Buying a new NAS Drive setup

[LastLine]

Hey all,

I'm looking at buying myself a new Networked Hard Drive very soon and I'm struggling with decision making at the minute so thought I'd throw out the question to people here and see what comes back.

As it stands at the minute I use a 1TB Mybook World linked into my router via ethernet which works very nicely, the catch is it's nearly full and I only have one ethernet port left so want to make the most of it.

My options as it appears are...

buy another prepackaged NAS drive - easy and straight forwards, but potentially expensive and unexpandable.

Buy a SATA drive and enclosure - but I can't figure out the best option here.


Or any other option someone might come up with.


Basically the drive acts as a storage space for all my iTunes media, music, video etc so needs to be expandable down the line where possible, or have a high capacity. Money is a consideration, so if anyone's so good as to dig out for a good priced item then I'm looking for a UK website please.

Any thoughts or advice very greatly appreciated.

 

[Tomorrow]

Does the MyBook have an external USB port? If so, you can simply add a cheap USB drive to it to expand its capacity.

Otherwise, you're looking at adding a second NAS, I'm afraid. If you go that route, look for one that uses at least two disks; it makes swapping out drives and upgrading your storage a bit easier, and some (Buffalo drives come to mind) have RAID functionality as well.

 

[LastLine]

Does the MyBook have an external USB port? If so, you can simply add a cheap USB drive to it to expand its capacity.

Otherwise, you're looking at adding a second NAS, I'm afraid. If you go that route, look for one that uses at least two disks; it makes swapping out drives and upgrading your storage a bit easier, and some (Buffalo drives come to mind) have RAID functionality as well.

Actually it does, but when I plug one in it doesn't seem to do anything. It shows up in the Shared Storage Manager but I can't find a way to access the darned thing, otherwise I'd be doing that already sadly. I have a couple of help posts calling out but so far nothing.

And yeah, having one that takes two or more drives is more or less essential, though I must admit RAID is lost on me - what is it in simple terms?

my help posts

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=9071612#post9071612

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book...ssionid=2741D8824619F8623A3AD9F6F3993673#M254

 

[prostuff1]

Hey all,

I'm looking at buying myself a new Networked Hard Drive very soon and I'm struggling with decision making at the minute so thought I'd throw out the question to people here and see what comes back.

As it stands at the minute I use a 1TB Mybook World linked into my router via ethernet which works very nicely, the catch is it's nearly full and I only have one ethernet port left so want to make the most of it.

My options as it appears are...

buy another prepackaged NAS drive - easy and straight forwards, but potentially expensive and unexpandable.

Buy a SATA drive and enclosure - but I can't figure out the best option here.


Or any other option someone might come up with.


Basically the drive acts as a storage space for all my iTunes media, music, video etc so needs to be expandable down the line where possible, or have a high capacity. Money is a consideration, so if anyone's so good as to dig out for a good priced item then I'm looking for a UK website please.

Any thoughts or advice very greatly appreciated.

There are options such as the drobo that might fit the bill. You can add any size drive you like as you need to and the machine will do a RAID5 to it which gives you a little bit of protection. NOTE: if you want this on the network then you are also going to have to buy a DroboShare so you can plug it in via Ethernet.

I use a system called unRAID. They have a new configuration available for purchase that some with everything needed to expand to 12 drives for a price of $700. This is a pretty good deal and the systems are tested before they are shipped. One thing you have to take into consideration is that the unRAID system is a full blown computer and therefore just as big. If you need this to be small then you might want to go with the drobo or the like.

 

[prostuff1]

Actually it does, but when I plug one in it doesn't seem to do anything. It shows up in the Shared Storage Manager but I can't find a way to access the darned thing, otherwise I'd be doing that already sadly. I have a couple of help posts calling out but so far nothing.

And yeah, having one that takes two or more drives is more or less essential, though I must admit RAID is lost on me - what is it in simple terms?

my help posts

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=9071612#post9071612

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book...ssionid=2741D8824619F8623A3AD9F6F3993673#M254

This page from wikipedia does a fairly good job of explaining RAID.

 

[LastLine]

As good as some of these options look, they loom on the expensive side - I'm looking at wanting to spend perhaps, £150-170 at the top end (happy to have the option of leaving drive bays empty to fill up later though.)

 

[Tomorrow]

RAID is, simply put, multiple disks paralleled together into a single volume. RAID0 stripes data across two disks - this speeds up performance but offers no protection against a disk failure (I don't recommend it). RAID1 "mirrors" the two drives, so the exact same data is on both drives. If one drive fails, it can simply be swapped out for a new one with no loss of data. There are other types of RAID arrangements as well.

When I plug a USB drive into my Buffalo NAS, it appears as a new folder under the Shared folder on the NAS, not as its own volume.