NAS for home office

[jsm4182]

I'm looking for a NAS solution for my home office. Two of us live in the same house and need to be able to access the drive from anywhere. We both use macs. We are a web development studio, will mostly be using the NAS to share photoshop and Microsoft office files.

I've been looking into Synology, Buffalo, WD, or building a computer to run FreeNAS.

Anyone have any experience or suggestions for using a NAS in this type of working environment?

Edit: RAID is a requirement. Also considering Mac Mini server.

 

[CaptainWD]

I'm looking for a NAS solution for my home office. Two of us live in the same house and need to be able to access the drive from anywhere. We both use macs. We are a web development studio, will mostly be using the NAS to share photoshop and Microsoft office files.

I've been looking into Synology, Buffalo, WD, or building a computer to run FreeNAS.

Anyone have any experience or suggestions for using a NAS in this type of working environment?

Hey jsm4182,

From the WD line I could suggest a few of the devices, depending on what features and capacity are you looking for:
WD My Cloud: This is the most basic NAS which is great if you are looking for a single-drive device that is used only for sharing files. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=K6rOoW

WD My Cloud Mirror: This one has pretty much the same features and functionality as the one above but has two drives inside and supports RAID1, RAID0, JBOD and JBOD Span. Using this NAS in a RAID mode should give you a good speed boost (RAID1 would be just a small increase in read speeds but would offer redundancy). http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=EGs9hb

WD My Cloud EX2: This one has some additional features such as third-party apps support, more powerful CPU and more RAM. It also has some security features such as volume encryption, UPS support and others. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=WLbrwf

WD My Cloud EX2100: This NAS has some of the features above improved and some other ones added. http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=0PK3jz

All of these should work perfectly fine for simple file access over the network and the Internet and should be pretty easy to set up and manage. They also support Time Machine backup.

Again, for the simple data access pretty much any NAS would do the job (even a larger HDD that's connected to a router )

Captain_WD.

 

[ColdCase]

My experience is NAS for this application leaves a lot to be desired. A MAC running OSX server is so much more flexible and capable... and easier to set up. I was convinced by NAS fanboys a year or so ago, but have regretted that decision ever since. My NAS is pretty much relegated to book end use.

There are numerous security holes as well as performance bottlenecks. OK for home use, but you will quickly grow tired of the constraints... just saying.

 

[Altemose]

Synology makes great hardware, but the software on some of their products is substandard. Their newer NAS's are good though...

A Mac Mini running OS X Server works great and is a whole lot more flexible than any NAS device. It does not even need to be a recent model. A person who I was helping setup their network used a 2009 Mini for their business, and it is exceeding all expectations!

 

[jsm4182]

The Mac Mini option was another route I was looking at going. With the way I would want it said up its the most expensive option, I forgot to mention I was looking for RAID mirroring so with the mini I would also get an external RAID drive. I was also worried about setting up to access outside the office. How hard is that to set up? Would I need a static IP address? What about accessing files from iOS devices?

 

[Altemose]

The Mac Mini option was another route I was looking at going. With the way I would want it said up its the most expensive option, I forgot to mention I was looking for RAID mirroring so with the mini I would also get an external RAID drive. I was also worried about setting up to access outside the office. How hard is that to set up? Would I need a static IP address? What about accessing files from iOS devices?

You can either use VPN or straight AFP or SMB to connect outside the LAN. The latter has security issues to consider as you are opening ports fully. For iOS you would use WebDAV.