[RickFLM4]

If you have more than a TB, they have DropBox for business. I like it better than the Synology server I was using or the WD before Synology. I keep a local copy of files I access frequently on my hard drive and it syncs with DropBox continuously, as long as I'm connected to the Internet. There are other files I store on DropBox without syncing so they don't take HD space. In any event, everything is continuously backed up, easy to access anywhere I am, safer than a device in my home (redundancy / not worried about home theft, hurricanes, fire, etc.) and requires no effort to manage. Just another option that may or may not work for you.

[mccannable]

Originally Posted by RickFLM4

If you have more than a TB, they have DropBox for business. I like it better than the Synology server I was using or the WD before Synology. I keep a local copy of files I access frequently on my hard drive and it syncs with DropBox continuously, as long as I'm connected to the Internet. There are other files I store on DropBox without syncing so they don't take HD space. In any event, everything is continuously backed up, easy to access anywhere I am, safer than a device in my home (redundancy / not worried about home theft, hurricanes, fire, etc.) and requires no effort to manage. Just another option that may or may not work for you.

I will look into it.

[mccannable]

Originally Posted by UncleWede

Just send the time machine back to before it fails, and you can fix it???

Maybe I do not understand time machine. I want to full back ups if our Mac. I have only skimmed info about time machine. I will research more.

[crimson49er]

i have a synology 412+ and it's been awesome. it's rock solid and has good app support as well.

[P1]

Cannot go wrong with Synology...

[mccannable]

So we got the Qnap 231 as I'm only using it to back up and store files. Setup was doable but I have nothing to compare it to. It's doing a massive time machine backup so when that's done I can get some idea of read/write speeds. The mobile apps seams weak and "I" cannot get them to work outside my home network.

I will say I struggled a bit with the set up they could benifit from a better quick set up guide. Again I have no other reference point.

[gtron]

any suggestions for a 1u rack mount?

[Maestro]

First, you need to look at the software that comes with the NAS. It is not all about the hardware, grant it this is important but the Software is what makes a NAS useful.

I put in a Netgaer Ready NAS with Readycloud, why, it support Mac, and PC as well as has the ability to support Streaming services like DLNA and Itunes Streaming and can act like a timemachine drive as well. It also have dropbox feature that allows you to share content with others if you like and limit their access to your NAS. You and even set it up to sync a folder on mutiply computers to have the same content as the NAS. It also allows you to attach another drive to the NAS to back up important files to yeah another drive. Lastly, it has the ability to be accessed from anywhere on the web via a website or a builtin app on your mac or PC. Netgear does not charge for this service, some companies charge monthly fee to remote access into a NAS.

It is also important to mirror the drives not just one large storage array. You can use a NAS in various RAID modes, and some people just use their NAS as one long drive and if on drive fails and drives do fail you loose the content on that drive. If you mirror the drives if one fails all your stuff in on the second drive and you can put in a new drive and it will copy all your files to the new drive.

I have nothing really against WD, however, they are not known for enterprise classes drives. Seagate and Hitachi make the best enterprise class drives which are highly reliable. For this reason I stayed away from WD products.

I looked at all the stand alone NAS from a number of companies which allow you to buy the housing and controller and let you decide on what drives you want to use. I picked the Neargear product becuase of their software features (I will tell you none of them are great getting a NAS set up correctly beyond the basic features including ReadyNAS). Once you learn the quirks of ReadyNAS is a good product and works well and their techsupport is good. I help them debug the Readycloud software for the MAC during their beta stage and it works well.

The most important part of the NAS are the drives you decide to put in them. I ended up put in two 6TB Seagate Nearline 7200 RPM drive into NAS.

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard...acity-3-5-hdd/

The important part of these drives is the fact they are design to run 24/7 and many people put cheap desktop computer drives into their NAS and then wonder why they have issue with the drives. Desktop are only 8hr/40hr per week drives they are exspect to be shut down each day. You want your NAS running 24/7 so you can access it when you need it. Make sure you spend the money on the Drives and get good drives, otherwise, you will have issue you do not want to deal with. Of the 6TB i have which is mirrored, i have about 3T on them today with personal files and all my video, pictures and music on them and also have an attached USB 3TB drive which backups the most important files so if there is emergance I grab that drive and run.

[dreamingat30fps]

Originally Posted by Maestro

I have nothing really against WD, however, they are not known for enterprise classes drives. Seagate and Hitachi make the best enterprise class drives which are highly reliable. For this reason I stayed away from WD products.

Interesting you say that as I have had the complete opposite experience. I have never had a WD drive die on me (knock on cyber wood) but I have had a couple Segate drive die. My buddy who works in IT says they no longer buy Segate drives either because of this. He says he is replacing all the Segate drives with WD Reds as they die.

[EALm4]

Originally Posted by crimson49er

i have a synology 412+ and it's been awesome. it's rock solid and has good app support as well.

Is there an app for cloud functionality? So when I visit family I can log in and download a movie

[Darkfiber]

Originally Posted by EALm4

Is there an app for cloud functionality? So when I visit family I can log in and download a movie

Synology and dont look back.

awesome support, lots of updates, 2 factor authentication, apps, software on the nas (Proxy server, video surveilance, vpn... you name it)


https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/mobile

[isakhnov]

Qnap for a home or small business, two or four bay with mirrored RAID and intel proc. This is what I ended getting (two bay) and sticking 4gb ram left from my laptop upgrade. Upgrade the switch if yours is old to get max bandwidth and it will do the regular NAS job well. It comes with the sync software that is barely adequate as I had to change my patterns to get it properly working across all of my computers (and I had to go on a preview firmware to get there). I have roughly a T of photos and half of that of home videos that it's handling at the moment. Lots of other toys that you may find interesting, I'm still waiting for free time to get video surveillance to set up.

[amgraham]

I'll vouch for Synology as well, though I know that Qnap is one of the better vendors in this space as well. As a senior IT "architect" on the technical side, not management, I'm tapped way to frequently for "friends and family" IT consulting and support. I've helped probably six or eight families and/or businesses set these (Synology) up. They always go smoothly, they're reliable and everybody has been pleased. I like them for several reasons:

- Legacy support. They do a great job of making sure that new/future versions of their IOS is/are supported on hardware that's 2, 3, 5 years old. So many vendors in this space release a couple of updates in the year the product is released, and that's it... Want the newer or updated features? Buy a new unit.
- Apps... Many, many OEM and third party apps are available, tested, certified, etc.
- Backup/DR options. It's one thing to dump files to an external drive. Thieves and flames do not care if your "backup" is onsite. It needs to be offsite. Personally, at home, I backup my NAS about once-a-month and stick that drive in a safe at my folks. I can live without the data for a day, or two, or a while. If getting access to that data promptly is important to you, Synology has great options. I helped set up a friend/business owner with two units. One at home, one at the office. Block level replication between the two ensures that if the office burns down, or the thing takes a dump, the other is online and ready to go. ...or you can replicate or back up to a cloud service. Naturally, in my professional position, replicating data off-site but on our network daily or even hourly is critical.
- The Synology Hybrid Raid is a cool feature if you start with smaller drives then plan to upgrade later, when you actually need the space. You can mix and match drive sizes while still maintaining redundancy and parity. Start with four 1TBs then when you need the space, through a couple 4TBs in there... then another couple later...

The only thing I'd love to see come out in this space is deduplication, at the storage processor level. We have Pure all-SSD arrays at work and I'm getting about 6:1 dedupe across 250 SQL VMs. It's really what makes going all-SSD work out, financially. Sure, Windows 2012 (R2) can dedupe at the file level but chunk-level is where it's at... Unfortunately, the garbage-collect and processing required for this requires more resources than is available on NAS units in this class.

[crimson49er]

Originally Posted by EALm4

Is there an app for cloud functionality? So when I visit family I can log in and download a movie

there's a few different apps actually, Synology ones & 3rd party.

[Maestro]

Originally Posted by dreamingat30fps

Interesting you say that as I have had the complete opposite experience. I have never had a WD drive die on me (knock on cyber wood) but I have had a couple Segate drive die. My buddy who works in IT says they no longer buy Segate drives either because of this. He says he is replacing all the Segate drives with WD Reds as they die.

As I said I do not have an issue with WD, they make good drives, however, they make good PC drives and most peoples experience as with their laptops or desktop machine not a server class performance drive. When you buy a WD drive they all made and tested the same way, so whether it is an OEM drive for Dell or you buy it at newegg or somewhere similar you can get a good drive. Seagate and Hitachi on the other hand make good OEM drives for like HP or Apple because both those companies required drives to meet their spec for their computers. The Drives which do not meet and OEM requirement are dumped on the open market for the adverage user to buy or those companies who do not care about quality. Knowing this I would nevr buy a Seagate or Hitachi drive which are not a OEM labled drive. Dell and the other asian PC companies do not care all that much about quality it all about price and this is why WD shows up in those products more than Seagate does.

That is for your generall PC. In this case I was talking about Enterprise class drives and Seagate makes all their enterprise drives to the same quality and preformance standards. These drives are tested to a much higher level than standard PC drive and they design to work in harser environment. The other thing they did in the last 5 yrs due to past issues was to not make an OEM grade enterprise drive and the general available drive. They has some quality issue with the general drive by their OEM customer demand that their drives be replace since they did not want to risk an issue showing up later.

WD has not gotten to this quality level, and I would not put a PC drive in to a NAS, your are asking for issue since those drives are not design to run 24/7 which is what your NAS will be doing.

Lastly, unlike most IT people who work on desk top machine and have some sort of experience good or bad with one drive or another. I worked in the technology industry and we deployed products with Drives and over a period of 10 yrs we put 30M drives into the market or both WD and Seagate and I know their performance over a much larger popluation than a few IT people might have.

[Flying Ace]

Sorry, had to post this

[gtron]

so i'm the only one with a rack in my place? i can't believe that. :|

someone tag me if they have any decent rackmount nas suggestions that aren't enterprise level and thousands of dollars.

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by gtron

so i'm the only one with a rack in my place? i can't believe that. :|

someone tag me if they have any decent rackmount nas suggestions that aren't enterprise level and thousands of dollars.

Nope. Here's one of my racks in my basement server room.

[dreamingat30fps]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

Nope. Here's one of my racks in my basement server room.

Dayum thats a lot o porn!

[meirvin]

Also a photographer and love my drobo. no hiccups in 5 years just put bigger and now cheaper drives in it last year as I keep my over 300 movie collection on it too

[davis449]

Originally Posted by Maestro

As I said I do not have an issue with WD, they make good drives, however, they make good PC drives and most peoples experience as with their laptops or desktop machine not a server class performance drive. When you buy a WD drive they all made and tested the same way, so whether it is an OEM drive for Dell or you buy it at newegg or somewhere similar you can get a good drive. Seagate and Hitachi on the other hand make good OEM drives for like HP or Apple because both those companies required drives to meet their spec for their computers. The Drives which do not meet and OEM requirement are dumped on the open market for the adverage user to buy or those companies who do not care about quality. Knowing this I would nevr buy a Seagate or Hitachi drive which are not a OEM labled drive. Dell and the other asian PC companies do not care all that much about quality it all about price and this is why WD shows up in those products more than Seagate does.

That is for your generall PC. In this case I was talking about Enterprise class drives and Seagate makes all their enterprise drives to the same quality and preformance standards. These drives are tested to a much higher level than standard PC drive and they design to work in harser environment. The other thing they did in the last 5 yrs due to past issues was to not make an OEM grade enterprise drive and the general available drive. They has some quality issue with the general drive by their OEM customer demand that their drives be replace since they did not want to risk an issue showing up later.

WD has not gotten to this quality level, and I would not put a PC drive in to a NAS, your are asking for issue since those drives are not design to run 24/7 which is what your NAS will be doing.

Lastly, unlike most IT people who work on desk top machine and have some sort of experience good or bad with one drive or another. I worked in the technology industry and we deployed products with Drives and over a period of 10 yrs we put 30M drives into the market or both WD and Seagate and I know their performance over a much larger popluation than a few IT people might have.

LOL! I run WD Green's in my server in RAID 5...'cause I'm a cheap ass. I lose a drive about every two years. Swap in another and off I go.

Now, when I go NAS here soon, I will be using Reds.

[UncleWede]

A rackable Synology with no drives isn't that much. Then you pick/choose whether you need enterprise drives, and how many. One thing I liked about Synology was that if I didn't fill all the bays, the next time I had funds I could get another drive and it would just add it to the array.

All at work, I don't do this shiite at home.