Recommend me a NAS solution

My wants are simple. I bought a Seagate Wireless Plus 1TB drive, and it seems much more geared towards being a mobile solution than i need.

I simply want something that i can access from any device on my network, wirelessly. I don't care about automatic backup, fancy interfaces, or any of it. I simply want 1-2tb that i can dump photos to on my own terms. That's it.

Recommendations?

Anyone interested in a screaming deal on a Seagate Wireless Plus?

Buy a few 1TB drives (that aren't Seagates as they aren't know for reliability), put them in an old PC with Sata Raid capability, configure Raid, plug PC into router, download and install FreeNAS. Configure FreeNAS. Done.

Does your router have a USB port? You can often plug an external hard drive in and use it for NAS.

I bought a QNAP 2-drive NAS last year. I have (2) 2 GB WD red drives in it, mirrored, and I connect it to my house wifi router. I back up the NAS periodically on a 2 GB external HD that usually resides in a drawer at my desk at work. Though the NAS drives are formatted as Linux, I can access the NAS from my smartphone or from laptops in the house (PC and Mac OS) using it like any other local HDD.

I can recommend my setup for what you are seeking. Your needs matched mine. It works well.

Having said that, it does feel a bit over my head, maybe "intimidating" is a better term. I'm comfortable on Mac OS and Windows, but I still I feel the NAS is more geared for somebody with Linux knowledge, of which I have none. I will likely leave it alone and enjoy it.

If I had to do it again, I might just get an unlimited Pogoplug cloud subscription. Or one of many other cloud storage solutions out there.

I have a single drive QNAP. It will do you what you want, but as it has aged, it seems somewhat less reliable... I've had to reset the password a few times this year already (it seems to reset itself after power outages). But maybe that's typical?

If you value your data, I would use a NAS with at least 3-4 drives to increase the chances that your data survives if a disk goes belly up. Doesn't help with the fat fingering, but at least it should help with bad disks. Oh, and it really needs to be on a UPS, especially if it's a Linuxy one.

Clearly i have no idea what i'm talking about or just asked, as all these answers are Greek.

So i really do want something with 2 drivesn mirrored? Would prefer something standalone, i don't have an old pc and don't really want one.

Router doesn't have a usb port.

FreeNAS on a thumb drive stuck in an old PC that's not used anymore.
http://www.freenas.org/

I went a little overboard, bought an older, refurb, 1U, single quad core 775 Xeon, Supermicro server, and stuck 4 1Tb WD RE hard drives in it. RAID gives me just almost 2Tb of storage.

Bad thing about the old server, even setting the fan speeds on their lowest setting via BIOS, it still sounds a bit like a turbine, it wasn't exactly designed to be quiet.

If you're going to have a RAID (unless only a software RAID) be sure the drives are up to the task. I got burned using cheap drives without any error recovery control in a RAID once, won't make that mistake again. Stick with enterprise level HDs, or drives advertised for RAID use.

SF1: I would recommend more than one drive, mirrored. That way, if you lose one, you've hopefully not lost everything.

And remember that it's important to keep a backup. If the house burns down, even if it's got mirrored drives, it's gone...

(Which is why cloud solutions are attractive)

Maybe this is a situation where i'd like to hear about other options.

Setting up a pc just for this is out.

The scenario is that the laptop we're using right now has run out of hard drive space. I need a way to dump photos manually to a drive that any device (or even just windows machine) can access.

Am i even asking the right question?

From how you describe your needs, the Seagate is what I'd recommend. What is it about it that doesn't meet your needs? Most of the other solutions are wired and would get plugged in to your existing wireless router. Is having independent wireless connectivity a requirement, or is there an open port on your router/access point?

The Seagate acts as its own network. I have to connect to it specifically instead of my router. If i'm connected to the home network, i can't access the Seagate.

If i connect to the Seagate's "network," i can then connect to the internet by going through the setup and connecting it to the home network.

It... Works. But Seagate specifically says that you shouldnt stream internet video while connected to the drive's network, and the idea of all activity going through that drive doesn't sit well with me, and seems needlessly complicated.

I don't want to have to use a second network, i just want something on my existing network.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DW1UNS8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00DW1UNS8&linkCode=as2&tag=alesoddotcom-20&linkId=5I4YLXCXHTFCSD4J

Get some nice drives for it, maybe even Samsung 850 Pro 1TB drives...

Ah, it wasn't clear from their data sheets that it was just its own network. That's kind of kludgey.

If you have an extra wired network port, I would look to get a Buffalo NAS device with 2 hard drives preinstalled. Have it mirror the drives and then it's pretty much done. They have ways to connect it to the interwebs if you want as well as smartphone apps, but those aren't required.

Just offering a solution that will work and allow you to configure it the way you want.

A NAS is exactly what you describe, but Seagate just had a dumb way to implement it as it should just provide a network share (or shares) that you can access. It also isn't fault tolerant which would basically leave your data exposed to potential failure.

A simple NFS or SMB share is all that is needed and FreeNAS would perform that easily. The PC could be anything, even a Raspberry Pi which is the size of a pack of cigarettes and could attach to an external USB Drive.

Basically you need a drive connected to some sort of computer that can provide the interface between the drive, network and the various operating systems via a network share.

Personally, if I didn't want to setup a PC, or care about fault tolerance, etc. I'd buy a wireless router that has a USB port and an external USB drive of the desired size, put the two together and use the wireless router to share the drive out. My Linksys router could do this, but I've never tried it since I have a server loaded with 6, 1TB drives in a proper RAID array running FreeNAS.

Enough choices for ya?

The router idea is very interesting and a good one. I need to see how much ATT is charging me to use theirs. I could use direct access to the settings to my advantage to try to eliminate buffering issues running Kodi on my Amazon Fire TV, too.

So you're direct connected to the net without a hardware firewall/router? Dude.

You can always leave AT&T's in place and connect the new router directly to it, turn off DHCP and wireless, etc. on it so that it is just a hub and uses the AT&T solution for ip addresses and wireless.

I use a synology disc station for your exact situation. Bought three 2tb drives and swap/backup once a month and keep the spare drive at work. Probably overkill but my wife would kill me if we lost all the pics of the kids. Little spendy but I have a lot of data and cloud solutions are slow and expensive monthly in comparison.

turboswede wrote: So you're direct connected to the net without a hardware firewall/router? Dude. You can always leave AT&T's in place and connect the new router directly to it, turn off DHCP and wireless, etc. on it so that it is just a hub and uses the AT&T solution for ip addresses and wireless.

I dunno. I don't even IT, bro. I'm using ATT's modem, yes. Whatever that means for me.

Paul_VR6 wrote: I use a synology disc station for your exact situation. Bought three 2tb drives and swap/backup once a month and keep the spare drive at work. Probably overkill but my wife would kill me if we lost all the pics of the kids. Little spendy but I have a lot of data and cloud solutions are slow and expensive monthly in comparison.

This thing?

http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Attached-DS214se/dp/B00FWURI8K/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1429492987&sr=1-4&keywords=synology+ds215j

Here's my next question: Do i need special drives to run a mirrored/RAID setup? Or is it more about buying a reliable drive than anything else?

$150 + 2x 1TB drives would be within budget.

Swank Force One wrote:

turboswede wrote: So you're direct connected to the net without a hardware firewall/router? Dude. You can always leave AT&T's in place and connect the new router directly to it, turn off DHCP and wireless, etc. on it so that it is just a hub and uses the AT&T solution for ip addresses and wireless.

I dunno. I don't even IT, bro. I'm using ATT's modem, yes. Whatever that means for me.

You're killing me smalls.

In that case, I would just plug the new router into your AT&T modem and tell AT&T that you've got it from there and turn off their wireless and setup wired and wireless access, etc on the new router along with the backup drive.

turboswede wrote:

Swank Force One wrote:

turboswede wrote: So you're direct connected to the net without a hardware firewall/router? Dude. You can always leave AT&T's in place and connect the new router directly to it, turn off DHCP and wireless, etc. on it so that it is just a hub and uses the AT&T solution for ip addresses and wireless.

I dunno. I don't even IT, bro. I'm using ATT's modem, yes. Whatever that means for me.

You're killing me smalls. In that case, I would just plug the new router into your AT&T modem and tell AT&T that you've got it from there and turn off their wireless and setup wired and wireless access, etc on the new router along with the backup drive.

Ok that makes sense.

Now the big question: Am i correct in saying that this would be an answer to the question i specifically asked in the OP, but not potentially what i "need?" I feel like this is one of those times i asked the wrong question based on what i thought i wanted, but it wasn't what i needed.

I just manually moved 150gb of pictures over to the Seagate drive last night simply to get some space back on the laptop, and now i'm paranoid that they'll be lost forever if that drive eats E36 M3.

Sooo... a 2-bay NAS setup is probably the bare minimum i should be considering at this point? Would i want my own router there as well for security's sake? Or would password-protecting network mapped drive be good enough?

What Turbo is saying is right on. A two bay NAS box with the drives mirrored and a router between your stuff and the ATT box is the minimum of what you need.

Just to let you know, here is the newer version of what I bought: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165642

And I put 2 Western Digital 2Tb drives in running Raid 1 (which is a redundant mirror of data, so you can recover even if one drive fails): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136891 (Note that there might be better drives for a better price nowadays, this is what I did 2 years ago).

Back then, it cost a grand total of $330, but you can probably find cheaper drives and it looks like the NAS has gone down by about $50 as well.

To answer your question above, you can run RAID with any drives as long as they're the same size, which really means the same make and model (Since a 2Tb drive can be different "sizes" from one manufacturer to another).

My setup works well. I use a free program called Cobain Backup (google it), so all of our stuff is automatically backed up to the NAS once or twice a week, and it's accessible anywhere as normal share. It was fairly easy to setup, and I haven't done anything to it in 2 years.

Rusted_Busted_Spit wrote: What Turbo is saying is right on. A two bay NAS box with the drives mirrored and a router between your stuff and the ATT box is the minimum of what you need.

Ok, cool.

Walk me through why i need the router, if you could. Security reasons only?

The modem still has at least 3 empty corded ethernet ports on it. All that's plugged into it is the TV box, Fire TV, and PS3.