Getting a NAS

R

RC

Veteran XX
I'm thinking of getting a NAS.

I have a gigabit network at home, so it seems sensible. I'm also downloading a lot of movies lately so I need to be able to back them up to a central place that can stream them fast enough (50MB/s for HD?) to the PS3.

I'm seeing soo many options for NAS out there.. gigabit..dual gigabit.. iscsi.. and then some of them have entire computer built in with bit-torrent preinstalled? Why would one want that?

Any recommendations?
 
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RC depends how computer literate you are..you can build your own for a hell of a lot cheaper than a pre-made. Also just stick with SATA.
 
I could probably build my own, just not sure what enclousure I'd need etc.

I'm just confused.. for example this has a CPU etc.. what would it do for me that this
this couldnt? my primarily concern is speed
 
ive had to buy a handful for work, i always buy lacie 5big's. they work well, the included software works well, and their support is great. i had a drive die on one, sent it back, and received a replacement drive in the mail a couple days later with no hassle.
 
Here's a site that does reviews on NAS.
Real Help For Your Small Network - SmallNetBuilder

Most cheap NAS are underpowered (CPU and RAM), so they don't offer a lot of features or aren't very fast, or aren't advanced enough to support drives up to 3TB.

Figure out how much space you need, whether or not you would want to run raid, and what kind of transfer speed you want to see, then get the best one within your budget.
 
I have these 4TB hitachi raids that I run via eSATA..

Basically I want that but over gigabit ethernet? Isn't that possible without the CPU gizmos? What are those things doing!?

I need like 100MB/s down 50MB/s up.
 
I researched this a while back.

There are two brands that are worth checking out, imo..

QNAP and Synology.

Buy whatevers in your pricerange.
 
RC said:
I have these 4TB hitachi raids that I run via eSATA..

Basically I want that but over gigabit ethernet? Isn't that possible without the CPU gizmos? What are those things doing!?

I need like 100MB/s down 50MB/s up.
Click to expand...

stick with eSATA if you want those kind of performance unless you shell out the big bucks to get the better NAS for better performance (I like Qnap myself).

Just because the NAS has a gigabit connection doesn't mean it'll offer those type of transfer speeds. The CPU and memory on the NAS makes a big difference on the performance you'll see.

You'll see between 15 - 30 MB/s with most cheap NAS.
 
I wasn't aware that the cpu had so much to do with how the gigabit performed..

Maybe this is a entirely new conversations but I downloaded a 3D BluRay .mkv to playback on my ps3 via medialink over gigabit ethernet. First I ran it over my Macbook Pro, 2.4Ghz, the playback stuttered whenever it hit over 25MB/s. So I tried installing medialink on my MacPro tower, playback was smoother, but never went over 20MB/s. I was really confused because how can the same file playback at different data rates over the same network..is it related to how the medialink server transcodes on differnet systems!?!?

im nerding out right now
 
No idea, you've lost me at Macbook Pro.

You can test the speed of your file source location with this:
NAS Tester
That is if you can run Windows executables. :shock:
 
Hmm.

It's seeming more and more like I should just get an eSATA raid, hook it up to my macpro, and just share it over the network?..doy :\
 
as long as it is a real NAS with 4 striped drives and not the best buy external hard drives packaged as a "NAS", you should be ok. I do not know which is best, only one I ever used was a Buffallo NAS. installed it 3 or 4 years ago, a a drive fail once, it told me, replaced it, it rebuilt itself. no info was lost, and it was accessible while it was rebuilding itself.
 
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