discussion Need NAS Advice

[Laquer Head]

So right now my home "cloud/nas" consists of a 2.5" hard drive in a caddy, plugged into the front of my Asus Rt-Ac3200.

Naturally, I have outgrown this ghetto setup, and need advisement on what to pick in a sea of different NAS and Cloud units on the market.

We are pretty basic, I'd guess that a simple 2-bay system would be fine, and a capacity of 4TB is probably overkill.

Not sure if RAID is necessary or even supported.

Are WD RED hard drives the right drives for a NAS setup?

What brands do people recommend?

What type of CPU/RAM/other specs do I want to be looking at?

Max budget would be $1000 CAD tax in for the unit and pair of hard drives

Thanks in advance!

 

[SugarJ]

If you're just looking for something to pull files from, this 4-bay QNAP on sale at NCIX would do the trick. QNAP NAS TS-431 4BAY Arm CORTEX-A9 Dualcore 512MB 4X3.5 2.5SATA Tower W DLNA - TS-431 - NCIX.com If you want something to transcode, look at a TS-451+.

BTW, I'd never suggest buying a 2-bay NAS. You'll always fill it up at some point. It's a lot easier to pay a bit more for a 4-bay and fill the extra drives in as you need them.

 

[Laquer Head]

Yes, the usage is pretty much to store our movies, videos, pics, and software to share between 5 computers.

I hear ya on the 4-bay enclosure, even if you dont use em, you have em in case.

As for the drives, would you recommend the WD Red's? or something else?

 

[SugarJ]

Yes, sorry, WD Reds would be my choice. I've used them in my work NAS since launch.

 

[Laquer Head]

Thanks for confirming that.

Going a step further from your recommendation, is the amount of RAM important? What about some that have a quad cpu over a dual. Do these specs make a huge difference in a simple setup?

 

[Inik]

Don't forget that you can add extra RAM yourself. I did that on my QNAP

 

[Laquer Head]

Don't forget that you can add extra RAM yourself. I did that on my QNAP

I did not know they were user upgradible, thats terrific to know

 

[MARSTG]

What you are talking about is more like simple storage then a real NAS. Usually when I hear NAS I am thinking a machine running the FreeNAS OS. Which is a bit more complicated. I would just buy a high performance router with a USB 3.0 port, slam a 4TB hdd on it and there you go sharing.

 

[Laquer Head]

.. I would just buy a high performance router with a USB 3.0 port, slam a 4TB hdd on it and there you go sharing.

Thats what I have and am doing now..and its slow. I want a faster, more reliable, and more robust setup.

 

[MARSTG]

Thats what I have and am doing now..and its slow. I want a faster, more reliable, and more robust setup.

I meant a 300$ dual core cpu router. Otherwise in 300$ you can build your own FreeNAS machine, as long as you don't transcode, even a Core2Duo should be enough.