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basic questions about network / ethernet storage drives etc

wfriedwald

wfriedwald

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 1, 2017
554
48
Mac Mini 2018
OS Monterey 12.3.1
startup drive 250GB SSD, 152GB currently available
32 GB RAM, rarely am I using more than 15-20 GB maximum at any point

Okay, I have been having a lot of problems with crashes etc (ZOOM + VLC = crash!)
rather than recap all of them, you can check out some forum threads below.



A few friends have told me I just have too many USB devices.

Typically, I am using USB for:
Keyboard
trackpad
Microphone
camera
USB audio output device
+
sometimes about 3-4 external storage hard drives
(out of a total of about 30 - but I rarely have more than 4 powered on at the same time, though about 20 or so are permanently connected via powered USB3 hubs)

So: It has been suggested that for the external storage, I move away from using the USB3 ports and instead start to install NETWORK / ETHERNET drive enclosures.

This is a whole new area for me!

* it seems very expensive (possibly worth it, of course), ethernet / network drive enclosures are two or three times more expensives than USB3 drive enclosures / solutions etc.

* is there any kind of a device (adaptor / cable / whatever) out there that enables one to connect a USB3 drive to an ethernet port? That would obviously save a lot of work / time / money!

As I always I am grateful for feedback / suggestions!


Thanks!

w






recap below:



and yesterday I asked a question about USB firmware and got some good answers, which led to reinstalling MAC OS Monterey:


(and also to get a visual look at my system from the outside, I started a photo gallery here:)
USB JUNGLE (FLICKR photo album)
flic.kr

USB Jungle

Explore this photo album by Will Friedwald on Flickr!
flic.kr flic.kr
 
Last edited:
You definitely have an interesting setup, the cables alone would drive me crazy.

I think long term a move to network attached storage would be better for you and cutting back on the amount of drives you have.

I’m curious what your current backup setup is, are you backing up the 20 plus drives you have?
 
it is confusing! Yes! The startup drive is completely backed up. some of the others are backed up, but not all - the most valuable / irreplaceable stuff is backed up. Yes!

Do you use network attached storage? What has your experience been like?

I am looking at a Synology DiskStation DS418 (4 bays) for $369 on Amazon & NewEgg.

I see that there are two ports marked USB3 - is there any chance that those can be used to attach two USB3 external drives? Then I can get six attached at once, which would make it much more cost effective for me. yes! (At least I am hoping that's what they're for.)

thanks for the feedback!

w
 
Maybe network attached storage is right for you, maybe not. The big advantage of network attached storage is that the disks can be used by many computers on your network at once compared to USB which is plugged into one computer at a time. Also, a NAS box will typically implement some form of RAID to help reduce the risk of drive failure. The NAS box would be like your Mac Mini if you shared the attached drive over your network. There's more hardware and software involved in a NAS box compared to a USB adapter, thus the higher price. But keep in mind that most NAS boxes will want to format the directly attached drives to an internal format. You'd have to read the product documentation very carefully to determine whether you could plug a MAC-formatted drive into a NAS box and have it serve the drive directly on the network without reformatting. A NAS box likely wouldn't be able to do that if that's what you're looking for. For example, the product sheet you linked clearly states that the file system used by the internal drives will be ext4 (Linux). You might be able to plug in a USB disk formatted HFS+ to the two USB ports. But there are only 2 ports.
Why do you have do many drives now? Was it because you filled them up and bought more as you went? If so, maybe it would be better to buy larger capacity drives and consolidate your data onto fewer, larger disks. That's applicable whether you use USB storage or network storage.
 
mfram said:
Maybe network attached storage is right for you, maybe not. The big advantage of network attached storage is that the disks can be used by many computers on your network at once compared to USB which is plugged into one computer at a time. Also, a NAS box will typically implement some form of RAID to help reduce the risk of drive failure. The NAS box would be like your Mac Mini if you shared the attached drive over your network. There's more hardware and software involved in a NAS box compared to a USB adapter, thus the higher price. But keep in mind that most NAS boxes will want to format the directly attached drives to an internal format. You'd have to read the product documentation very carefully to determine whether you could plug a MAC-formatted drive into a NAS box and have it serve the drive directly on the network without reformatting. A NAS box likely wouldn't be able to do that if that's what you're looking for. For example, the product sheet you linked clearly states that the file system used by the internal drives will be ext4 (Linux). You might be able to plug in a USB disk formatted HFS+ to the two USB ports. But there are only 2 ports.
Why do you have do many drives now? Was it because you filled them up and bought more as you went? If so, maybe it would be better to buy larger capacity drives and consolidate your data onto fewer, larger disks. That's applicable whether you use USB storage or network storage.
Click to expand...

Thank you!

I am the only user of my network, although I have an older Mac Pro (2008) on the network that I use for various projects and a vintage MacBook air as well. But I live alone and I am the only user.

Ultimately RAID is a good idea. But in an attempt to ease into it gradually, I was hoping / planning just to use Network drives the same way I use USB drives. Independent of each other - that's what they call JBOD (Just a bunch of discs) right? I would handle backups myself, in the same semi-organized way that I do currently.

Question re Network Drive Formats: I was thinking (perhaps incorrectly) that I could still use Network drives in the same format as USB drives, ie, in basic Mac Format. (I guess that's "Mac OS Extended," right?)

Yes, I collect material and store it digitally. The collection keeps growing. Larger drives are a good idea, but the system slows down when I do what I want to do - ZOOM + VLC - even if there's only one or two USB3 drives powered on, so that might not help.


Thanks again for the feedback!

w
 
wfriedwald said:
Question re Network Drive Formats: I was thinking (perhaps incorrectly) that I could still use Network drives in the same format as USB drives, ie, in basic Mac Format. (I guess that's "Mac OS Extended," right?)
Click to expand...

Maybe think of it this way... the NAS is a small server. When you plug disks into it, that server is going to want the filesystem on the drive to be useful to its implementation. I'm willing to guess that most NAS boxes on the market will be implemented using a Linux environment. So they will want to use Linux-native filesystems on the drives used internally and will format them to that filesystem.

Once your MAC access the data storage pool over a network, the actual filesystem on the drives becomes irrelevant to your MAC because your MAC isn't reading the filesystem directly anymore. It's using a network filesystem protocol such as AFP or (most likely) SMB.

The goal of a NAS is to add storage to it in the form of blank drives and it present a pool of storage over the network that's abstracted away from the clients. The NAS can use RAID to help protect against drive failure at the expense of presenting less overall storage to the network clients. The goal of a NAS is generally not to take existing disks formatted in some format (NTFS, HFS, FAT, etc) and present those disks as-is over the network. At least, that's not the primary goal. So if you want to use a NAS for that, I suspect you'll be fighting an uphill battle.

Since you're talking about many TB of data, I'd suspect you will find a NAS useful in the long-term since they designed to efficiently serve out lots of storage space. But it doesn't sound to me like it will solve your immediate problem.

I guess you need to decide if you want to spend resources trying to solve your immediate problem or move toward a new solution and come up with a plan to transition your data away from individual drives and onto a NAS environment. Maybe the USB ports on the NAS can be useful at transitioning the data from the existing drives to the new NAS drives.
 
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thanks again for the most helpful advice.

Okay, so the drives in the bays are formatted in a special NAS format. I get it. So I can not swap them in an out, the way I could with drive bay enclosures connected via USB3 or eSATA (which I used a lot like ten years ago).

But regarding the USB ports on the NAS: those drives connected via those ports, they can still be in the traditional MAC OS EXTENDED file format? Now this is very useful info!

Thank you again!

w
 
looks interesting ... let me look into it.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Let me ponder: Is Thunderbolt3 essentially the same as USBC? I'm wondering if that would drag on the system the same way that USB3 might be doing. (of course, I haven't proved that yet... I'm going to have to do some tests to see.)

thank you for taking the trouble to look - let me poke around some. thanks very much!
 
OMG that's a lot of USB stuff! No wonder it doesn't work well!

In your case, might I suggest getting a big tower PC chassis, one with lots of drive bays, and then putting all the drives in it?

You seem quite handy so you can probably get your hands on a PC ATX motherboard & CPU & RAM quite easily & build the tower PC yourself. Doesn't need to be the latest & greatest, something from 2015 onwards is fine, as long as it runs an i3 or i5 chip. DDR3 RAM is fine too, doesn't need to be DDR4. 8GB is good. Put Windows or Linux on it.

You'll have more drives than the motherboard has SATA connectors, so get an add-in card that carries extra SATA connectors. They're quite cheap. The AXT motherboard will have several card slots so you can add several cards. If you need lots of cards, get an EATX motherboard which are bigger with more slots (possibly more expensive too). Make sure the CPU has an integrated GPU so you don't need to waste a card slot on a GPU.

You can put all this together quite cheaply, and there is a lot of used PC equipment available. No need to buy new. The SATA cables & add-in cards you might need to buy new, but they're cheap. The PC can then act as a file-server for you.

Use TeamViewer (free app) to log into the PC so that you can leave it in a cupboard without a monitor.

All nice and tidy, no more mess of cables!
 
@wfriedwald

You have several options depending on your background and desire
1. Buy an off the shelf OEM NAS. All of them support network file protocols, including TM. This is by far the easiest option.
Amazon NAS Storage
2. If you are DIY inclined and have an old x86_64 machine, you can install open source enterprise class NAS software from https://www.truenas.com.

Keep in mind several things
1. Never expose any NAS directly to the internet, regardless of the manufacturers claims of supporting remote access.
2. If you get a RAID (multiple disk) NAS, keep in mind that RAID is not a backup. RAID is resiliency.
3. Implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy to protect against hardware failure, data loss, or catastrophe

3 - copies of data (original + 2 copies)
2 - different types of media
1 - off site
 
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