NAS for Photographer

[ladon]

Hi there,
I'm new to the forum, but have been researching NAS's for quite some time.

Brief run down.

• I'm a commercial photographer.
• I shoot 50-60 jobs per year. Each job averages about 30GB of files (raw and final files)
• All processing is completed on a drive attached to either my laptop or desktop and backed up nightly.
• Lightroom catalogues exist on the computer and would be backed up to the NAS nightly.
• Finished files would exist on the NAS when archived.

What I ideally need:

• An NAS that will allow expandability.
• I think RAID would be a good idea though I'm unsure of the type (0,1etc) that would serve me the best.
• 2-3 computers would have access to the NAS on the home/work network.
• A media server would be handy by not necessary (the media files may exist on an external drive attached to the NAS
• Cloud based option for delivering photographs to clients.
• Speed is important as some of the working files become as large as 2GB.
• Back up of the NAS would occur weekly to external harddrives.

I've looked at the Synology DS213+, 413+ and 713+. The 1513+ also looks good.

I'm having a hard time choosing. The 213 and 713 seem good as they are smaller (so I could travel with them), but I'm worried about the minimal capacity of them!
Any thoughts/feedback would be appreciated - or other options.

Thanks in advance.
Andrew

 

[stevech]

I chose Synology DS212 a year ago. QNAP was runner-up.

I don't use RAID because I wanted two volumes, independent duplicates, since RAID is *not* a backup.

A bit pricy, but the DS213 is good if you need 3TB or less. Maybe 4TB drives if you have the bux and are brave on the leading edge.

AND get one 3TB external USB3 or eSATA as suits the NAS, as your backup taken offsite or hidden for theft of NAS and failure of NAS electronics/Power Supply protection.

Where you say "some of the working files become as large as 2TB" ... I doubt the NASes in this league would deal well with ONE file that is that large. Maybe you meant GB rather than TB per file.

The rest of the wish list is fine.

Be sure to try the on-line demos at Synology, QNAP, and perhaps Thecus.

 

[ladon]

Yep....opps 2GB not 2TB.

Will amend the orignal post.

Thanks for the comments..

 

[clintb]

Just went through this at work and we're looking at different NAS units for small clients.

Synology 713+ is very nice. It's fast, supports link aggregation, all kinds of options for backup to local, offsite, and cloud. We have one in house with 2x WD 4 TB red drives. We have another that will be installed at a customer's site with 2x WD 3 TB red drives. Overall very nice.

QNAP TS-269 Pro seems to do everything the Synology does, with the addition of having a supported CrashPlan backup client available as a package.

I would say it comes down to how much you need to store and how much you want to grow the storage. Also, look at the software packages for each and determine if either has something that can be of use to you. As of right now, I'm leaning more towards QNAP because of the native support for CrashPlan backup. It can be done on Synology, but in a headless config and not directly supported by Synology.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Synology now has built in Amazon Glacier as a backup to the cloud option (don't know how it compares to Crashplan on QNAP though. I do strongly agree w/ @stevech that backing up the NAS to an external USB 3.0 drive is an essential step for true backup safety.

I run my Synology in "SHR" mode which I think is basically a finessed RAID 1.

I don't know where things will go w/ 3.5" HD technology/density, but I did an in place upgrade from 2TB to 3TB on my NAS.

I have a 212+ and would recommend the 213/713 in their + variants for the faster CPU.

FWIW, I get substantially faster throughput to the NAS on client machines that have SSDs, ideally if your main editing machine has an SSD you get the benefits of faster local handling/manipulation of your photos and faster offloading/loading from the NAS.

The cloud (or NAS hosted) photo sharing w/ clients I'm not totally up to speed on. You can easily share stuff directly from the NAS with one click (assuming you have DDNS running, most NAS boxes have free DDNS support), but I'm thinking you probably want to give people a prettier interface than a link to a folder. Synology (and I'm sure others as well) have built in packages to host multiple blog & mini site platforms (Wordpress, etc) that you could make esthetically pleasing public facing pages w/ proof photos or whatever on them, but still have the dilemma that if your NAS is hosting them your clients will be at the mercy of your upstream. Maybe there are easy cloud sync setups out there, I would think there would be a significant demand in the photography market.

 

[ladon]

I run my Synology in "SHR" mode which I think is basically a finessed RAID

I'm not totally up to speed on this - but will look it up.

FWIW, I get substantially faster throughput to the NAS on client machines that have SSDs, ideally if your main editing machine has an SSD you get the benefits of faster local handling/manipulation of your photos and faster offloading/loading from the NAS.

This is 'VERY' good to know! Thanks so much.

I have a 212+ and would recommend the 213/713 in their + variants for the faster CPU.

I noted this on the spec lists.
I'm trying to justify why the 713+ is a better buy than the 213+. And then, why I wouldn't get the 413+ instead of the 713+

 

[stevech]

I noted this on the spec lists.
I'm trying to justify why the 713+ is a better buy than the 213+. And then, why I wouldn't get the 413+ instead of the 713+

Capacity (TB)
Expandability (more drives, later)

Beware the advise often given:
"RAID is not a backup"
There will come a day when the RAID fails and cannot be recovered - unless you have a backup of VIP files on an external drive.

 

[PrivateJoker]

I'm trying to justify why the 713+ is a better buy than the 213+. And then, why I wouldn't get the 413+ instead of the 713+

If you want a deal on a nice 212+, shoot me a PM. . I'm looking to upgrade to the 713+ for the faster CPU & link aggregation.

Capacity (TB)
Expandability (more drives, later)

http://www.synology.com/products/co...DS713+&compare_list[]=DS213+#compare_show_top

Beware the advise often given:
"RAID is not a backup"
There will come a day when the RAID fails and cannot be recovered - unless you have a backup of VIP files on an external drive.

One can also make an argument that it's good to have an additional external backup that is just a dump of the files & folder layouts (no NAS OS or settings, etc) directly to a drive that is formatted NTFS or HPFS, etc that can be read directly by your client PCs. In case your NAS has a hardware problem that renders your files stranded on it (or gets stolen, etc) so you can have quick access to any files you need from it by just connecting it via USB to a PC. I know more than one person that was SOL when their RAID controller in their PC failed or their NAS maker went belly up and they are stuck w/ backups on in a file system they cannot access easily.

 

[stevech]

My backup to USB3 drive used to be to NTFS format to not be dependent on the NAS file system should the drive need to be read on a PC.

I found a reliable freeware utility for Windows 7 64 bit that will mount and read an USB3 drive produced in LInux/ext4 format. That's what Synology (others too?) use as the native format.

Doing it this way makes the backups much, much faster, since the Linux NTFS drivers used in NASes writes quite slowly as compared to native.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
I am using 713+/DX213 and another dual HDD USB3 ext cab for real critical file BU. Working out very well. Mostly acrive use is on family
members accessing photo station, Surveillance camera recordings.
All HDDs are WD Red 3TB ones. So far none failed.