Basic NAS Box for use with USB External Drives?

[jplewis01]

Hi I'm embarking on a network upgrade process at home and I have several External USB 2 and 3 Drives plugged into system that I would like to concentrate onto a NAS box as part of the upgrade project.

Phase 1 of my project is to take the several Multi-Terrabyte drives and connect them to a NAS box for basic backups and to provide File sharing capabilities across the Home network which is wired and Wireless A & N at present. I want to be able to stream movies and music, high performance is NOT a requirement at present, so long as I can stream HD Movies and do backups reliably I'm good. Support for Windows and MAC file systems is required.

I just want something I can plug all the USB Drives into and get to the USB drive file systems over the network in Windows and MAC via SMB (NO RAID needed here).

The Next Step along the road in summer is to build or buy a NAS that has RAID support that will be backed up by this first NAS box then file Services & Media Streaming will be handled by the newer box.

I'm wondering if the Synology or QNAP NAS servers will do the job or even the Seagate Business NAS???

Small and cheap is fine for the moment so long as it can serve files over the Network Reliably, I'm all good. I'll invest more deeply for phase 2 once I get phase 1 working.

Many thanks,
Phil

 

[stevech]

Seagate, Western Digital, IOMega, Buffalo, LG... in MY opinion, take a pass on these kinds of NASes.

The Synology and QNAP NASes, even the 2 bay, have USB3 ports. You can plug lots of drives in if you wish. I use just one, as the out of sight backup. I use native file system format, because FAT32 and NTFS are much slower, and I can mount read the native Linux format under windows using a freeware driver utility. Though this would only be in an emergency.

I would not recommend putting more than 1 or 2 USB3 drives on the NAS as it will get confusing on what is where and is that the sole copy.

 

[thiggins]

There aren't any elegant solutions for enabling "several" USB drives to be network shared.

Pogoplug was the popular, but its last Series Four handled only two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0.

The Cirago NUS1000 Network USB Storage Link looks like a better bet.

 

[jplewis01]

Thanks Tim this gives me a place to start looking just need to ensure it can perform well enough for streamed media. Too bad it cannot do HFS+ Beggars cannot be choosers!

Phil

 

[thiggins]

Thanks Tim this gives me a place to start looking just need to ensure it can perform well enough for streamed media. Too bad it cannot do HFS+ Beggars cannot be choosers!

Phil

Please report back with what you end up with.

 

[jplewis01]

Yep will do. This is all part of multi-step plan to unite much of my shared storage into a single better thought out plan. Ultimately The Cirago or whatever I end up with will be what the NAS box(es) backup to. I'm quite OK with starting small and building out from there and its likely I'll end up with two NAS boxes in the front end the second will be a bigger and more capable / expandable unit overtime Right Now I'm liking the feature set for the QNAP but time and research will tell what we end up with.

 

[stevech]

Thanks Tim this gives me a place to start looking just need to ensure it can perform well enough for streamed media. Too bad it cannot do HFS+ Beggars cannot be choosers!

Phil

The Synology and QNAPs can accept USB3 drives and you may elect to have some or all of the folders on a USB3 drive be a share. Not normally done though, due slower performance. But easily done

Pogoplug is a marketing failure. Avoid it. They probably won't be here much longer.