Anyone using a network attached storage device?

[guvnah]

Anyone using a network attached storage device?  Any problems? Any to avoid? 

Thanks,

Michael Haskins

[NickT]

I'm no expert Guv' but have read quite a few negative posts on NAS boxes, what are you wanting it to do?
Nick-T

Oh and Happy New Year folks

[jeff.grant@pobox.com]

I have two at the moment - a Thecus N2100 running RAID 1 and a Linksys NSS4000 also running RAID 1. The Thecus has been rock solid except for the time that it lost all my data, while the Linksys box has been replaced twice. They tend to be slow and run Linux which limits mobility. When I get around to my next storage system, it will be a Mac Mini with external FW800. It should be both faster and easier to recover from disasters.

[guvnah]

Thanks for the replies.  What I guess I'm really looking for is an affordable way to centralize & store job files and portfolio images so that I can access everything from studio, home, holiday, etc. easily without having to dig thru a ton of hard drives or spend the money on a server.  I'm not planning on making it a backup system although it will function as that as well.  I still backup off site, so losing data would not be the end of the world - but would be a drag. 

[fotostig]

I have a Lacie 1tb Network disc that I got about 1 year ago. It works sometimes. At home, it mounts nicely over the network, and I use it mostly to stream music trough iTunes. When I'm away, I can access my files on the disc trough a web-site. My experience is that its quite unstable. It "falls out" of my network often, and I have to restart my router to get it mounted again.

[hvk]

I am using the Netgear Readynas NV+ and Pro. The Pro is used for my online archive (files up until last month), while the NV+ is used for backups. Current projects and the Lightroom database are stored on local hard drives in my workstation.

With the Readynas you get a low power, low touch device that is pretty robust (but you do not get redundant fans and power supplies). It is very
simple to use. As an example, I recently expanded from 4x1TB to 4x2TB on the fly, just replacing the disks one by one. Qnap and Thecus make similar devices. I would stay away from the 1-2 disk cheap boxes like the WD "worldbook" series.

The NV+ is way to slow to be useable for Phocus or Lightroom (around 10-20MB/s). The Pro approaches useable performance (approx
60MB/s on writes and 80MB/s on reads), ie equivalent to a fast single disk in your workstation. For my local work disk I use several striped SAS spindles and
get >250MB/s.

Across gigabit Ethernet you are unlikely to get more than 70-80MB/s regardless of what solution you use. If you use WLAN, performance will be much worse.

/Henrik

[guvnah]

Thanks.  I'll check them out.  The ReadyNAS Pro sounds interesting.
Michael

[Michel P]

Hi,

I am using a Drobo  http://www.drobo.com  a solid system that can be reached from anywhere through their Drobo Serve set-up. I have not used that facility yet but apparently it works well.

Regards,
Michel