Recent content by turnstyle

The reason I keep at it: as I understand it, one drive in a NAS backed up to an external drive -- that has to be be more fault tolerant than two drives in a NAS. But people here seem to consider that an ill-advised solution, so I'm trying to understand if I'm missing something. Obviously two...

Thanks -- but isn't your RAID itself then a potential single point of failure? I don't mean to be doom-and-gloom, genuine question!

I would use the USB for regular backups of the NAS. This strikes me as more fault-tolerant as compared to two volumes in a two-bay NAS, no? With two drives in a single NAS, you still have a potential single point of failure. Whereas a 1-bay NAS with an external drive has two totally...

Right -- so if I have a NAS, and if I back it up to an external USB drive daily -- if the NAS fails, then I can restore from the USB drive -- so perhaps I lose a day. With a two-bay NAS, if it's mirrored, and if one drive fails, then I don't lose that day -- but I still need to back up to an...

I'm sorry, but I still don't get the point of the mirrored 2-bay NAS -- that is, assuming the NAS is being backed up to an external. If the NAS and/or drive within it fails, I have the external right there. (Additionally, I would try to cycle a second external off-site.) I'm sorry if I'm...

It seems to me two drives in a NAS is more at-risk as compared to one drive in the NAS and one external drive. I agree that mirrored drives are more problematical as compared to two separate volumes, synched at some specified time -- but it seems to me if I'm going to have two drives total, it...

So if I want to back the NAS up to an external, what do I use for the external? Some empty enclosure with both eSATA and USB3?

But I'm still going to need an external drive to back up the NAS. (Right?) So I don't get the point of two drives in the NAS, given that 4-6TB is plenty for me. So I thought: if the NAS has eSATA, shouldn't I be looking for an external with eSATA (in addition to USB3). I thought the answer...

Thanks, twice, with comments below... This is for my home, so I'm not worried about somebody walking off with an external drive -- in fact, I see ease of walking off as a *feature* (because I hope to get into the habit of cycling a copy off site). I don't really see a need for two bays (for...

But isn't there a "USB per file" hit each time the NAS accesses a file on an external USB drive that there wouldn't be if the external drive were eSATA?

Isn't the benefit of eSATA over USB3 going to be more prominent with lots of little files, rather than a big file? And, for example, if a backup program is doing tens of thousands of compares to determine which files need to be copied over, doesn't that come under the "lots of little files"...

Thanks so much -- so now I gather I still have to hope for data from somebody with a Mac and a NAS who can copy a big folder of small files over AC -- meaning, to have a sense of whether I should expect to do much better than the roughly 10MB/s read, 1MB/s write performance I'm getting with my...

For example, I'm looking at NAS'es such as the Synology DS115, DS215j and QNAP TS-131. I really only need one bay, which I would back up to the external drive. The Synology DS115 and QNAP TS-131 both include eSATA. However the DS215j seems to have the same specs as the DS115 -- except the...

Had a chance to try again with Microsoft Security Essentials off on the PC. Interestingly, the read test went from roughly 7MB/s to 10MB/s, but the write only went from about 1.1MB/s to 1.3MB/s -- I did the read test first, and thought that was a decent change -- so then I expected to see an...

I was thinking the external drive would ideally have *both* eSATA *and* USB3 -- so, with a NAS that has an eSATA port, I can get the benefit -- but I could always fall back to USB3 if I need to move the external drive to a computer/laptop. You think USB3 and eSATA are pretty similar? (Does that...