If you’re someone who needs to store things like photos and video someplace other than your computer, you have two choices usually. You can either use some sort of external hard disk that you connect via USB or ThunderBolt cable, or you can use a NAS which stands for network attached storage. I would like to argue that you should be using the latter? Why? There’s a few reasons why you should. But to explain that, I have to start with what a NAS is.
Network Attached Storage in short, a box that contains one or more hard drives that instead of plugging it into your computer, you plug it into your network. By doing so, it is constantly available to anyone on your network. More sophisticated NAS units have the ability to do things like download files for you, act as a multimedia hub, segregate files on a per user basis, or act as a backup device for any computer on your network. As you can see it is very versatile. All of this is available at a price point that makes a NAS a compelling option for those who need some or all of this functionality. But there’s one compelling reason why a NAS is a better option. Data protection. NAS units are often designed to be fault tolerant so that they can survive the loss of a hard drive due to failure. That’s something that your average external hard drive isn’t designed to do. Finally, you can get to your data from any computer on your network if you have to. And in some cases, even outside your network if you configure it to do that.
To illustrate how useful a NAS is, I’ll use this example. I recently set up a NAS for a customer of mine who wanted the following:
- Backup for all the computers on their network.
- A media center for all the movies that they “acquired” over the years.
- Segregated storage for all three members of their family.
They left it to me to figure out how to get there. After figuring out what their budget was and how much they wanted to store both in terms of backup as well as multimedia files, plus adding 50% for growth, I came up with this:
- A QNAP TS-451 4-bay NAS. This specific model is designed for multimedia activities as it will transcode (or convert) different media formats on the fly to whatever format a device needs. That way you can have an Apple TV or a Roku and all your media will work on it.
- 4 x 2TB Western Digital Red drives. These drives are specifically designed for NAS use as they can take the unique demands that a NAS places on a hard drive. Now you could save a few bucks and use regular desktop drives, but if you value your data, I wouldn’t.
This setup would give the users around 6TB of usable storage. More than enough for their needs. Once I set that up, here’s what I did next:
- There were three Windows 10 PCs in the house. So I was able to use the built in backup tools to back up each PC to the NAS. This is actually very simple to set up and I would point you towards this Lifehacker article for directions on how to do this.
- They had a Roku 3 in their home. So that was very easy to set up. QNAP has a channel for Roku devices that you can use. Once I installed it and set it up, they could access all their pictures, music and video on their Roku.
- Using QTS, I was able to create private folders for each member of the family. Before all the parents out there say “you mean I can’t see what my kids are up to?” Don’t worry. Using the admin account that is built into the NAS, you can see everything.
Other than my time, the total cost for this was $1100. Now that does sound expensive relative to the cost of an external hard drive. But I would argue that you’re getting capabilities that are not just scale-able, but were not even available to the average user. Thus this is money well spent because it is an investment of sorts. That’s why I say that you should consider a NAS if you need to serve up files on your network or protect your data. All things considered, it’s a very cost effective and powerful way to do those things.
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This entry was posted on May 30, 2016 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Why You Should Consider Having A NAS In Your Home
If you’re someone who needs to store things like photos and video someplace other than your computer, you have two choices usually. You can either use some sort of external hard disk that you connect via USB or ThunderBolt cable, or you can use a NAS which stands for network attached storage. I would like to argue that you should be using the latter? Why? There’s a few reasons why you should. But to explain that, I have to start with what a NAS is.
Network Attached Storage in short, a box that contains one or more hard drives that instead of plugging it into your computer, you plug it into your network. By doing so, it is constantly available to anyone on your network. More sophisticated NAS units have the ability to do things like download files for you, act as a multimedia hub, segregate files on a per user basis, or act as a backup device for any computer on your network. As you can see it is very versatile. All of this is available at a price point that makes a NAS a compelling option for those who need some or all of this functionality. But there’s one compelling reason why a NAS is a better option. Data protection. NAS units are often designed to be fault tolerant so that they can survive the loss of a hard drive due to failure. That’s something that your average external hard drive isn’t designed to do. Finally, you can get to your data from any computer on your network if you have to. And in some cases, even outside your network if you configure it to do that.
To illustrate how useful a NAS is, I’ll use this example. I recently set up a NAS for a customer of mine who wanted the following:
They left it to me to figure out how to get there. After figuring out what their budget was and how much they wanted to store both in terms of backup as well as multimedia files, plus adding 50% for growth, I came up with this:
This setup would give the users around 6TB of usable storage. More than enough for their needs. Once I set that up, here’s what I did next:
Other than my time, the total cost for this was $1100. Now that does sound expensive relative to the cost of an external hard drive. But I would argue that you’re getting capabilities that are not just scale-able, but were not even available to the average user. Thus this is money well spent because it is an investment of sorts. That’s why I say that you should consider a NAS if you need to serve up files on your network or protect your data. All things considered, it’s a very cost effective and powerful way to do those things.
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This entry was posted on May 30, 2016 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.