NAS drives

I realize that this forum doesn't get a lot of traffic, but I'll ask anyway;

Is there a NAS drive that you all can recommend? I had a Seagate Black Armor but it bit the dust. Fortunately i have all the data on the drive (lots of pictures, LOTS of music). I have been looking for a replacement unit and the reviews are all over the place. Nothing seems to be a standout. Any suggestions?

You're probably better off looking here....

The 10 Best NAS (Network-Attached Storage) Devices

By Samara Lynn
June 18, 2014

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp See their reviews of drives also

Thanks. I saw that article. Most of the units are outside my price range, but I am thinking about the Seagate Central. My last Seagate (Black Armor) lasted for a few years without a major problem. But Seagate support is useless, so I am not sure if I want to wander back into their world. I've heard good things about Synology.....

Most NAS storage will put you on RAID-5 configurations when you have more that a few disks. This is a bad option due to READ errors and TLR. You can improve this with RAID-6 (ie. if you lose one disk in a RAID-5 and during repair you get a read failure you can bring down the entire array). In RAID-6 you have double parity redundancy with only a small overhead. Alas, this is difficult to keep stable. I recommend doing RAID-1 (mirrored disks). You can do this with most modern OSs (even Windows) although I recommend Linux. You can also use any PC that meets your needs to drive it (so no need to buy a storage solution). I have a mid tower with a bunch of decent server hardware (because of my programming hobby) but... I also use it for media sharing and it currently has 8x2TB disks mirrored (so 8TB total). These disks would only cost about $600 now I think. You could of course put up a much smaller array with less disks

Regards

Jason

Thanks Jason, and welcome to the site. I had decided on a Synology 2 drive unit, which has now been in use for about 6 (ish) weeks. It set up very easily as a raid 1 and I had two 3GB drives that were just dying to be used.

It's hooked up to my wireless router and does a pretty good job of keeping my music and my pictures handy for the whole house. i have yet to set it up as a backup device, although I should. And I am kind of curious about setting it up as a ftp server (or personal cloud or something similar). Any thoughts on that and on keeping it secure?

In general I would not recommend an FTP site. They are notoriously pourly secured and there is more than a good chance you could leak your information. If it is just pictures and music, you might want to consider a DLNA server software that has web capabilities like Serviio. I am not familiar with the NAS and whether you can install software on it or not. Serviio is java based (so as long as the NAS has a JVM you can run it) but I use it at home to server up all my media, plus it provides a netflicks like web interface (with user authentication) you can use to provide streaming access over the web (for outside your wifi/internal network). If you just need read access to the information, I would set it up as a http server (if serviio is not an option). Note this would not provide streaming but would provide read/viewing of files. For transferring files in, you are better off using an application that can stream them over ssh connections. I do not allow these connections to take place on my system so I can not comment too much about the remote client putting data on the server.

For securing, the number one place is your internet router/wifi router. If you have a Comcast rented modem it would be that device (or similar from other vendors). If it is just a modem (I have a Motorola cable modem) it pipes into a router which I secure by locking down all ports except those I want to come in. For those ports, only allow them to go a specific destination IP / service (ie. port 9000 is mapped to port 80 on 192.168.0.25 on my internal network). Other than ssh and http I do not open any ports to the outside world. Since my server behind that firewall is running Linux you need to keep it up to date with patches etc. That also has a software firewall which only allows internal IPs to access other services/ports on that box (like the DLNA server Serviio, my database, subversion code repository etc.) finally for the one outside port (SSH) I only allow a single user access (who is not the root admin) and regularly change their password to ensure I don't get hacked. I also will lock out remote access after three unsuccessful attempts.

Paranoid... maybe... but with nearly 15TB of data (of which almost 1 is my personal data + source code etc. why wouldn't I be)

Not paranoid at all; just being realistic.
That's why i haven't jumped on all the packages Synology offers ( https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/download/DS213j ). It's tempting, but i would have to do more homework than I want to do right now. I will take a look at Serviio, though.

I'm late to the party but I have a Synology DiskStation and I love it, good price and great features. I have been using it for 4 years now and its running solid. I have the DS210j

I have the DS212J. And I am still happy. Have you installed any of the software packages? Any comments, recommendations?

I have used a ton of the packages, I host my website form it, i use python, audio package, video package, and a few others. What ones are you curious about?

I have the DiskStation DS412+ with two 4TB Western Digital Red hard drives which gives me 4TB of mirrored storage.

Have had it for just over a year now with no problems, only package I have installed is the Photo Station which works great.
I was planning on installing a few more like the Cloud Station and maybe Plex Media Server but never really messed with it since at this point all we use it for is to load all our pictures & videos on to free up our Phones and Tablets and to make monthly clone backups of all of our PC hard drives.
So don't really need anything else.

It is nice though knowing that whatever comes up that we can expand and it can handle it no problem.

I am thinking though that IF Santa brings me a Gear VR (Virtual Reality) for my Samsung Note 4 that I will most likely download the Plex Media Server to download all the High Def and 3 D movies an such so that I have lots of movies to watch in VR without taking up any space on my phone.

It's been a while since i looked at the packages...can't remember names right now. I like the idea of retrieving files remotely. I'm not sure that I need a music server; the drive seems to play smoothly to three computers (not often using all three at the same time, though).

I'll get back to this when I review the packages again.