I've been thinking of getting a twin disc NAS for all the music/photos/videos we have plus backups, and seen the Zyxel NSA325 on offer at ebuyer and the 3 TB Seagate Barracuda HDD's seem good value at under £100 (so I was going to get a pair).

What's the best way to transfer the 1 TB or so of data I have at the moment scattered around various external HD's and PC's? (I want lots of room or expansion with all the old 35mm negs to scan, LP's to rip, etc.) The external HD's all have USB connections but are old and maybe only USB or USB 2. The NAS has a gigabit socket but I have nothing else with it, is it worth getting a gigabit ethernet card for a PC, or will the USB connection be the bottleneck? I would imagine the external HDD's are not SATA-III like the 3 TB drives.

Anyone else think the NAS+3TB drives are good value?

The modem/router is still only 54g but all PC's can do wireless-n 150 Mbps (apart from my old laptop with 11 Mbps PCMCIA adapter) and I have several 200 Mbps HomePlug adapters (some of which show a low speed due to the house wiring ) but I could do with a faster modem/router.

I used to use MAC address filtering but have more than the max of 16 devices so switched to WPA2 (which my old laptop couldn't do but I just found an Edimax EW-7711UTn adapter which I'll have to try) but I'd like additional features like being able to lock the kids out of the internet at certain times (bed time )

I know other forum-ers have Zyxel stuff, and it mentions Squeezebox which I want and those drives are listed as being compatible, so it seems good value compared with basic 2 bay stuff from Synology, QNAP or Netgear. Other stuff I'd like to connect is a PS3 and a Humax FoxSat PVR.

The maximum phoneline Broadband speed is 4 Mbps on a good day, but 3 Mbps more typically

Any recommendations for a modem/router? No point in getting too advanced or I'll have to update all the PC's etc.

Right....

Best way to copy, copy everything on to the one PC and then shunt it over to the nas box.
Is it good value? seems to be, the 3tb drives are nice and cheep at the moment.

Do you need to upgrade your router?
Yes, if you want gigabit speeds and wireless N, streaming hidef content is almost impossible otherwise. I have seen better quality adsl routers help bring up the sync speed as well (better noise control?)
Netgear seem to be a solid suggestion.

Is it worth getting a gigabit Ethernet connection for the pc?
Depends on if the router supports this, if not it will drop down to the next speed that everything can handle with will be 100 base. I have made the move over as I push a lot of data around and the speed increases are noticeable.

I've seen a lot of good comment on the Proliant microserver - and it's cheaper than many of the NAS boxes, too. I'm on the verge of buying myself and that's what I'll probably end up with.

The annoying thing about most of the NAS boxen I investigated is that for some reason none of them offer raid 5, just raid 0 (striping, quick but twice the risk of loss) or 1 (mirror, standard speed but more reliable). I'd rather have a 3+1 parity system.

Proliant, hmmm, a little more costly than I was hoping for, but the main problem is that the hp badge is the mark of the devil in our house. As for the different RAID types, I haven't the faintest idea what you're on about, other than I think RAID 1 will suit me OK?

My ZYTEL also has an eSATA socket. But the one you linked has a USB3 input so get a USB3 card for your PC and jobs a goddun.

The interface for the drives is SATA I or II so your 3TB SATA III drives will be fine but won't be working at full whack, but they rarely do anyway even with a SATA III interface.

I have the Zytel 320 model with single 1TB drive and my only negative is that with the drive spinning it gets noisy if placed on a bookshelf. 2 drives will only be noisier but that said the extra size of the unit will mean better damping.

As for the external drives USB2 will be the bottlneck, but if they are SATA drives you could just dismantle and remove the drive and plug them into one half of the NAS drive to get the data transfered to the 3TB drive on the other port. But is speed that much of an issue as you will only be doing the transfer once for each external drive so just set them running overnight.

@DaveG:

Raid 0: data is placed onto two drives, half on each drive. That means you can get it back twice as quickly but if either drive dies you lose everything.

Raid 1: data is place onto two drives, the same on each. Capacity is the same as a single drive, but if either fails, you've still got a good copy.

Raid 5: data is placed on n-1 of n drives - I'd be looking at 3 of 4 - and a checksum of the n-1 drives is placed on the remaining drive. If any one drive dies it can be recreated from the remaining drives.

There are more sophisticated combinations: raid 5.1 mirrors two raid 5 drives and allows any two discs to die, for example.

If you have a NAS box with two drives, your only options are raid 0 or 1. With more than two drives, you can consider raid 5.

With four (e.g.) 2TB drives:

raid 0 = 8TB capacity, fastest, risky
raid 1 = 4TB capacity, standard speed, reasonably bombproof
raid 5 = 6TB capacity, medium speed depending on chipset or raid software, pretty bombproof.

Of course, if you're *really* concerned about availability of your data... one of the last jobs I did in the Beeb was the radio audio servers. Raid 5.1 in one rack of discs; a second copy in another rack on the same controller; a third copy on a different OS on the server. Duplicate that in a different server room on different power and network supplies. Then copy the whole lot in a different city... you could drop a meteorite on London and Radio 4 will still work.

@barnacle I feel suitably edd-you-kate-edd, but does that mean that Radio 4 is all just recordings?

@bockers, yes I thought about sticking the existing drives in the NAS. not sure how easy they are to dismantle though. I only have one laptop with USB 3 I think. I envisaged copying over several nights, I have done that before using the Homeplugs to get a lot of stuff off the Humax box. But AFAIK the Zyxel NAS is SATA-600 (same as SATA-III?) which is the same as those 3 TB drives.

But with the Homeplugs I found that the speed at the Humax connection was sometimes dropping below 10 Mbps, pretty poor for what is supposed to be max 200 Mbps. The Humax is plugged into some new sockets in the lounge, a lot of new sockets were added, but just the other side of the wall is an original socket on the same circuit as the router, and plugging into that gave me closer to 100 Mbps, so I just ran a cable through the wall and joined the circuits (they are on the same fuse). Elsewhere in the house the Homeplugs give 100-150 or so if on the same circuit. I was disappointed to see how poor the Homeplugs could be on different circuits.

That's why I thought that a direct gigabit-to-gigabit connection might help, but the files to copy are scattered over multiple old HDD's and PC's, so it won't help unless it all gets copied to the PC with a gigabit card, then copied again to the NAS, which seems like a waste of time.

Thanks all!

Most of radio 4 is recorded and edited, apart from the news shows (and of course, individual articles are prerecorded, even if just from the live interview an hour ago).

That's why it's so good!

Neil there are plenty of NAS that do RAID 5 Synology and Qnap both do 4 disk raid 5 models. I don't think I have seen a 4 disk model which doesn't do Raid 5. I have a Synology DS410j which will be for sale this weekend should anyone be interested. And possibly a 2 disk model as well depending on what I decide to do

On the drive front I would also consider thee Western Digital Green range or possibly the Red range as well. Longer warranty than the seagates may be worth the additional few £'s

If you have a old desktop available you may want to consider Unraid. Its free for up to 3 drives (Raid 5) and runs on even the most basic of hardware.

Just another suggestion would be perhaps consider spending more ona 4 disk the device and save alittle cash back by getting 2tb drives if needed. It will give more flexibility in the future when you need to expand.

Well maybe...but perhaps I'm better off just getting to grips with a twin version and RAID 1 for now. I have to say that now because I've gone and bought the Zyxel plus 2x3TB discs. Watch out for my 'help needed' thread in a weeks time...

I don't 'really' get the fuzz about RAID-5. I've used it and...

1/ writing data (which you kind of do a lot for backups) was s l o w compared to my RAID-1
2/ one of the disks failed after a year and then another one failed while trying to recreate the array (disks off the same batch tend to fail after about the same time)

Generally, I now just go for RAID-1 for the speed (well I did, I now have a small SSD running my system which is the best move I've done the last year together with a 24GB RAM upgrade) but I have a double backup system as well: all gets copied on a daily basis to a big drive in the PC itself + an external drive on eSATA. I also always make sure my RAID-1 drivers are perfectly matched but my other drivers are completely different. They will fail on different types.

That said I only had drives fail once so I'm not buying WD's again.

And even now I'm still not feeling very safe. I'd like a remote backup in case of fire or lightning strike. Then again, I'm talking valuable data of customers here. Oh and pictures.

Ideally... I don't know what would make anything bombproof. Remote backup sounds rather okay. As long as you check it. And as long as the connection is REALLY fast. My problem is I often create a couple of Gigs a day so the backup can take a while.

Oh and then I also have "ARCHIVE" disks. This is a backup on DVD. Err... twice. I store them in different locations in the house. And then those archives also get archived on two different hard drives.

Yeah... it became a bit freaky after those drives failed and it took me 6 months to recreate a lot of work for customers.

I know what your saying but it depends on what you need it for. I would say Raid 5 isnt really suitable for desktop use or data which is accessed modified regularly its more for lonerg term storage and is fine for media servers.

I use Unraid which isnt a true raid 5 system but argueably much better for it. Its far easier to expand storage even with different size disks, and even if 2 drives fail you wont lose all the data as you would with a raid 5 system. You can also add a cache drive to speed up transfers speed to the system (the data wont be protected till its transfer to the array at night but you can also write straight to the array if you want.

Yes, you tend to learn the hard way. Starting with 5" floppies, then 3.25", then CD's, etc., one copy is never enough, and when you start to hear funny clicking noises from a hard disc, don't ignore it...

One of the PC's has gigabit ethernet and eSATA apparently, but only USB 2. The hard disk has nearly 0.7TB free so I'll probably copy all the stuff from multiple HDD's over to it as a first step (might need to do it 2 or 3 chunks).

To get it all on the NAS, I assume I would need a gigabit router to connect the PC to the NAS via gigabit, I can't just connect them directly?

The PC also has firewire (as do some of the other PC's), can I connect PC's directly together by firewire cable?

Once I've got the all the files on the NAS, I'll have a look at upgrading the modem/router.

I would say Connect the usb drive(s) directly to the NAS using usb, there no point copying them twice. The pcs need to be done on the network.

Yes, but I'm just thinking that PC to NAS can be done via Gigabit (with crossover cable, or apparently supposed to be smart enough to use normal patch cable and do a "software" crossover) for up to 1,000 Mbps compared to Firewire at 400 Mbps and USB/USB2 (not high speed) will be the slowest.

And going over the network as it is now will only be up to 54 Mbps with the old wireless router, and only up to around 100-150 Mbps using Homeplug.

Yes thats fine. I just suggesting you dont copy data either from usb drive to the pc and then to the NAS (moving everything twice) or copying over the network from the usb drive ( no benefit). Anything on usb can be copied direct the NAS. Everything located on the PCs can then be moved on the network as you suggest

For RAID5 you really want a hardware RAID card so that the parity can be calculated by a dedicated logic chip on the card, rather than in software on the host system, otherwise it's sloooow indeed.

Even then writes are slower than reads 'cause it has to read all the strips to calculate parity before writing.

I run 10 x 2TB drives in an external box as RAID6 (like RAID5 only with 2 parity drives, so you can have 2 fail at once) on an Adaptec card and performance is excellent.

Of course if you're running a Mac hardware RAID probably isn't an option as the most common cards (Adaptec and LSI) have no driver support for Mac.

Proper raid 5 cards tend to be pricey (multiple hundreds £s) though dont they? Again it depends on your needs I am guess your is used for work as well as personal? It probably excessive for most home users.

Given that I'm likely to be accessing any NAS through the house wireless, I'm unlikely to see transmission rates in excess of a couple of megabits a second anyway. Even a software raid 5 would be able to keep up with that!

Raid 5 is available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00620CM0I/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

Its a 4 disk RAID, and its pretty good, 2xUSB3.0 Ports, 1x USB2.0 , gigabit networking, fairly quick and a bargain at the price.

I have just streamlined our home NAS drives, getting rid of 2x Buffalos, 1x:Lacie, 1xLinkSys, (in fact you can have the 2bay Linksys for £25 delivered if you want it., no drives supplied though)

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/servers_storage/linksys_by_cisco/media_hub_nmh-305/280272

Am down to using the Qnap TS219 Pii, the Apple TimeCapsule and the Netgear.

As for the Mac using RAID 5, thats only if you connect the RAID Array directly to the Mac, I thought poster was planning on using his network? There are MAC Raid cards available, I know because I have one in my Mac Pro http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPCIE6GRS/

Dave, are you on cable broadband or bt?

I think Grahams point was proper raid cards don't tend to be supported for Macs. The vast majority of Raid (be it on a motherboard or add in card) are "fake" raid in that there isnt a dedicated chip for parity calcs etc, its either software on chip or via drivers.

From what I've seen a decent true raid card cost more than most consumer NAS devices.

I've picked up quite a few used Adaptec or LSI cards on ebay over the years for £100-£200, about 1/4 of the new price, so not excessive cost wise considering the performance gains. If you don't go for the current range there are some bargains to be had.



Yes, but just for backups, it's mainly used for storing HD movies.

Even these new gigabit NAS boxes will totally bottleneck the performance of a decent multi-drive RAID0 or RAID5/6 array , DAS (Direct attached storage) with hardware RAID will easily perform 4x faster and it'll remain that way until 10Gb ethernet is much more common.



That card doesn't implement RAID in hardware so would perform no better than software RAID.

I'm not sure if proper hardware RAID5/6 cards are even available for the MAC at all, I've never seen one.

True Graham there are some cheap bits of kit about. That said now I have gone unraid I cant see me changing. Its probably nowhere near a proper raid system but I dont need that performance as it just streaming music and movies over my network and downloading stuff.

I'm building a ZFS FC 8GB/s SAN.
But I am a Nerd.
Got a Brocade Switch.
Software raid will P all over any hw raid 5 card.
But it does have 32 GB ram and 8 cpu cores

BT I haven't asked them about fibre optic broadband, I'm with Utility Warehouse and they won't be upgrading for fibre optic for a while now. But TBH I'm not that fussed, we don't stream movies and as long as it works for BBC/ITV iPlayer it's OK, but that's not to say we won't want it in the future...

http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421

+ £100 cashback from HP makes this a no brainer in my opinion compared to a NAS. Depends how technical you are though