HELP Spec me a NAS £100 max Please

chiffs

chiffs

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Sean
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Right let me 1st say i dont know a great deal about this :thinking:

Current equipment is.

2 iPhone 4's
Windows 7 laptop (only 10% space left on a 250gb drive:thumbsdown:)
BT HomeHub 2 (curved one) Hopefully i can use this to coneect a NAS?
External 180 GB HD (getting on a bit now and all but full)


What i would like is a network hard drive to allow access to files and use as a storage for £100 or less.

Access would be required for playing movies through xbox.
Access files from network drive to allow editing in LR and PS.
Is it possible to add my musix so itunes uses the NAS instead of the laptop HD
Plus anything that is possible with iphones

Only files that really matter are pictures of my daughter since her birth 12 months ago. So it will be a storage for these. I will also be adding some movies and music for itunes if that will work.


Any more info needed then please say and i will do my best to supply it.

Thanks for your time.:thumbs:
 
To be honest a nas for 100 is going to be pretty rubbish, I'm not sure you'll even find one for that price and it certainly won't come with hard drives of a decent size if at all.

I think I'm right in saying the later home hubs have USB connections where you ca share out hard drives from? Might want to look in to that and possibly just get a 1tb USB drive.
 
I'm in a similar boat - the Linkstation Pro Duo seems like a decent option (there was one for sale on here a couple of weeks ago), as I want a RAID setup so at least there's some backup on hand.
 
neil_g said:
To be honest a nas for 100 is going to be pretty rubbish, I'm not sure you'll even find one for that price and it certainly won't come with hard drives of a decent size if at all.

I think I'm right in saying the later home hubs have USB connections where you ca share out hard drives from? Might want to look in to that and possibly just get a 1tb USB drive.
Click to expand...

My hub has a USB but this is a very slow connection and needs some tweaking which I found on the net. Think it was something like 8 hours to copy just my music which was only around 5 gb.

I have several free Ethernet ports though.
 
chiffs said:
Neil could you explain as i have no idea what raid is?
Click to expand...

Right okay, ill try and do simple terms.. Raid is basically taking more than 1 drive and creating an array (I.e. Taking 2 drives and making 1 larger one) normally factoring disk redundancy (excluding raid0) so that if 1fails you can continue accessing data. Raid levels vary, level 0 is basically sticking all of the drives together to make 1 but with no redundancy, if 1drive fails then the data is gone. however performance is increased. Raid5 creates a large drive with 1 hot spare so if one fails the data is still accessible. level 1 is mirroring, I.e. Data is duplicated on separate drives so you can lose half of the drives in the array. people falsely believe this is a backup when it is only meant as a form of redundancy for systems requiring 24/7 uptime. It is still vulnerable to deletion, corruption, some forms of hardware failure etc.

You can also get combinations of levels but hopefully the above will give you a basic understanding.

Even with a raid array your data should be stored on a second media/hard drive outside of that array.

Hope that makes sense, I'm full of cold so it's about as accurate as I can manage.
 
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RAID 0/5 etc can protect you from one HDD failing....but as said, it's not the same as a seperate backup.

If the RAID controller PSU goes and fries/corrupts the drives you lose everything. If the RAID controller itself fails and has to be replaced it can be a pain recovering the array. If someone spills a drink on the unit/drops it....you get the idea.

Backup up to two seperate cheap NAS drives is much more resilient than backing up to one NAS with two RAIDed drives.
 
If the stuff in the box controlling the drive goes wrong I want to be able to remove the drive and connect it to something else to read the data. You can't do that with most NAS units and having the drive as part of a raid makes things even worse so I'll never use a NAS unit again.

My solution is an old PC turned on for backup. Whatever your solution is, make sure you have at least 2 copies of everything as a hard drive with your important stuff on it will go wrong sometime...
 
Sorry, Raid 1/5 !

I use one of these :

http://www.zotacusa.com/zbox-intel-atom-d525-all-in-one-zbox-id41-plus-u.html

I installed a 640GB HDD and 4GB of ram, it's about the size of a hardback book. It serves as a great little home server, does all my downloading, stores incidental stuff on the internal drive.....but has USB3.0 for backing up important bits. It's also sat under my TV, has HDMI output, and is more than capable of running 1080p video.

Uses very little power as well compared to a traditional home server.
 
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