Is a NAS really the right solution for my home office?

[SRF]

My wife and I are trying to bring some order to our home office setup. We've been using Google docs and Dropbox to share files, but we're running out of Dropbox space (and have lost important work on Google) so we are looking for a better solution.

About a year ago we used a Mac Mini (running Snow Leopard) to set up a home network. The Mac Mini had a 2TB 7200 rpm drive hooked up via FW 800. It was on a wireless network (not hooked up over ethernet) and served our laptops wirelessly. It worked ok, but accessing files felt slow (especially when disks needed to spin up) and connecting to it from off site always felt a bit fussy.

Now I'm trying to figure out if we should go with a NAS or if I just need to give the Mac Mini another go, possibly with different software (say Lion Server?).

Here's what we need from our server/NAS/whatever:

1) Hosting of all our work files (mostly MS Office and iWork files, and the occasional photoshop file) so we can both access them and work from the same "sandbox." Probably 2-4 TB of stuff.

2) Hosting of our mutual itunes collection.

3) Hosting our individual (and decently large) iPhoto libraries.

4) Protection against drive failure for all files mentioned above -- either the form of "hybrid" raid, raid, or just scheduled SuperDuper backups.

5) Off-site access to our files -- in essence, serving as our "personal cloud" when we're away from home.

Finally -- and this may be a big issue -- my wife and I each use Macbook Airs as our primary computers for this work. Most of the time we're wirleless, and the MBAir doesn't really have a legit gigabit ethernet solution, though you can get adapters that go through via USB.

As I said, we do have a Mac Mini, but we're not averse to buying a NAS. Whatever's going to work is what we want to do. For what it's worth, we've been looking at the Synology DS411j and DS212j.

BIG thanks in advance for help anyone can provide!

 

[zurge]

Stick with the Mac Mini

First a question.

Does you Mac Mini have one or two hard drives in it?

Now to answer your questions.


1) You could buy a USB/Firewire Raid device that would connect to the Mac Mini and be your storage. Just make sure its large enough to fit everything you need, plus plan for growth.

2) Mac Mini is perfect for this....

3) Mac Mini is perfect for this too...

4) If you got a RAID device as mentioned above you would have a layer of protection, but you should still consider backing up to an additional device/service in case the USB/Firewire device died and took the drives down with it. You could backup to a USB drive and store it at a family/friends house, or you could use cloud storage system like Backblaze or CrashPlan.

5) You can pay for services that provide this, like GotoMyPC, LogMeIn, etc... You can purchase devices that allow you to connect to your network, like the Sonicwall TZ100. It would allow you to create a secure VPN tunnel into your network at home, from anywhere.

You have all of the tools that you need to do what you described. Remotely connecting to your Mac Mini is going to be slowish and not perfect if your Internet Upload speed is slow. Your Internet connect will be the factor in connecting to your Mac Mini remotely.

Also, network shares, whether a Mac Mini or NAS, will not be as quick and snappy as your hard drive in your computer. If your wireless router is only G then that can also be slowing you down a little.

 

[SRF]

First, thanks for the quick and substantial reply. A few follow-up questions...

Does you Mac Mini have one or two hard drives in it?

No. Just one hard drive. It is a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM.

You have all of the tools that you need to do what you described. Remotely connecting to your Mac Mini is going to be slowish and not perfect if your Internet Upload speed is slow. Your Internet connect will be the factor in connecting to your Mac Mini remotely.

Also, network shares, whether a Mac Mini or NAS, will not be as quick and snappy as your hard drive in your computer. If your wireless router is only G then that can also be slowing you down a little.

We have an "N" router (a Belkin N600 Play), but things still seemed sluggish when we tried this below.

- Would plugging the Mini straight into the router via Ethernet speed things up for our Macbook Airs accessing the files?
- Would using server software (e.g., Lion Server) make things speedier?
- What, if anything, can be done about the delays I was encountering waiting for the external HDs to spin up?
- Would a NAS be any faster? Or is it basically the fact that anything is going to be limited by the internet speeds since we're doing most stuff wirelessly?

Again, thanks so much for your reply!

 

[zurge]

My Reply

Plugging the Mac Mini into the ethernet port of your router would theoretically increase your speeds/latency, but I don't think you would be able to tell a difference.

Using Lion Server would add features, but it shouldn't make your file access any speedier.

Most hard drives will spin down. This is, unfortunately, a feature that most companies build in. You could try and get an USB/Firewire drive that allows you to configure that, or maybe the computer is putting them to sleep. There may be a way to adjust this in Power Management of your Mac Mini.

In my opinion a NAS would probably be just as fast or slower. The Internet speed will only play a role when you connect to your files from outside of your house, like at a coffee shop. Otherwise, the only thing that will be slowing you down is the wireless router, and inherent slowness that network storage has.

 

[SRF]

Thanks for these replies -- I'm going to try again with the Mac Mini, FW 800 drives, and possibly also Lion Server. I'll post back when I have something to report.

 

[aaronisgoodman]

Reply to thank

Nice post! You really did a great job! Thanks for your sharing! I hope that you can share some of the home office solution information.