Looking for 1-bay NAS

[mlody]

Good evening,

I am having a hard time deciding on a simple NAS for home use. I have gone through a lot of reviews (many outdated or products already updated) and still not sure what to get.

What I am looking for is a simple, yet fast, single drive NAS to keep perhaps 200-250GB of data - mainly pictures, home video's, some music and kids movies. My only requirement would be an ability to make a backup of NAS via USB (2.0 is fine too), perhaps some kind of iTunes/DNLA server, a gigabit connection and a decent iOS client to view the media.

The NAS would be connected to Netgear WNDR 3700v2 wifi router and all clients would wireless connect to it - that would be Panasonic plasma TV, 4 iPad's, 3 iPhone's, Apple TV and 2 Windows laptops.

Most of the data would be read only, only occasionally updating new content (once or twice a month), so I would prefer something with fast reads over writes. I am also fine with either option - disk or diskless.

I appreciate any suggestions.

Thank you

 

[thiggins]

You can buy most anything. Performance won't matter because all clients are wireless. Even N450 class clients will limit throughout below what any current generation NAS can support.

Your main limitation on selection is your requirement to view media. Be warned that NASes don't have on the fly video transcoding, so trying to watch Blu ray rips will be iffy.

Look at the WD My Book Live

 

[mlody]

You can buy most anything. Performance won't matter because all clients are wireless. Even N450 class clients will limit throughout below what any current generation NAS can support.

Your main limitation on selection is your requirement to view media. Be warned that NASes don't have on the fly video transcoding, so trying to watch Blu ray rips will be iffy.

Look at the WD My Book Live

Thanks for the suggestion. I do not have any 450 Wi-Fi clients. The best I have are 300's so in theory anything over 37.5 MB/s is a waste for my network; however, there are still a lot NAS products that cant even saturate that network, so I would rather get something that is a bit future proof.

As far as WD My Book Live, I do not see USB port on that NAS. Since this is a single drive unit, I really would like to see USB port that I could use for backups.

 

[thiggins]

Sorry for the bad recommendation. Single drive Buffalos can usually be picked up for not a lot of $.

You might even look at the Pogoplug. You can add whatever you want for storage and it has good remote access and streaming. It doesn't do scheduled backup. But since it mounts drives as network shares, you can run any backup program to do a folder to folder backup.

 

[heehee62]

As far as WD My Book Live, I do not see USB port on that NAS. Since this is a single drive unit, I really would like to see USB port that I could use for backups.

Does your router have a spare usb port? If so, you can attach a usb hard drive to that and have pretty much any NAS that doesn't have a port of it's own automatically back up to that. The only thing about automatic backup (though you still can do it manually but manual is a pain) is that you won't be able to spin down the usb hard drive unless you know how to (and your router will let you) flash a non-native firmware that allows for automatic disk spin down.

If you still want that usb port then ZyXEL NSA310 has it. It's about $90 and then you would have to buy a separate harddrive (I'll guess $50 though don't know) to put in it as it doesn't come with a hard drive of it's own - so total $140 maybe.

You can get a buffalo linkstation without a usb port for $60 on amazon and I don't think you will need to buy another harddrive with it. There is a buffalo single drive NAS that has a usb port for about the same price as the Zyxel - $140 I think though don't quote me. If you want simple then buffalo would be easier, if you want more functions then Zyxel.

I have the WD mybooklive (don't recommend new expensive mycloud for you unless you need that usb port). It's a good drive but I don't like how I can't see video preview thumbnails on android and ios devices (you can see file name but thumbnail is only possible for photos. Can get previews with PCs). I suspect that's true for the buffalo linkstation as well too. You can get video thumbnail previews on all devices with the zyxel.

I myself don't feel safe with backups residing in the same house in case of a fire. So I'm setting up one NAS in my sister's house and one in mine that automatically and remotely backup to one another with bittorent sync. This is not simple though so if you decide to try it, I'd buy from a place that will let you return stuff like best buy (really, you might want to do that regardless of what you choose). I use my network usb port to turn my ancient printer into a wireless printer.