Anyone bought or built a NAS (Network Attached Storage)

[savwar]

Hey guys, have any of you bought or built one?

I think i need to get one sorted sometime soon.

 

Currently I have about 7 Harddrives, with about 10TB of data at least. Nothing is doubled currently (I do have my serato library backed up online with Backblaze, but thats not really practical for everything.)

I end up copying to USBs and shit and then playing from those on the TV which is just getting too annoying.

 

And obviously not everything needs to be in two places, just photos, music, docs, and important shit. So expandable would probably be good, enough bays, to get started now, and then expand if i need.

 

I'm trying to get rid of everything unnecessary on those and reduce my data needs (which is working but feels almost like a waste of time, and therefore money)

 

NEEDS:

I have a PC Laptop and a Macbook that need backing up to (have the mac time machined on a small external currently)

Missus' Macbook too

I'd like to have a media player option of some sort running on the NAS possibly or at least having my samsung tv be able to play from one source (as it does have some kind of networking features i think, it's pretty new...)

File transfer & over the Wifi between laptops and the NAS, media files playing over wifi too i suppose.

It'd be handy if it fit in the closed cupboard under the TV, but i don't know if that's optimum for airflow.

Access from out of the house would be handy.

Low noise.

Low energy.

 

What do you think?

Go the homebuild way or just get something like this?

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS216se-Bay-Desktop-Enclosure/dp/B014SKVQR8/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1536778890&sr=1-3&keywords=NAS+2+bay

 

I'm not sure about a budget.

Don't really want to spend a fortune but dont really know what i need to be spending yet i guess.

 

 

 

[djdiggla]

The IT guy at work took the old Dell Optiplex I had and built me one. It was pretty loud and I managed to deleted a TB of movies off one of the drives so I stopped using it. It lost alot of it's purpose when streaming music and video came to be so ubiquitous. I'd probably still be using it tho at least a little if I hadn't fucked that shit up. If I ever have a room that's just a studio I'd set it back up for occasional use--like you I have loads of HDs... kinda ridiculous. But it's too loud to be running all the time.

[Flexinoodle]

Got two 8TB 2x4 each, slowly encoding my vinyl so that i can sell it and not have to carry that heavy shit ever again lol.

[joeClockwork]

I bought an HP Microserver from a guy at work. It has four bays and runs Windows 10 on an additional SSD that I tucked in the top, above all the disks. I've created two folders for me and my wife and we connect to it with a PC laptop, an iMac and a Macbook. It connects to my router via a LAN cable but apparently WiFi also works, which I was surprised to hear. So far, so good. It's nice and quiet.

 

Instead of hardware RAID I use a thing called StableBit DrivePool. You add all of your drives to the pool and you can choose which folders you want to mirror. This frees up more space as you don't have to commit to mirroring entire disks (the idea is that you mirror valuable folders containing photos, etc and don't bother with stuff that you can easily download again).

 

It handles load balancing and redundancy, so if one of the disks craps out it'll fail over to one of the good ones. You can also use the SSD as a cache for quicker transfer of data.

 

It's $30 and you can trial it for 30 weeks. I ended up buying it because it seems to do what I need.

 

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool

 

One downside is that it takes hours to move files and folders around on the server if you do it via a mapped network drive on one of the client machines. It seems to copy the data to the client and back to the server again. It's fine when you RDP onto the server and do it but if one of your 'users' wants to move a load of photos around, they're better off asking you to do it!

 

I haven't looked into automating backups from my PC and Mac. That's the next thing on my list.

 

Would I recommend it? Yes, but only because it seems to work and I haven't tested any alternatives.

[savwar]

I bought an HP Microserver from a guy at work. It has four bays and runs Windows 10 on an additional SSD that I tucked in the top, above all the disks. I've created two folders for me and my wife and we connect to it with a PC laptop, an iMac and a Macbook. It connects to my router via a LAN cable but apparently WiFi also works, which I was surprised to hear. So far, so good. It's nice and quiet.

 

Instead of hardware RAID I use a thing called StableBit DrivePool. You add all of your drives to the pool and you can choose which folders you want to mirror. This frees up more space as you don't have to commit to mirroring entire disks (the idea is that you mirror valuable folders containing photos, etc and don't bother with stuff that you can easily download again).

 

It handles load balancing and redundancy, so if one of the disks craps out it'll fail over to one of the good ones. You can also use the SSD as a cache for quicker transfer of data.

 

It's $30 and you can trial it for 30 weeks. I ended up buying it because it seems to do what I need.

 

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool

 

One downside is that it takes hours to move files and folders around on the server if you do it via a mapped network drive on one of the client machines. It seems to copy the data to the client and back to the server again. It's fine when you RDP onto the server and do it but if one of your 'users' wants to move a load of photos around, they're better off asking you to do it!

 

I haven't looked into automating backups from my PC and Mac. That's the next thing on my list.

 

Would I recommend it? Yes, but only because it seems to work and I haven't tested any alternatives.

 

thanks a million man, i'll have a look at that Stable bit program