Trying to connect multiple computers to NAS via Ethernet, please help, total newb

[Michael Anthony]

Hello all,

I am a photographer that has three computers at our studio. I am trying to keep all of our data accesible to one server or drive. We purchased a QNAP TS-453 Pro. I need to keep a fast transfer rate because of the heavy data loads we are going through so just hooking up our computers to the NAS via the router is not a great option.

The guys at Best Buy told me to hook the ethernet cables up directly to the NAS. I did so and the MAC's seem to work perfectly, however I cannot find the drive on my Windows 8.1 PC which is my main production computer.

The NAS has USB ports on the back but I do not think I can connect directly to those.

I can still return the NAS if this is not the best solution for my needs. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[bill001g]

You will not get full performance out of that device without a switch that allows you to bond ports together. You need a small managed switch that allows port bonding.

 

[srobin]

Michael,
Do you have network discovery and file sharing on? Control Panel\Network and Sharing Center\Change Advanced Sharing settings.

There is a forum for QNAP that may help.
http://forum.qnap.com/index.php

 

[Michael Anthony]

Srobin I do,

 

[Michael Anthony]

You will not get full performance out of that device without a switch that allows you to bond ports together. You need a small managed switch that allows port bonding.

I am not really sure what this means, are you saying that there is an accessory that I need to purchase that will allow me to get better performance?

 

[bill001g]

Not even sure where to start here if you do not know what port bonding means.

The ethernet ports on the back are not meant to hook different hardware devices to. It might be possible to run it in that mode but it is not the normal way it is used.

If this device could only run 1g you would hook a cable to your router or a switch and all your pc to that router or switch. This would allow all the machines to access the NAS. The problem is they must share 1g to the nas but the nas itself can run at 3.2g.

If the router/switch and the NAS had a 10g ports you could connect it up and the end machines could then use the full 3.2g. What this NAS has instead is 4 ethernet ports it combines together to get what looks like a 4g cable.

Just like you would need a special switch to run 10g you need a special switch that can combine 4 ports to get 4g. Many of the manged switches can do this.

What you do is buy say a 12 port switch. You would hook 4 cable to the nas and configure both the nas and the switch to bond them. You would then hook your end pc to this switch on 1 port each. So each pc could only get 1g but 4 running at the same time would be able to max out the 3.2g of bandwidth the device has.

 

[srobin]

do a ipconfig in a command window. Are you on the same network as the NAS?

 

[Michael Anthony]

Wondering if there is a better way to accomplish what I am trying to do. Would a different storage solution work better? Perhaps some type of server? Any recommendations would be great. Sorry guys I am an amateur at best with computer stuff

 

[bill001g]

That is a fairly high end NAS device it will likely outperform any server based solutions.

Maybe just start simple. Hook everything to the router including the NAS. It will limit you to 1g but it will get you started and make sure you can access the device from all the machines. After you get this working try using it for a while and see if you experience any slowness. You can then think about putting in a advanced switch to hook everything together. You will then already know that it works and all you are adding is the port bonding feature.

 

[Michael Anthony]

I currently have a Lynksys switch hooked up to the router. The Nas is plugged directly into it. I have all of the computers connected to the nas via ethernet cables.

The MACS are working fine, I mapped windows to the IP address of the NAS after setting it to a static IP and am now getting transfer rates of around 70mbps, which seems about right.

Last question. I set this drive up as a RAID 5. It is a 4 bay and I have 3tb hard drives in all of the bays, however instead of getting 9tb of space, I am getting 6tb. One drive is being used as a NAS host. I don't know if this is correct or not.

 

[srobin]

the 6tb is right, as Raid 5 uses parity on each disk and will reduce the space by one disk. This builds in fault tolerance

 

[Michael Anthony]

Ok, I have 4 disks in the enclosure, shouldn't I have 9tb available?

 

[srobin]

are you using all of them for Raid? If so, I would say, yes.

 

[Michael Anthony]

When I plugged in the device I configured it as RAID 5. The QNAP NAS utility is telling me that Disk 3 is being used as a NAS Host, not sure what that means or how to disable it

 

[srobin]

I can't answer that and would suggest you consult the QNAP site. I'm assuming that the OS and applications are running on the host disk and that the Raid is for storage.