of file server and streaming.

Many of us are happy with Synology or QNAP as they specialize in NAS, unlike the mass market NAS-kludges from retail. May of us buy no-drive NASes and shop for best deal on disk drives and add-in. Simple. I suggest a 2 bay NAS and 2x2TB or 2x3TB. Not JBOD. Non-RAID config in 2-bay; separate volumes. One backs up the other, or key parts of the main volume where the neworks shares would be.

And a big USB3 external drive as the extra backup and kept out of sight.

 

[htismaqe]

And a big USB3 external drive as the extra backup and kept out of sight.

Yes, USB backup is a must. It's saved my butt a couple of times.

 

[RMerlin]

QNAP and Synology are the two most popular brands out there. I have no personal experience with Synology, but I've installed and configured many QNAPs over time, from an home user TS-219 (now replaced by the TS-220 I believe - 2 bays, low performance CPU) upto a TS-669 Pro (6 bays, high performance CPU). The 220 would probably work fine for home use.

For best stability I recommend using WD Caviar Red HDDs. They are specifically validated for NAS use (which means amongst other things they have TLER enabled in their firmware, unlike standard desktop HDDs). Caviar Blue would be good enough if you want to save on price. I do not really recommend putting Caviar Blacks in a NAS due to the heat, but a NAS with decent active cooling might be safe with them.. And avoid the Caviar Green - their aggressive power management causes many issues when used in a RAID.

As others said, having an external USB3 HDD for backups is a must. Personally, I recommend a Caviar Green shoved into a Nextar USB3 enclosure.

 

[Razor512]

If your main focus is performance, then you are far better off building a desktop PC to use as a NAS, from a performance standpoint, many branded NAS boxes will cost upwards of $300-500 at he low end and still struggle to saturate a gigabit connection, and struggle heavily with offering good IOPS

Spend the same amount building a PC to use as a NAS, you end up with far faster hardware (at long as you avoid network adapters that offload all of their work to the CPU, you can easily build a system that will barely even need to boost the clock speed on the CPU to handle saturating a gigabit connection. When you build, you get the option to do so much more with the system using the excess processing power. I personally use my NAS build for also running 2 VM's (1 for a minecraft and teamspeak server, and another for a VPN server)

Overall, the purpose built branded NAS devices carry a huge price markup when you consider what you can build for the same money. (not to mention that building your own system gives you a 3 year+ warranty on most of the components, with some even having a lifetime warranty, compared to the branded NAS with a 1 year warranty)

 

[stevech]

If your main focus is performance, then you are far better off building a desktop PC to use as a NAS, from a performance standpoint, many branded NAS boxes will cost upwards of $300-500 at he low end and still struggle to saturate a gigabit connection, and struggle heavily with offering good IOPS

Spend the same amount building a PC to use as a NAS, you end up with far faster hardware (at long as you avoid network adapters that offload all of their work to the CPU, you can easily build a system that will barely even need to boost the clock speed on the CPU to handle saturating a gigabit connection. When you build, you get the option to do so much more with the system using the excess processing power. I personally use my NAS build for also running 2 VM's (1 for a minecraft and teamspeak server, and another for a VPN server)

Overall, the purpose built branded NAS devices carry a huge price markup when you consider what you can build for the same money. (not to mention that building your own system gives you a 3 year+ warranty on most of the components, with some even having a lifetime warranty, compared to the branded NAS with a 1 year warranty)

Assuming the user/OP isn't making a career of owning a NAS 8^) then..
A PC-based NAS (a) Uses more power than a small NAS; (b) lacks all the great software features that Synology and QNAP offer.

I wonder if more than a 2 bay NAS for most home users is needed, esp. with the 3, 4, 5TB drives.

Preaching: RAID is not a backup. External big USB3 drive is your life vest.

 

[randymadden]

thmsantosh - It sounds you have a very similar setup to mine, only we use PS3s instead of Xboxes .

In my case I also sought the "advice of the internet". The best advice I got, and subsequently followed, was to build a simple Windows 8 based server. My total budget was $500 USD and I ended up with a system very much like the one described by azazel1024: a core i3 processor with 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD, and 6TB of mirrored storage (at 2TB and a 4TB), all in a tiny ITX case.

I have been extremely happy with this setup as it was good value for that amount of money, is reliable and fast, and is easy to manage.

 

[htismaqe]

Preaching: RAID is not a backup. External big USB3 drive is your life vest.

Preach on!

 

[RMerlin]

thmsantosh - It sounds you have a very similar setup to mine, only we use PS3s instead of Xboxes .

In my case I also sought the "advice of the internet". The best advice I got, and subsequently followed, was to build a simple Windows 8 based server. My total budget was $500 USD and I ended up with a system very much like the one described by azazel1024: a core i3 processor with 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD, and 6TB of mirrored storage (at 2TB and a 4TB), all in a tiny ITX case.

I have been extremely happy with this setup as it was good value for that amount of money, is reliable and fast, and is easy to manage.

Considering an OEM Windows license alone would eat nearly 150$ out of that 500$ budget (wish that 49$ deal MS originally offered would still apply), a Windows-based NAS is not an economical route at this point.

And you don't want to use the home edition of Windows for NAS duties, as it's far more complicated to manage share security, plus I'm unsure if MS still limits SMB connections to a maximum of 10 concurrent connections (this used to be the case up to until the Vista era).

 

[htismaqe]

The only reason to use a Windows machine for file sharing is if you want to use it for something else as well.

With Linux or an appliance, you can get a lot more functionality and stability for a lot less money.

 

[sfx2000]

The only reason to use a Windows machine for file sharing is if you want to use it for something else as well.

With Linux or an appliance, you can get a lot more functionality and stability for a lot less money.

Right now Apple has on their refurb store MacMini Server with i7-2.3Ghz with 2 1TB drive for $849 -- and it's far more than "just a NAS"...

Only downside I see with it is that it only has a single GIGe port, but that can be handled with a Thunderbolt dongle, and drop on a FW800 RAID5, and it'll be shiny - plays well with Win/Mac/Linux...

sfx

 

[stevech]

Right now Apple has on their refurb store MacMini Server with i7-2.3Ghz with 2 1TB drive for $849 -- and it's far more than "just a NAS"...

Only downside I see with it is that it only has a single GIGe port, but that can be handled with a Thunderbolt dongle, and drop on a FW800 RAID5, and it'll be shiny - plays well with Win/Mac/Linux...

sfx

As ever, that $850 is a lot more than a decent 2 bay with well priced BYODrives. Like 200-300% more.
But I have some Apple stock so please throw money at them.

 

[sfx2000]

As ever, that $850 is a lot more than a decent 2 bay with well priced BYODrives. Like 200-300% more.
But I have some Apple stock so please throw money at them.

QNAP TS-269L without drives is $485, by the time you add a couple of 2TB enterprise level drives, it's actually more than the MacMini is... QNAPWorks quotes $1430 with WD drives...

http://www.qnapworks.com/TS-269L.asp

And - well it is Intel based, but it's an Atom compared to an IvyBridge Core i7 quad for the MiniServer I linked earlier.

I'll admit up front though - QNAPWorks is a VAR, so you get a fair amount of markup, but you also get a tested/verified good solution - if you buy the box itself, and provide a couple of WD Red 2TB drives, it's more reasonable - around 180 for the drives, which takes us to $665

Alt approach - base Mini which is a Core i5 dual core @ 2.5Ghz...

A base MacMini is $599 USD, and while it only has a single 500GB drive, and then add a LaCie 4TB USB3.0 drive for 200 more... OSX Server app is 20 bucks in the AppStore... Thunderbolt GiGe NIC 30 bucks...

And it does have more functionality than most NAS's with a full blown ServerOS... the one thing missing is MySQL, which is a free download, and a DCHP daemon, which is also free via MacPorts or Fink.

So...

QNAP with Drives - $1430 from QNAPWorks - ready to run
QNAP - BYOD - add two 2TB Reds - $665
MacMini Base with Drive, OSX Server, extra NIC - $849

Not the 200-300 percent difference you speak of...

 

[stevech]

I'm just a home user, work at home so need NAS with triple redundant backup. And not expensive. Not overkill.

I'm 2+ years into owning a 2-bay NAS. Synology DS212. 2x2TB. Independent volumes, one does time backup of file versions on the other drive. No RAID, by by choice. USB3 external backup.

As to cost (I'm cheap), I recal paying $200 or so for the drive-less NAS (prices have come down). Had one 2TB drive; bought another. Later I bought a 2TB USB3 drive for out-of-sight backup.

So I have more than I need and under $300 for a NAS. I can't see that I'd need a 4 bay ($$$). But I don't do video work nor rip DVDs. The CPU in the DS212 isn't a hot rod but it does fine for the I/O bound NAS duties (not CPU intensive).

Happy camper.

 

[htismaqe]

My NAS is just a Buffalo Linkstation LS-VL (thanks Tim Higgins!). I paid $175 for it in 2010 and it came pre-loaded with a 1TB HDD. I added a 1TB drive ($75) and a Rosewill USB enclosure ($30) for automated backup.

So I have just a little over $300 invested and it works like a champ. I use it for some file storage but mostly I'm backing up PCs to it.

 

[RMerlin]

A QNAP TS-269L might be overkill for many home users where a TS-212 or TS-220 might be enough.

 

[azazel1024]

Why would you buy enterprise HDDs? Short of the very tiny subset of features that Enterprise drives can bring that comsumer drives don't have?

In general, the VERY small amount of hard testing done shows that Enterprise drives don't really have particularly lower failure rates than standard drives. It is pretty bone headed not to have duplicate physical disks backing up your data no matter the type of drive you are using ends up negating a "well I'll just buy a pair of Enterprise drives instead of 4 comsumer drives and it'll be cheaper with the same chance of failure".

My father went with a Mac Mini to run OSX server on it because he is wedded to Apple. My sever that I built is, other than not having the OSX server features, has at least as much software flexibility for my environment (which is Windows generally) and has significantly more hardware flexibility, with barely any more power consumption (his measures 3w less at idle and 4w more under load) and mine cost around 60% as much including drives (oh and mine as 2x2TB drives in RAID0, his is a single 2TB drive, so mine has double the storage at twice the speed...and mine has a pair of GbE interfaces using SMB3...so I have twice the networking performance too).

You CAN build a file server/server for pretty cheap if you want (I think including disks mine is around $500-550 all inclusive). If you don't need the performance, or want/need simplicity, a 1-2 bay NAS is just fine too and slightly cheaper.

 

[RMerlin]

One of the reason is that in a RAID situation, you will want a disk that has TLER enabled. This is the case for the Caviar Red disks, for example.

It might be possible to enable TLER on a desktop drive, but that will require an external tool, and some research to determine if this is really the case.

 

[speedingcheetah]

I say just use FreeNAS or NAS4Free and re-purpose a desktop or laptop computer.

U can get a dual core core2duo off lease office pc(like a dell 755 sff or HP DC5800) for $50 or so. Or a cheap AMD based system for cheaper.

Though, far as router based NAS, the linkys WRT 1900AC router, fastest I have seen.

 

[Nerre]

U can get a dual core core2duo off lease office pc(like a dell 755 sff or HP DC5800) for $50 or so. Or a cheap AMD based system for cheaper.

And what does the electricity to power it cost?

 

[htismaqe]

The other advantage of a NAS appliance is its size.

My NAS is centrally located, sitting on a shelf with my router and MDF switch, using the same UPS. It's connected via a 3-ft ethernet cable. Placement is really never an issue with an appliance, whereas finding a good spot for a full-blown desktop PC might be an issue for some.