NAS Server / Wireless External Harddrive

pickledseal · Mar 9, 2011

Another request, apologies, but unfortunately I always get a good response!

Been looking into finding a way of setting up a media server with music/videos on to be shared around the house without my old PC having to be on all the time - and freeing up all the HDD space on my laptop.

There seems to be two options:

Picking up something like this - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Lin...1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1299708114&sr=1-3

Or buying a storage casing like this - http://www.dabs.com/products/2-bay-nas-network-storage-enclosure-49GV.html - and sticking a few harddrives in

The second option seems more 'future proof'.

Has anyone got any experience with these?

As always, any help/advice gratefully received!

Mr Plow · Mar 10, 2011

I'd go for a minimum of a 2-bay unit myself, either something like this -

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-001-SY&tool=3

or

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=192

You'd want to use two hard disks in the unit and run it as a mirrored array (RAID1) so if a disk fails you don't lose all the films/music you spent hours ripping/downloading! I plan to do something similar but I'll probably pick up a 4 bay NAS and run a RAID5 array.

Any idea how much data you plan on storing? Bear in mind Blu-ray rips are pretty big if left in raw format.

pickledseal · Mar 12, 2011

Cheers mate - it's mostly just for music to be honest. Just fed up of connecting my three external harddrives to my laptop all the time trying to remember which is for photos, which for mp3s and which has my other stuff on! I'd keep the other harddrives for backup too.

I think I'll go for my second option but may need to invest at a slightly lower level that those you shared.

Thanks ever so much.