I needed a new NAS box at home. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage by the way and in short it is a box that you plug into your network where you put one or more hard drives into so that everyone on your network can get access to the data stored on said NAS. I had been using a D-Link DNS-323 NAS with 1TB of storage for years. But I needed more storage than that. So I want on a mission to get a NAS box that I could grow into. After some research, I settled on the QNAP TS-431:
The QNAP TS-431 is a NAS box that allows you to put four hard drives into it. From there, you can configure them in the following ways:
- Single Disk: You use one disk and serve it up to those on your network.
- JBOD: This is where you use multiple hard drives, but not in a RAID configuration, thus providing neither redundancy nor performance improvements. Hard drives may be handled independently as separate logical volumes, or they may be combined into a single logical volume using fancy software tricks. If you go this route (which I wouldn’t except for specific use cases), make sure that your data is always backed up.
- RAID 0: This is when you take two or more disks and combine them to get large amounts of storage. For example, if you have four 1TB drives, you can use RAID 0 to get 4TB of storage. But if one drive fails, your data is gone. If you go this route (which I wouldn’t except for specific use cases), make sure that your data is always backed up.
- RAID 1: This consists of an exact copy a set of data on two or more disks. A classic RAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks. If one drive fails, your data is safe on the other drive.
- RAID 5: This consists of three or more drives where they are combined to provide a single storage volume. To protect your data, roughly 2/3 of each drive is used for data and roughly 1/3 of each drive is used for what is called parity information which can help to rebuild your data in the event of the failure of a single drive.
- RAID 6: This extends RAID 5 by adding more parity information to better help rebuild your drive in the event of a failure of a single disk. But you give up storage space in exchange.
- RAID 10: This is a combination of RAID 0 and 1 with the purpose being to provide additional redundancy.
- RAID 5 + spare: This is a RAID 5 setup with a spare drive that can step in to automatically replace a failed drive. In a classic RAID 5 setup, a user has to physically swap the drive out and start the recovery process.
This is the sort of data storage and protection options that until the last few years, only big businesses got access to after spending a pile of cash. These days, anyone has access to this level of data storage and protection.
So, in addition to the TS-431, I got my hands on four 1TB Western Digital RED drives. Why these drives? Unlike desktop hard drives, they’re specifically designed to run in a NAS box 24/7. Thus they won’t fail in this use case. My plan was to take all four drive and configure them for RAID 5. That would give me roughly 2.7TB of storage. Installing the drives into the NAS is easy. You have to put the drives into some plastic trays that allow you to remove and replace drive while the NAS is running. Simply get a screwdriver and screw the drives into the trays using the supplied screws.
Setup was kind of interesting. I tried to go to https://start.qnap.com to run through their automated setup. However that turned into a #fail when it tried to go to https://install.qnap.com and came back with an error 502 which is a bad gateway. In short, it couldn’t reach the website that I needed to go to next. So I resorted to plan “B”. I used a piece of software called QNAP Finder which comes in PC and Mac flavors to access and set up the NAS box. I’m glad that I went this route as I was able to configure the NAS exactly the way I wanted it, including the following:
- This NAS box supports NFS for LINUX, AFP for Mac, and CIFS/SMB for Windows. That’s important as using the right network protocol can affect the speed of your NAS. Since we’re a Mac only home, I turned off everything but AFP.
- It has two USB ports in the back and one in the front, so I configured one of the rear ones for a USB laser printer and the other for a UPS. The latter was configured to shut down if power goes out for more than 15 minutes, and start back up once power is restored. The former is being shared to all users of the home network.
- It has two Gigabit Ethernet ports which I configured for Active Backup. Active Backup uses just one adapter, but it switches to the second adapter if the first adapter fails. I plugged one Ethernet cable into my router and one into my 4 port switch. There are other configurations that you can use to maximize speed or redundancy.
- I had to update to the latest QNAP Turbo NAS System software (version 4.2 build 20151118 in my case) which makes this NAS box easy to manage using a web browser. The TS-431 has an iTunes like app stores where one can download additional “apps” to add functionality. Beyond the included Photo Station, Music Station and Download Station, apps such as Surveillance Station (Network surveillance and video management system) Notes Station (private cloud based notebooks) and Cloud Link (Remote access service) are available. Also available are developer tools such as Python, Perl, phpMyAdmin and Mantis to name a few. To view a complete list of available apps, visit QNAP’s App Center web page.
- I set it up to notify myself and my wife via e-mail if anything bad happened to the NAS. I could have used push notifications via the QNAP app for iPhone, but I figured that using e-mail was good enough.
- I turned off the network trash can to get additional storage as this NAS is simply being used to back up all the Macs in the house to and serve up media.
So, once it was set up and I had copied my data over, I got a chance to do some experimenting. Since I have a Roku 3, I tried out a Roku channel called Qmedia which allows you to stream media from your TS-431 to your Roku. Setting it up is dead easy as described here and it works well as long as you have media that the Roku supports. For example, the Roku 3 doesn’t play .avi files. Now the TS-431 does have the ability to transcode media from one format to another. But I’m not taking advantage of that as it cannot do that in real time and this isn’t why I got this NAS box. If real time transcoding is important to you, QNAP makes other NAS boxes that have this ability. Another thing that I should note is that the TS-431 supports DLNA and AirPlay streaming so you can get your media displayed on almost any device. Finally, you can create your own private cloud so that your files are always accessible via the Internet. However, I did not leverage this feature as I want my files to stay behind my firewall.
But the real question is, how does this setup work in terms of speed? Very well in fact. My old NAS took about 4 hours and 25 minutes to do the weekly back up my MacBook Pro. Now it takes 2 hours and 40 minutes. That performance is pretty good. Another note is that this NAS is very quiet which is important for home use.
What’s the price of this setup? I paid $395 CDN for the QNAP TS-431. I also paid $89 CDN for each of the four 1TB Western Digital Red hard drives. That works out to a total of $751 CDN. If you need a NAS box for home use and want to get the same level of data security while being able to serve up media to your devices and so much more, this is a very good option. Check it out at your local computer retailer.