Do I need a Network Attached Storage (NAS)? (Internal storage vs NAS)

[Vladimir81]

After moving house the location of our "main" PC has moved from the living room to the "office".
So we now find ourselves using the laptop in the living room far more than the main PC. Due to this and also planning to setting up a HTPC in the near future, I am wondering if I should set up network attached storage.

Currently I access the storage hard drives on the main PC shared on the network via wifi. That works well except for the inconvenience of having to turn the PC on or take it out of sleep when I need to access something on it.

I guess the main benefits for considering a NAS were less power consumption and having the location of data safely hidden away (someone is less likely to steal a NAX box in a cupboard than the main PC box which is a more obvious target). Also setting up RAID for mirrored drive (I have lost years of photos before due to a failed drive!) I can do this without NAS though.

After doing a bit of research I don't know if the pros outweigh the cons.

The main drawback I keep seeing for internal or USB external storage is that is only available for that PC. I don't get this when I am currently sharing internal drives over the network, and to me they work as I would expect NAS would. Is there something I am missing here?

Regarding the power consumption - I haven't done the calcs to know if this is even much of a factor to be honest. I use the main PC for a bit of gaming so it has a 600W PSU, so I figured this would use way more than a NAS? Secondly, is a NAS on all the time? Or do they only turn on HDDs as required?

Speed is the other consideration. I was surprised to learn that NAS is actually slower than an external USB HDD, but I can't seem to find any solid actual use specs on NAS vs internal. The main time this would be an issue is when browsing folders on the HTPC I would imagine. Currently accessing the main PC from the laptop via wifi I don't notice too much of a problem.

Also it turns out a decent NAS box is more expensive than I first thought, so there needs to be some benefits to justify the expense.

 

[kanewolf]

Is "I was surprised to learn that NAS is actually slower than an external" this true? It depends. A USB3 external drive from your local PC can be faster than network storage. From the laptop or HTPC it is the same or the NAS may be faster.

The key thing to remember about network storage, whether it is a PC or dedicated NAS, is that it MUST be wired ethernet connected. Your performance will be poor otherwise.

Most commercial NAS units will keep the CPU and network powered up at all times. They will spin down the disks after a period and spin them back up when someone accessed the volume(s).

Take a look at the webpages of Thecus, QNAP, Synology and Asustor. They are the largest dedicated NAS vendors in the home segment.

Don't get a false sense of security with RAID. It is NOT a substitute for backups. Read these two articles -- http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31745-data-recovery-tales-raid-is-not-backup and http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/32168-data-recovery-tales-prepare-the-right-way-for-raid-failure

 

[Sleepy3103]

If you have the money to put into a synology or qnap style NAS thats the easiest way to go. For me those are to expensive when I already have perfectly good pcs that are powerful and can do raid already. I use my HTPC as a NAS also. It has a quad core 3GHz cpu, 8GB of memory and a 2GB dedicated graphics card which is way overkill for eiither of these functions but its a re purpose older gaming machine. I have a 240GB SSD for the boot drive, a 1TB HDD for programs and such and it has 3 WD Green 2TB drives in raid 0 for a 6TB raid drive for media and NAS storage. I then have it auto sync with freesync over my network to my workstation which has 2 Seagate 4TB drives in raid 0. To me this is the cheapest to have lots of storage and everything is backed up. I can access my media files locally for editing on the workstation and on the htpc I can access everything locally to watch. All our laptops and computers back up to the 6TB shared raid on the HTPC then like I said it syncs to my workstation. I have had it like this for years and I just get bigger hard drives when I need them. I just upgrade the storage in my workstation from a 4TB raid to an 8TB raid and I will be adding one of the 2TB drives I had in the workstation to the raid 0 in my HTPC so it will be 8TB also soon.

Also your pc will not use much power if you set the power setting right. Also set it to never hybernate or sleep. Just turn the screen off after a while or use hybrid sleep. Another option is in your bios there should be option for network and hard drive wake from sleep. You can mess around with these options so that you can always access your storage.

 

[Vladimir81]

I ended up getting a Synology DS216j. Good reviews, low power consumption.

Kanewolf:
" A USB3 external drive from your local PC can be faster than network storage."
Yeah that's what I had read. I figured since I hadn't noticed a massive slowdown accessing my data via wifi with the laptop then the difference between NAS & USB won't be an issue in reality.

Thanks for the link regarding the raid and backups, was very interesting. After reading that I decided I probably don't want (need) to use raid at all. I will just use the NAS for the "main" shared drive, and continue to use my existing external USB for backup.

I had thought the main benefit of mirroring with raid would be continuous "live" backup, vs backing up once a day like I currently do with FreeFileSync. I wasn't aware that NAS don't use NTFS file format though, so it is not a simple case of copying your data if you have a failure using the NAS as a backup.


Sleepy3103:
We probably will only use the HTPC a few times a week (definitely not every day anyway) so thought that would be a waste of power to have a PC powered up all the time whenever we need to access anything at all.

What is your reason for using Raid 0? Is it just so 3 drives appear as 1?

 

[failboat]

I ended up getting a Synology DS216j. Good reviews, low power consumption.

Kanewolf:
" A USB3 external drive from your local PC can be faster than network storage."
Yeah that's what I had read. I figured since I hadn't noticed a massive slowdown accessing my data via wifi with the laptop then the difference between NAS & USB won't be an issue in reality.

Thanks for the link regarding the raid and backups, was very interesting. After reading that I decided I probably don't want (need) to use raid at all. I will just use the NAS for the "main" shared drive, and continue to use my existing external USB for backup.

I had thought the main benefit of mirroring with raid would be continuous "live" backup, vs backing up once a day like I currently do with FreeFileSync. I wasn't aware that NAS don't use NTFS file format though, so it is not a simple case of copying your data if you have a failure using the NAS as a backup.


Sleepy3103:
We probably will only use the HTPC a few times a week (definitely not every day anyway) so thought that would be a waste of power to have a PC powered up all the time whenever we need to access anything at all.

What is your reason for using Raid 0? Is it just so 3 drives appear as 1?

Raid 0 stripes the disks which evenly spreads the data over them so that when reads or writes are needed the effort is spread over the disks. This also makes the data useless if one disk is down. JBOD mode can make multiple disks show as one directory. It writes complete files on each drive so if one drive goes down you only lose the data from that, but read/writes won't be evenly spread over the disks.

In a NAS your limiting factor is likely going to be 1Gb/s network speeds. One HDD will saturate the 1Gb/s network, so striping is not going to help much. Raid 1(mirror) will keep your data safer.