Backup solution recommendation (NAS questions)

[jbedford]

Hi everyone,

Well the time has come for me to get a proper backup and storage solution for all of my photos and other critical data on my network. I have been doing a lot of research and have really started to confuse myself with the options that are out there.

In my research, I have determined that I do want:

• Raid redundancy
• Ease of use
• Ability to sync with a folder or drive on another machine to ensure redundancy
• Something with reasonable performance and energy consumption
• Cross platform capabilities - as I will be adding a iMac to my network shortly

Nice to have:

• Streaming capabilities - other computers, apple TV or mobile devices
• Photo sharing
• mix and match drive brand and capacity

I think I have narrowed my search down to the following 3 choices:

Drobo S - There's a love hate thing when I read about this device. Some swear by it, others cringe at the thought of using a Drobo. This is where my search first started, as it caught my eye with mix and match capabilities. The Drobo S does not have an Ethernet connection - but my router does have a USB port. The Drobo also supports 5 drives, the others are 4.

QNAP TS-419P II - I had never heard of QNAP before until I really started looking. This unit seems to be feature rich and boasts the fastest onboard processor. When I wrote to QNAP, they recommended against mixing and matching drives.

Synology DS411 - Again, I don't know much about the Synology product, but this seems to be the least expensive model in Canada. The Synology support team said they have Hybrid RAID baked in, that supports mix and matched drives.

The reason I make mention of mixing and matching drives is that over time, I have swapped out a number of drives starting from 1 TB, and now have several 2 TB drives. It would be nice to put them all into one enclosure instead of using a SATA dock swapping drives as necessary.

Can you work directly from a NAS, or will the read/write performance not be adequate to provide a positive working experience?

Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions? I am not interested in building a NAS, as I don't want the headache. I want something simple that will provide me peace of mind with my critical data.

Thanks in advance!




Jason

 

[stevech]

Being an engineer by profession... I looked at all the products, 5 times each, and so on. My wife says I over-analyze.

I chose a Synology DS212 (two drive) NAS. It's not backup.. it's where all data is stored. The backup is: The NAS is split into two volumes (not RAID). One volume is a backup of the other. And there's also a "time machine" backup in the DS212 that has the last 30 days of versions of all files. So if I mistakenly delete a folder (me?) I'm covered. If a drive fails, I'm covered. And I backup once a week the entire main volume to an external USB3 drive and stash that away - protection from theft.

That's my rationale - for a home user system.

Tryout the on-line demos -- Synology and QNAP have them. You can look at the features and UI. The feature set and UI drove my selection, along with my desire to avoid mass market crud - I had a Netgear NAS (yuck). Synolgy and QNAP both have good longevity.

Preaching: RAID is not a backup.

 

[thiggins]

First question is how much storage do you need? Single drives can now store 3 TB and soon 4 TB.

Avoid RAID if you can help it. RAID doesn't provide additional data security. It is primarily used to make one big virtual drive out of physically smaller ones.

Synology SHR provides capability similar to Drobo.

Depending on what you are doing, yes, you can work on files directly on the NAS. But then, it wouldn't be backup.

 

[jbedford]

What I'm really looking to do is have all my files in one place.

I want some redundancy with what I decide to go with as I understand that Hard Drives are not infalable.

I want to sync certain directories from my main machine - documents, MP3's and digital pictures to the NAS providing me with a backup copy.

I'd like to stream MP3, pictures and possibly movies from the NAS.

I have a number of 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB drives of different manufacturers and want to use them all in one enclosure - today I use a SATA dock - which is not ideal as only 1 of the drives are online at any one time.

My expense threshold is $400-$500 (driveless) for this solution.

Thanks!



JB