NAS - thoughts and opinions

hey,

so now we have 2 laptops and no desktop pc we need a centralised location to store all of our music and photo's. nas is quite clearly the way forward - but i have a budget. If I can get 500gb for under £100 I'll be chuffed.

I've seen this (150106851972) on ebay and was about to plump for it, but thought I'd dig some brains here first. The only problem that I see with it is that it appears to take fat32 disks only. the seller mentions somehting about that you can't shre ntfs disks on this system, which seems dumb to me. I did ask but he hasn't got back to me yet.

anyway - one of them plus a 500gb ide drive should be around the £100 mark.

has anyone else got a nas solution? if so how do you find it? okay? issues? thoughts about this proposed solution?

cheers

 

Not a very good idea if you are planning to store photos or other files which you cannot find again if they get lost (disk failure etc).
If you want to use a NAS for permanent storage you need one that has RAID1 capabilitities.

 

as a back up I'd use another external disk. even better than raid imo as i can keep the disks apart so in case of fire i'd not lose all my information.

 

I use Snap's NAS for my storage. They are not cheap, but are SMB class equipment. You will require to have a backup, NO matter which way you go. This is where most have a false sense of security. Since they are in raid they think they are safe. If you have a hardware failure your in trouble (non drive), unless you have backup units or external backups. If you have old pc's laying around there are several option. WarFTP is real good, runs on older version of Windows, non-raid unless your hw supports it. The other option is like FreeNAS which is still in Alpha. I would currently not trust FreeNAS right now till it reaches v1 (Beta). But currently it is a working release, so you can use it provided you use some other source of backup (dvd's). There are others Linux version out there to choose from.

Another option for backup. Install a Removable drive bay in your PC. Then on a regular basis install it and do a ghost or backup of your drive/data. Have several so you can have multiple sets. Need to decide if you need to be able to access your backup with out special software. Another words do you want to use file compression. Any way you go you need to test it, to know what you need to do encase of a failure.

 

you are forgetting that I don't have a pc at home!

music is not a problem. A friend of mine and I collated it at work with a couple of spare pc's. I have a copy of it on my icy box and he has a copy of it at home so backup is not necessary. I am looking to replace the icy box with this nas solution. the only issue as fas as backup goes is the pictures and to be honest I'd probably just cut it to dvd.

So back to the nas question rather than the backup question: would a 500gb Fat32 file system running on the device mentioned in the link be suitable for my requirements? I am not sure about the product that guy is selling...

 

Fat 32 is limited to 137gig. Must be NTFS or Linux.

Most and including the one you are looking at uses a Linux file system.

 

cheers blue. ntfs is the only way to go for large file systems. think i'll skip this one then. shame really because it had good functionality.