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Help purchasing a NAS

M

Management

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 20, 2010
100
0
I would like to purchase a NAS for my home theater and to integrate with PLEX app. I don't know anything about NAS but I'm here to get help from you all.

What are some good brands and products that are known to be reliable and fast? Prices if you know them.

Possible to get 4TB for $400?
 
Management said:
I would like to purchase a NAS for my home theater and to integrate with PLEX app. I don't know anything about NAS but I'm here to get help from you all.

What are some good brands and products that are known to be reliable and fast? Prices if you know them.

Possible to get 4TB for $400?
Click to expand...

Why do you believe that you need a NAS drive?

Will you actually be sharing the media?

Is you house wired with Cat5?

Cheers
 
Ok so I thought a little more about this and would rather go with the Raid 0 4TB or higher external that I can later (when I have more money) connect the same size in a raid 1 mirror configuration.

I looked at this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/ME8Q7T40H128/

Can I get a second one in the future for Raid 1 mirror? If so how? If not then which on of those high capacity OWC drives will be capable? I can't buy bought now.

Thanks.
 
Management said:
Ok so I thought a little more about this and would rather go with the Raid 0 4TB or higher external that I can later (when I have more money) connect the same size in a raid 1 mirror configuration.

I looked at this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/ME8Q7T40H128/

Can I get a second one in the future for Raid 1 mirror?
Click to expand...
NO
If so how? If not then which on of those high capacity OWC drives will be capable? I can't buy bought now.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

If you want to do Raid 1 + 0 you would need to find a NAS that supports that in one enclosure. If you bought two indentical NASes, they would have their own ip address and operate independently. For your scenario, to achieve redundancy, you would have to copy the data twice, once to each NAS.

As for Raid 0 or Raid 1, Raid 0 is faster, but it can bite you in the end. if one drive fails you can't read either drive. If it were me, I would save up a little more and get a 4 drive enclosure and do RAID 5. You'll have redundancy, and have 6GB of storage if using 2TB drives instead of 4TB of storage implementing Raid 0+1. Plus if one of the drives fail in a raid 5 array it can be replaced without any loss of data.

Some brands to look at are Promise, QNAP, LACIE, and Netgear.
 
Last edited:
Nas

I don't believe you have answered an important question which is, do you need a NAS? Are you looking for a NAS for redundancy or storage capacity? External USB drive's now come in 3TB capacities and would certainly be cheaper then buying a NAS, however if you want something you can connect to a network for the purposes of sharing your data then I would suggest you look at products from Qnap.

Something like this might be good, however you still have to factor in the cost of the drives:

http://www.ncixus.com/products/56752/TS-219P+/QNAP Systems Inc./

or this.

http://www.ncixus.com/products/58630/TS-412/QNAP Systems Inc./

As you know, with two drives you can do RAID 1, as RAID 0 offers no redundancy at all. With three drives or more you can do RAID 5.
 
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