Network Attached Storage (NAS)

From time to time, I'll probably have some posts about new gadgets and such. This happens to be the first one. I'll try not to get too technical, but I make no guarantees.

In case you've never heard the term NAS, it stands for Network Attached Storage, which is a computer device for file storage that connects to your network. So, if you are low oo disk space on your computer, or want a backup copy of your files, you can copy them to/from the NAS whenever you please.

We've had a SimpleShare 500GB system that has served us well for a couple of years, but it was starting to get full (from all of our music and many of our movies) and we were risking data loss if it ever broke or the hard disk within the unit failed. It was time to look into other options. What we settled on was a Synology CS407 with four 1TB hard drives, and we've been very pleased with it so far.

The CS407 has 4 bays for hard disks (SATA II), and supports RAID 5, which basically means if one disk fails you haven't lost any data. You simply replace that disk and the data gets copied automatically from the other disks. There is a price to be paid for this, however, so we end up being able to use around 2.7 TB of the full 4 TB capacity of our drives. That is definitely worth the cost to help avoid data loss.

In addition to its file serving capabilities, the CS407 also has the ability to stream media. It streams music via iTunes, and can also stream movies, photos, and music to our PlayStation 3. So, when we are cleaning the house, we can turn on the PS3 and crank up the tunes on our sound system. We've found that we can even browse through our photos while listening to music via the PS3 and the CS407 doesn't miss a beat. Streaming high-quality video (h.264) to the PS3 is pretty choppy (802.11g wireless), but streaming the same video to our Macs works flawlessly (802.11n wireless).

The unit can also serve files over the internet so that you can access them from any computer (via HTTP or HTTPS), but we're not planning to make use of that feature at the moment.

While it is always possible to set up an old computer as a NAS, nothing can compare to the ease of setup and low maintenance that specially built units like the CS407 can offer. It also uses much less power than a desktop computer. I definitely can recommend it if you are willing to spend the extra money.