NAS storage - home use.
Discussion
Looking to say goodbye to my 2009 Mac Pro with 6Tb of files and stuff across 4 HDDs. I'll be using my MacBookPro to access those files going forwards and looking for a device to store the data on.
I would need to copy files from MacPro to new devices and it would be helpful to be via cable, as surely this would be quicker than over wifi. As it's 2009, there is Gb ethernet, USB and Firewire lol.
Or should I look for a caddy type unit and simply place my existing drives in there? But my drives are quite old, and maybe hinder transfer speeds in this setup. The existing drives are 2Gb 7200rpm Sata units.
Going forwards, I want to be able to access the files over wifi from my laptop, and potentially point Apple TV at it for streaming.
Needs to be quiet and reliable.
Any suggestions? Cheers.
I would need to copy files from MacPro to new devices and it would be helpful to be via cable, as surely this would be quicker than over wifi. As it's 2009, there is Gb ethernet, USB and Firewire lol.
Or should I look for a caddy type unit and simply place my existing drives in there? But my drives are quite old, and maybe hinder transfer speeds in this setup. The existing drives are 2Gb 7200rpm Sata units.
Going forwards, I want to be able to access the files over wifi from my laptop, and potentially point Apple TV at it for streaming.
Needs to be quiet and reliable.
Any suggestions? Cheers.
Luca Brazzi said:
Or should I look for a caddy type unit and simply place my existing drives in there? But my drives are quite old, and maybe hinder transfer speeds in this setup. The existing drives are 2Gb 7200rpm Sata units.
Do you mean 2TB drives?The drive speed isn't so much of an issue in NAS boxes: even with Gigabit Ethernet the drives can usually keep up. I've got 2 x 7200 rpm Seagate drives in a Zyxel NAS326, and the NAS runs at full Gigabit speeds, both on read and write. Some older Synology boxes had a reputation for stodgy performance, particularly if folder encryption was enabled, but I've not seen many crits of the current range.
Check YouTube for reviews.
NAS gives you low-energy networked media access compared to USB caddies, as you don't have to leave a file sharing computer on. Plus you get a handful of 'apps' thrown in like media servers, Time Machine backups, folder encryption, remote Cloud access and NAS backup to 'cloudy' services like Gdrive etc.
Thanks for the replies.
Sorry, typo, I meant I have 3 x 2Tb and 1 x 1.5Tb, but I can go through and bin a fair bit of that.
Budget - low, less than £200
NAS sounds like the way to go, and it looks like I might find an enclosure around that price. Which are the brands to look for and which to avoid? And features to look for?
One other thing that is important is noise level. I've read some reviews that some units are extremely loud and get very, very hot.
If I wanted to access it via wifi, is the only option to plug it into the home router via ethernet? On other occasions if I wanted direct connection, I guess it would be USB from NAS to laptop, yes?
Thanks again
Sorry, typo, I meant I have 3 x 2Tb and 1 x 1.5Tb, but I can go through and bin a fair bit of that.
Budget - low, less than £200
NAS sounds like the way to go, and it looks like I might find an enclosure around that price. Which are the brands to look for and which to avoid? And features to look for?
One other thing that is important is noise level. I've read some reviews that some units are extremely loud and get very, very hot.
If I wanted to access it via wifi, is the only option to plug it into the home router via ethernet? On other occasions if I wanted direct connection, I guess it would be USB from NAS to laptop, yes?
Thanks again
Edited by Luca Brazzi on Tuesday 16th July 17:51
Luca Brazzi said:
Thanks for the replies.
Sorry, typo, I meant I have 3 x 2Tb and 1 x 1.5Tb, but I can go through and bin a fair bit of that.
Budget - low, less than £200
If I wanted to access it via wifi, is the only option to plug it into the home router via ethernet? On other occasions if I wanted direct connection, I guess it would be USB from NAS to laptop, yes?
Number of drive bays is the first question: 2 bay NAS boxes are cheaper than 4 bay. Sorry, typo, I meant I have 3 x 2Tb and 1 x 1.5Tb, but I can go through and bin a fair bit of that.
Budget - low, less than £200
If I wanted to access it via wifi, is the only option to plug it into the home router via ethernet? On other occasions if I wanted direct connection, I guess it would be USB from NAS to laptop, yes?
Edited by Luca Brazzi on Tuesday 16th July 17:51
RAID 1 provides redundancy, in case a single drive (of a pair) fails, but halves the total store size, if 2 TB is enough, you could use the 2 x 2TB to give 2TB of mirrored store. Then put the spare 2TB drive in a USB caddy to backup the NAS, once its setup.
Or buy a 4 bay NAS, whack all the drives into it and set up JBOD (just a bunch of drives) to give you no redundancy, of 7.5 TB. Or buy a 2 bay and a couple of larger drives. Etc etc.
Ethernet: yes, plug the NAS into the router. You'll get wifi access. Some older routers only have 10/100 ethernet ports, so throughput will be lower.
I don't know about USB access to a NAS. Generally, Network Attached Storage is attached to, er, a network. The store appears as folders or Mapped drives on the PC/Mac, once user privs and folder privs are allocated.
You can often attach external USB drives/sticks to the USB ports on the NAS. They'll appear as extra folders/drives once privs are set up. (Useful to backup the NAS.)
You can also share USB printers through most NAS boxes.
You can use a NAS without a router, coupled direct to the PC with ethernet if you're comfortable setting up IP addresses. Generally, its easier to let the router dish out IP addresses and put the NAS on the local network.
Access to NAS settings is generally through the NAS's web page, or through a terminal with SSH. If SSH means nothing, you can safely ignore it.
Once the user and folder privs are set up, the NAS will tick along without much user intervention.
Cheapest budget decent NAS enclosure (no drives) is the 2 bay Zyxel NAS326, for about £90. (Amazon) I have one which has been running for two years. (2 x Seagate 2TB in RAID 1.)
There's a QNAP TS-231P 2 bay enclosure, for about £200.
- The fly in the ointment is Mac Pro, and Mac streaming, neither of which I have any recent experience of.
Edited by Slushbox on Tuesday 16th July 19:30
What’s wrong with the 2019 Mac Pro? Just whack a Xeon X5960 and some RAM off of the ‘bay, an SSD and a Sonnet USB-C card in there and it will fly
For the NAS you could go with a Synology unit and also use that as a Time Machine backup drive for your MacBook as well as a streaming server (using either DS Video or Plex). To be honest, I’d invest in a couple of mirrored WD Red drives 6Tb or larger though, which will increase your budget
For the NAS you could go with a Synology unit and also use that as a Time Machine backup drive for your MacBook as well as a streaming server (using either DS Video or Plex). To be honest, I’d invest in a couple of mirrored WD Red drives 6Tb or larger though, which will increase your budget
Luca Brazzi said:
One other thing that is important is noise level. I've read some reviews that some units are extremely loud and get very, very hot.
I have a WD Ex2 Ultra. Most of the time it's silent but it can get pretty loud when doing things like indexing and transcoding. I wouldn't want it next to my work space if I made heavy use of it. Sometimes it's the loudest thing in the room. Most of them will be more vocal than the equivalent computer as the fans will be tinnier and the disks more exposed.
There's a Buffalo 2 LS220DE-EU drive NAS enclosure on Amazon for £66.
They get mixed reviews, but will take a couple of drives. Has Gigabit ethernet, RAID 0,1, JBOD. 'Mac support.'
There's a review of the similar single drive 210 here:
https://youtu.be/m6cCLTFnwdM
I've ordered one so will report back. A couple of new NAS-rated 2TB drives (Seagate IronWolf or WD Red) will squeeze into the budget of £200 so the old hard drives can be copied over.
One further point is that setting up a NAS invariably formats the drives. So you have to figure out a method for shuffling data off them before you start. :-)
They get mixed reviews, but will take a couple of drives. Has Gigabit ethernet, RAID 0,1, JBOD. 'Mac support.'
There's a review of the similar single drive 210 here:
https://youtu.be/m6cCLTFnwdM
I've ordered one so will report back. A couple of new NAS-rated 2TB drives (Seagate IronWolf or WD Red) will squeeze into the budget of £200 so the old hard drives can be copied over.
One further point is that setting up a NAS invariably formats the drives. So you have to figure out a method for shuffling data off them before you start. :-)
Edited by Slushbox on Wednesday 17th July 07:18
^^^^
I agree. I had a Buffalo thing ten years ago, which lasted six months then smoked its power supply. This one is cheap enough to be a 'test' unit, especially as I've got a couple of spare drives gathering cat fur. The Zyxel NAS326 though, is doing really well for the price, but I really should back it up.
Edit:
This Synology is currently at £155. No disks.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS218j-Bay-Deskt...
I agree. I had a Buffalo thing ten years ago, which lasted six months then smoked its power supply. This one is cheap enough to be a 'test' unit, especially as I've got a couple of spare drives gathering cat fur. The Zyxel NAS326 though, is doing really well for the price, but I really should back it up.
Edit:
This Synology is currently at £155. No disks.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS218j-Bay-Deskt...
Edited by Slushbox on Wednesday 17th July 11:42
Great info, and thanks for the comments and reviews.
My 2009 MacPro is the old style large Apple machine, weighing around 20Kg. It just doesn't get used anymore, as I prefer the flexibility and portability of the laptop.
It will be for sale as soon as I've moved onto NAS. In 2009 it was a great spec...dual Zeon chips, dual graphics cards, 20Gb Ram, plus it will be sold with the Apple 30" Cinema display. The drives will not be included. PM me if interested.
As for NAS, I think I will avoid Buffalo products based on your wisdom and my reading of reviews. Zyxel and Synology sound pretty solid.
And from further reading, I need to make sure they can be indexed using Apple's 'Spotlight'. Decent software tool / mobile apps to support it and make life easier are also important, much like the noise level.
My existing drives are obviously formatted for MacOS at the moment. Am I right in thinking they will have to be reformatted to FAT, or do some providers accept non FAT format? If not, I do have backups I can restore on to the reformatted disks. ;-) I have 4 x 2Tb 2.5" drives which are a mirror of the internal drives?
To connect to a router, presumably it would need either old shape USB or Ethernet, as I presume most broadband provided routers would not have USB yet (just about to switch to Vodafone broadband.
My 2009 MacPro is the old style large Apple machine, weighing around 20Kg. It just doesn't get used anymore, as I prefer the flexibility and portability of the laptop.
It will be for sale as soon as I've moved onto NAS. In 2009 it was a great spec...dual Zeon chips, dual graphics cards, 20Gb Ram, plus it will be sold with the Apple 30" Cinema display. The drives will not be included. PM me if interested.
As for NAS, I think I will avoid Buffalo products based on your wisdom and my reading of reviews. Zyxel and Synology sound pretty solid.
And from further reading, I need to make sure they can be indexed using Apple's 'Spotlight'. Decent software tool / mobile apps to support it and make life easier are also important, much like the noise level.
My existing drives are obviously formatted for MacOS at the moment. Am I right in thinking they will have to be reformatted to FAT, or do some providers accept non FAT format? If not, I do have backups I can restore on to the reformatted disks. ;-) I have 4 x 2Tb 2.5" drives which are a mirror of the internal drives?
To connect to a router, presumably it would need either old shape USB or Ethernet, as I presume most broadband provided routers would not have USB yet (just about to switch to Vodafone broadband.
^^^^
NAS will connect via ethernet into the router, not USB.
The drives are normally partitioned and formatted by the NAS when you first set up the disk group. It's often EXT3 or EXT4 as there's a lot of Linux in NAS boxes.
Synology seem to offer Brtfs or EXT4, there's a discussion here.
https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/t...
Some older NAS boxes refuse to partition and format drives with existing partitions as a safety net. (Buffalo!) The Zyxel seems to chomp happily on anything you shove into it.
Apple Spotlight: Out of my remit. Most NAS's, including the Zyxel support AFP networking but I haven't used it, or Spotlight. You'll need to make sure AFP is enabled when you set up the NAS.
https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=145...
A Synology chap will be along in a minute to answer further Mac/NAS queschuns.
NAS will connect via ethernet into the router, not USB.
The drives are normally partitioned and formatted by the NAS when you first set up the disk group. It's often EXT3 or EXT4 as there's a lot of Linux in NAS boxes.
Synology seem to offer Brtfs or EXT4, there's a discussion here.
https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/t...
Some older NAS boxes refuse to partition and format drives with existing partitions as a safety net. (Buffalo!) The Zyxel seems to chomp happily on anything you shove into it.
Apple Spotlight: Out of my remit. Most NAS's, including the Zyxel support AFP networking but I haven't used it, or Spotlight. You'll need to make sure AFP is enabled when you set up the NAS.
https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=145...
A Synology chap will be along in a minute to answer further Mac/NAS queschuns.
Edited by Slushbox on Wednesday 17th July 15:45
Some NAS will allow you to connect USB drives directly and then transfer off the data onto the NAS, if the USB drives are decent it will be considerably quicker than going via the network. I know QNAP supports this.
Don't forget to factor in some lost storage from the new drives you buy to allow for RAID on the new NAS. A two drive NAS will obviously only support RAID 1 for redundant storage, so you'll lose all of the storage on the second drive. To get 6Tb of usable storage you'll need two 6Tb drives. Not using redundant storage would obviously give you double the disk space but if you lose either of the disks you are f
ked unless you have good backups.
Don't forget to factor in some lost storage from the new drives you buy to allow for RAID on the new NAS. A two drive NAS will obviously only support RAID 1 for redundant storage, so you'll lose all of the storage on the second drive. To get 6Tb of usable storage you'll need two 6Tb drives. Not using redundant storage would obviously give you double the disk space but if you lose either of the disks you are f
ked unless you have good backups.Luca Brazzi said:
My 2009 MacPro is the old style large Apple machine, weighing around 20Kg. It just doesn't get used anymore, as I prefer the flexibility and portability of the laptop
It may be worth more than you think, check prices on eBay. Even if it has the original Xeons, it’s upgradeable to faster processors at a reasonable cost. I have a few MacBook Pro’s (2015 through to 2019), but still use my old style large Apple Machine for 4k video editing, running multiple VMs and app development because- 128GB RAM
- drives two 4K monitors with a R9-280X card
- 24 virtual cores @ 3.46 GHz
- PCIe SSD and multiple internal SSDs
- bunch of 6TB internal drives
Love my MacBook Pros, but the cheese grater Mac has its place and the price and spec of the replacement Mac Pro (later this year) mean that it still has plenty of life for a 10-year old design
Selling that would pay for a top-spec Synology NAS...
Luca Brazzi said:
Great info, and thanks for the comments and reviews.
My 2009 MacPro is the old style large Apple machine, weighing around 20Kg. It just doesn't get used anymore, as I prefer the flexibility and portability of the laptop.
It will be for sale as soon as I've moved onto NAS. In 2009 it was a great spec...dual Zeon chips, dual graphics cards, 20Gb Ram, plus it will be sold with the Apple 30" Cinema display. The drives will not be included. PM me if interested.
As for NAS, I think I will avoid Buffalo products based on your wisdom and my reading of reviews. Zyxel and Synology sound pretty solid.
And from further reading, I need to make sure they can be indexed using Apple's 'Spotlight'. Decent software tool / mobile apps to support it and make life easier are also important, much like the noise level.
My existing drives are obviously formatted for MacOS at the moment. Am I right in thinking they will have to be reformatted to FAT, or do some providers accept non FAT format? If not, I do have backups I can restore on to the reformatted disks. ;-) I have 4 x 2Tb 2.5" drives which are a mirror of the internal drives?
To connect to a router, presumably it would need either old shape USB or Ethernet, as I presume most broadband provided routers would not have USB yet (just about to switch to Vodafone broadband.
Whichever NAS you choose, the drives will be re-formatted by the NAS. It's unlikely to be to FAT though, as this is essentially an MS format. Synology NAS boxes use a LINUX based OS and so will format to EXT. Worth nothing that I've never managed to get a Synology to work with an EXT formatted drive from a different OS, the NAS insists on re-formating to Synology's own flavour of EXT.My 2009 MacPro is the old style large Apple machine, weighing around 20Kg. It just doesn't get used anymore, as I prefer the flexibility and portability of the laptop.
It will be for sale as soon as I've moved onto NAS. In 2009 it was a great spec...dual Zeon chips, dual graphics cards, 20Gb Ram, plus it will be sold with the Apple 30" Cinema display. The drives will not be included. PM me if interested.
As for NAS, I think I will avoid Buffalo products based on your wisdom and my reading of reviews. Zyxel and Synology sound pretty solid.
And from further reading, I need to make sure they can be indexed using Apple's 'Spotlight'. Decent software tool / mobile apps to support it and make life easier are also important, much like the noise level.
My existing drives are obviously formatted for MacOS at the moment. Am I right in thinking they will have to be reformatted to FAT, or do some providers accept non FAT format? If not, I do have backups I can restore on to the reformatted disks. ;-) I have 4 x 2Tb 2.5" drives which are a mirror of the internal drives?
To connect to a router, presumably it would need either old shape USB or Ethernet, as I presume most broadband provided routers would not have USB yet (just about to switch to Vodafone broadband.
Synology and QNAP both come with gigabit ethernet ports, just connect to your router and off you go. When using a Mac with a Synology, you may to enable the AFP file service before the Mac can identify the NAS correctly (this is just a tick box in the Synology control panel).
Synology DS218J currently £139 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS218j-Bay-Deskt...
To round this off, the £66 Buffalo LinkStation arrived. It took about 45 minutes to set up, including a firmware update.
The short answer is that you get a very basic NAS, with a DNLA music server, and a Bittorrent client, plus WebAccess. The user/access privs are comprehensive, though the web interface is very slow. It supports AFP. Power draw is about 22 watts.
Speeds: PC to NAS over Gigabit: 46 MB/s (megabytes). This is about half the speed of the Zyxel and slower than a USB 3.0 disk in a caddy connected to the PC.
The file system is XFS. Fan is quiet, other than at first boot, when it revs up to full speed. Very little disk clatter. (WD Green drives). It doesn't do smart stuff like hot swap drives, apps like Gdrive backup, but there is a basic FTP server.
The drive setup is RAID 0/1 or none. None gives you two drives in a box, with no interaction between each other. The default is RAID 1. I set it to 'none' to give two separate 1 TB drives. Max capacity appears to be 2 x 4TB.
It does have a daily/weekly sleep timer, so with Macrium Reflect on the PC set to weekly backups, the LinkStation will wake on a Friday, slurp down the auto backup and go back to sleep.
Verdict:
At £66 it's OK as basic network box for holding two drives in RAID 0/1, but the Zyxel at £90 is much more fully featured and noticeably quicker in almost every aspect.
LinkStation is very quiet, and hasn't set fire to the wallpaper. Unobtrusive, and good at the price.
The short answer is that you get a very basic NAS, with a DNLA music server, and a Bittorrent client, plus WebAccess. The user/access privs are comprehensive, though the web interface is very slow. It supports AFP. Power draw is about 22 watts.
Speeds: PC to NAS over Gigabit: 46 MB/s (megabytes). This is about half the speed of the Zyxel and slower than a USB 3.0 disk in a caddy connected to the PC.
The file system is XFS. Fan is quiet, other than at first boot, when it revs up to full speed. Very little disk clatter. (WD Green drives). It doesn't do smart stuff like hot swap drives, apps like Gdrive backup, but there is a basic FTP server.
The drive setup is RAID 0/1 or none. None gives you two drives in a box, with no interaction between each other. The default is RAID 1. I set it to 'none' to give two separate 1 TB drives. Max capacity appears to be 2 x 4TB.
It does have a daily/weekly sleep timer, so with Macrium Reflect on the PC set to weekly backups, the LinkStation will wake on a Friday, slurp down the auto backup and go back to sleep.
Verdict:
At £66 it's OK as basic network box for holding two drives in RAID 0/1, but the Zyxel at £90 is much more fully featured and noticeably quicker in almost every aspect.
LinkStation is very quiet, and hasn't set fire to the wallpaper. Unobtrusive, and good at the price.
Edited by Slushbox on Friday 19th July 08:15
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