Whats the best way to setup my 219P for SOHO w/ Macs

[piotr01]

Right now i have the 219P synchronizing two 1.5gb drives for raid 1 (taking forever, is that normal?), and I was wondering if maybe I should have done raid 0 instead.

1) I was planning to hook up an external esata drive to the the 219P as well for regular backup redundancy, so i'm thinking if I add an external drive to backup the NAS i might as well use raid 0 for better performance?

1.5) How would I go about backing up the NAS onto another external drive via esata? Do i just drag the files over everytime or can i set it up to copy everything on its own every once in awhile? Any recommendations for such a esata enclosure/drive?

2) How much faster would the raid 0 be over raid 1 on my small network? Does it make sense for me to do raid 0 or raid 1?

I was planning on using the 219P with the time machine software on all our macs.

3)Once the drives are done synchronizing will the NAS pop up automatically on my macs or do I have to do something else as well?

Thanks! -Pete

 

[thiggins]

Right now i have the 219P synchronizing two 1.5gb drives for raid 1 (taking forever, is that normal?), and I was wondering if maybe I should have done raid 0 instead.

What is "forever"? Resync for two 1 TB drives in RAID 1 took me 3.5 hours.

1) I was planning to hook up an external esata drive to the the 219P as well for regular backup redundancy, so i'm thinking if I add an external drive to backup the NAS i might as well use raid 0 for better performance?

You can do this. But performance gain is minimal vs. the increased risk of data loss.

1.5) How would I go about backing up the NAS onto another external drive via esata? Do i just drag the files over everytime or can i set it up to copy everything on its own every once in awhile? Any recommendations for such a esata enclosure/drive?

Use the built-in backup function. It includes a schedule function.

2) How much faster would the raid 0 be over raid 1 on my small network? Does it make sense for me to do raid 0 or raid 1?

Minimal. Check the File Copy charts. I see about 4 MB/s gain in write speed and ~10 MB/s for read.

I was planning on using the 219P with the time machine software on all our macs.

QNAPs currently don't have native Apple Time machine support. But there are two workarounds.

3)Once the drives are done synchronizing will the NAS pop up automatically on my macs or do I have to do something else as well?[/quote]If you are rebuilding a previously valid, but damaged volume, the volume should be available during rebuild. If you are building a volume for the first time, then you may have to create shares before you can browse to them. Check your manual.