NAS or WD Thunderbolt Duo?

[Levendis]

Hi. I would love to get your advice on whether to get my first NAS or stick with using external drives.

Currently i have a 2011 macbookair, which has a thunderbolt port, but no ethernet port, usb3.0, nor firewire port. I could get these ports only by buying an applecinema thunderbolt screen for around $900.
I have about 600gb of photos and music on an 4yr old external firewire disk.

Requirement for new storage solution:
- space for about 2tb of data over the next few years
- scheduled backups with versioning support (eg to protect against my kid from deleting then saving client presentations that i have worked on for hours, which happens more often to me than hard drive failures)
- speed - (the photo files that i edit are usually 20-50mB per file)
- less space/clutter due to extremely small home office
- a nice to have would be ability to access all files remotely at least in emergencies, but i only have internet upload speed of about 0.2mB/s.
- ability to share files with ipad or other devices at home would be neat but not critical.

I was initially thinking of trying a Synopogy two bay drive, but the store clerk told me that perhaps a WD thunderbolt duo hd would be a better solution because of much higher speed (around 120mB/s compared to around 60mB/s for the small Nas) plus i could configure the the duo hd as two separate disks, store my data in drive A, then have the macbook air run Time Machine and back up the data in drive B together with the macbook air internal SSD.

Would you experts agree with this assessment? Also would u know if i set up the duo this way, if drive A suffers a failure, whether drive B would remain usable so i could use the Time machine backups there to reconstruct the data by inserting a new disk into Bay A?
Many thanks.

 

[teknojnky]

I think your only realistic option is to stick with another external drive similar to your existing one, be it thunderbolt or usb 3.

unless you have a real need to have a shared network drive, it sounds like you need to continue use direct attached storage.

I suspect a direct attached usb2 or 3 drive will still be faster than a gbit duo drive for managing photo collections, and usb would be way faster than trying to access a NAS over wifi.

A usb3 ext drive will be cheaper (and slower) upfront than a TB drive, but if you do plan to get a cinema display or other TB docking station at a later date, once you have a usb 3 port it should be just as fast as TB would have been.

So really it depends if you want to spend more money upfront for a TB drive, or some time later for a TB/usb3 docking station and/or dongle.