Perfect use of a NAS -- whenever I get a new DVD/Blu-Ray my husband makes a copy for the server and puts the disk in another location so that we don't scratch the disks when we want to watch a movie. The explanation of our server setup in an IT job interview is the reason why my husband now does IT for a living. :-)
Loved that intro! Yup I could really do with a NAS. Storing thousands and thousands of family photos, over a weeks worth of music and now my videos would be so much easier and efficient if they were stored centrally with redundancy. Great video as always.
@@llothar68 Good luck making a file server as energy efficient as a NAS with old bits you have already. Oh, and also good luck getting it as compact as the typical NAS. Aaaaaaand good luck getting it set up properly for use with anything else than a typical Windows PC unless you *really* know what you're doing. For most people, a NAS is the smart choice!
@@HepauDK Building it energy efficient isn't a problem anymore, even with normal old parts. Living in the most energy expensive country in the world (Germany) even here the difference of 10Watt is a no brainer and when you read webpages you soon find out which motherboards/cpu's to buy. Space is a non difficult problem because a NAS can be put in every corner of your house. What is wrong with you people who jump on the Apple idea that everything should be as small as possible? I don't care at all for non mobiles. I like big towers which lots of space to make it easy to add huge fan's and 10 or more disks. Try to buy a 8/10 bay NAS and compare the prices again. Especially when you think about your energy saving bill. The only point where you are right is that the software is complicated to setup. If home users can really setup SAMBA and a backup solution is indeed questionable. For them a NAS is better. But for me who also needs to run a Jenkins server firing up virtual machines on the fly while building my hobby software ... i would need another build server anyway.
Please do not rely on one NAS as your backup. RAID is not a backup. Your backup should be off-site and not synced 1-on-1 with your active disk. If your house burns down or someone messes with your NAS you will loose everything you mentioned in your post.
Can be that it just went past me, but what he forgot to mention in NAS vs Cloud services is that YOU are in control of your data. The data is only accessible by those you choose to give access to, not google,microsoft or whichever corporation. To me, that i already worth atleast a small sum of money.
And if your home burns down or someone hacks your NAS you will loose everything. RAID is not a backup. A cloud service actually is. And requires zero maintenance and comes with zero fire hazard.
@@Engineer9736 Well i am assuming that if you actually intend to use a device of this caliber, you want/know how to tinker with stuff. A cloud service can be shut down, go bankrupt, or be hacked aswell. Cloud services sometimes also come with limitation even if you pay, like forbidden file types or capped size of files. Both comes with its own limitations. Still, privacy in this age is worth more than a house to many.
@@Engineer9736 you can backup your devices to a nas regularly and backup the nas to the cloud a little less frequently. Backups can be uploaded after being encrypted. This way you have an offsite backup without undermining privacy.
I had a bunch of spare parts hanging around doing nothing, so i essentially made something similar with a raspberry pi and a hard drive :) works great for my purposes
not a good idea. you dont get hot pluggable drive slots, ergonomically designed, labeled, with error LEDs. considering the above plus that an old pc is not that cheaper, consumes more power, it really comes as an expensive, bulky and not easy to maintain solution (even for geeks like me) that in the end, in a couple of years of continuous use, can get much more expensive and tragically less effective.
Yep home made servers are more practical for small Enterprise that need modularity and most of all have an IT employee that can check the server on a daily/weekly basis The amount of time you can put on a diy server can be ridiculously high compared to a all in one even if this last is an investment.. having more power is good but at the end if you're 1 or 2 only to use the Nas this only extra power sleeping in a box pumping extra juice every day.. Not to mention that to build an home made Nas that is practical, small , hot swappable and that didn't require an entire closet (plus extra câble tu rien in this closet) is expensive At the end the only viable alternative to all in one Nas is a DAS connected to a tiny computer using Windows share function even if I don't trust this solution to open the storage to external network access
Agreed! For me Always Make your own NAS as it will be cheaper and can be configure to your requirements. On Top of that you can learn from it and troubleshoot yourself if it failed instead of left stranded when it failed. For a home made NAS, You can always upgrade it to more powerful/capacity because of your know how. That my opinion, And of course if you have the bucks, Why bother?
Interesting video. Personally I don't need 24 x 7 access or even sharing with others and would prefer to turn off the unit when not using it, or maybe automatically at night. What you could have mentioned is that if the NAS hardware fails then you could end up with corrupted data. Also a NAS can apparently be noisy in operation so might be best to keep elsewhere in the house.
Tao of Tech planning on turning my old Dell Dimension 2400 into a NAS. Got a PCI SATA RAID card and a new network card! Just need to pick new HDDs, the old 40GB I had to repair to get running again so it won't last long lol
This video is about “do you need a NAS” ...it is not about what kind of NAS you need. Homemade NAS is still a NAS. Homemade NAS can do the job and have all the functionality you need and maybe more, but the benefit of having out-of-box NAS are space saving, power saving and time saving. Building a NAS using old computer running 24 hours is taking up so much room in your house, will use so much powers and and it is not easy might be too complicate to maintain depending on your tech skills. Because of that, it is very fun to play with. They both have their pros and cons. NAS can be as cheap as $0 using old computer hardware or as expensive as $1000+ using server grade hardware. Depends on what you need.
Make sure the network card you get is 1Gbit as well as at least a good cat 5 cable. Also idk why he said you can't download games to a NAS. I have mine set up to do that nativly. Just if that is something that you were interested in.
You missed my main issue. When I upgrade my hardware, I used to get a bigger hard drive. I then found my main computer had several drives. As I dual boot, I was getting lots of drives. I built a NAS from an old computer to see if I liked the idea. I now have smaller drives in my computer and my long term storage, family videos and family pictures are on the nas. I recently parted out a dedicated NAS computer.
For those wanting to this for games: Yes, it works for some Steam games. It doesn't for instance for Clustertruck. For ETS2 loading times are huge. Despite 120MB/s write and read speeds. For Origin it works, but for instance Payback stutters first 5 mins and you need to change a parameter in regedit to download and run the games from there. Uplay isn't worth it at all imo since ForHonor, FarCry, etc. can't run the antihack software via network shares.
An old unused laptop/pc, 2 or more hard drives, a flash disk to install FreeNAS or Linux, put in Owncloud/Nextcloud in it, put in ftp in it, put in samba share in it, use BTRFS/ZFS for the filesystem. That's your NAS.
The PC method would be great if power consumption is not a concern. The Raspberry PI method will be ok as well for light use, however you might run into issues if you're a power user.
@@LaurenceReeves But you have to see the advantage it brings from a different point of view: - Consumer-degree NAS like the one mentionned in the video is just slappin' a bunch of hard drives in the unit, load the firmware and voilà! Ready to use! - DIY homemade NAS is an interesting project which identifies you with your ( new ) equipment. You know its hardware hierarchy, its operating system, how many hard drives are used in what way, how many spare drives are provided and who is in control over the system. And you are more likely to know what to do in case a malfunction occurs. On the consumer-degree NAS you might have a hard time figuring out what's going on due to the proprietary software, and calling up 24/7 phone services only to get unskilled personnel on the line won't help you out unless you are willing to pay minute-metered skyrocketing fees which gather up on your monthly phone bill. I jumped off that train some time ago and rerouted to DIY NAS which has proven to be the best solution for me. Hakuna Matata!
I started out with a WD My Cloud 1 TB years ago. Can't live without a NAS now. At the very least it allows me to watch movies and listen to music on all my SmartbTV's that support accessing network storage such as the "DLNA Server" on my Panasonic TV . Very very awesome devices.
Just stumbled on your video, unfortunately some arguments about NAS at home are not relevant or not explained. - NAS is not competing with portable drives, they are simply not made to be portable, and if a external drive is used as backup that's not to be active data and it's inexpensive. - NAS is not the only way to share data across network, Windows is a widely used OS and it allow sharing across network with ease. - NAS is build to easily install drives but so can be a PC computer installing a storage bay with hot-swap capability, if you don't know how go to you trusted computer shop (help them survive) - NAS is an advantage if you have devices that already have limited storage extension (Tablets, Phones, Laptops) - NAS (most) offers pre-installed softwares/services that add more functionalities without having to install them on your computer. - NAS is more energy efficient than leaving your main computer (hosting the disks) powered-on on a 24/7 basis.
Having a movie and music collection 24TB 32TB or larger all in one nice cabinet or smart rack mount with an OC255 built for best long life of HDD's fan speed RAID cards built in app bundled package maintained by whom ever does the legwork still with remote subsonic or plex for the lamers , surveillance cameras etc.......... No a PC running 24 hours a day with non WD RED or purple would not last half the life or even a quarter fan bearings would go out all the time free NAS platform is very basic the cost would be enormous and operating costs too .many components to reach GB speeds , tons of software to run just to have a small makeshift media server with no support. Bottom line BUY A NAS run ADM, DSM, QTS whatever company you choose but dont take the piss on this guys video with windows as an alternative lmao! vm or linux kernel also NAS technology there windows is out for this type of arena . You belong back on isdn 1997.
@resigned liberal But is it failsave? No! A nas is made to last and not loose data even if one drive failes. Beside if you just plug am external drive in a router it will soon break due to much vibration and not made for constant operation
@resigned liberal nas is network attached storage. You have storage attached to network so you have a nas. You run the drives in raid. Is it that badly explained in the video?
Using a NAS can be used in steam by adding a library folder under View > Settings > Downloads. Upon which you can select the location to install as normal shown in the video.
You don't need that large contraption to put all your drives into and make a NAS server, if your needs are limited to personal use you will be well off with just a raspberry pi 3 (at 40 bucks) and a couple 1 TB hard drives (70 bucks). The Asustor device shown in the video is mainly for professional environments or for use in an enterprise.
I run a Core i7 Socket 1155 on an Intel board and it is fast as hell and only draws 15W on idle. The case takes 10 disks, i have 8GB and so the system can run private cloud apps. There is no need for a NAS except easy maintainance, but setting up SAMBA on Ubuntu was very easy. And it was 200 Euro as used parts on ebay.
Lothar Scholz if you have 10 disks running on your computer then, that’s kinda a NAS. Like a homemade NAS. The name NAS not only means those out-of-the-box NAS. Network attached storage can be just a computer on a network to save files.
simple solution that I use: Get an old pc repurpose it for ubuntu server. Buy gigabit PCI card. Configure Samba. Get a 1tb hdd. And boom your done, I also use a small 250gb hdd to back up the real important stuff. That I copy over from the 1tb drive, like pc backups. Then you can expand later if youd like. Buy another 1tb drive and configure raid if youd like for redundancy. I just finished converting my network to cat5e making it gigabit compatible so When I upload backups to the server its much quicker than what it was before.
steam doesn't let you do it because your describing your steam install as installed on your hardrive whilst trying to install the games on the nas separately. Put steam on the nas as well and have the shortcut to it on your desktop and you should be good.
you must make iscis and then lunar i have done it with Nas . I make 2 lunars first is 200 giga for normal use and the second is 1 tb for install games at steam , the only problem is if the hard drive is not connect 1 time you must install the game again
First off, good video! I have a NAS I think it is great but I think that most people even with fairly large storage demands could simply do without. There are a lot of advantages to a NAS but there are also a list of negatives. One of these being that a decent modern 3.5" HDD will perform vastly better installed locally in the system being used or attached via USB 3.0 or greater for instance. The biggest down side to a NAS is current network handling capabilities (cost and standards at consumer level). A gigabit connection simply cannot keep up with modern HDD. You'll see around 115 MB/s over a gigabit network if you are the only one pulling data at a time. Theoretical limit of 125 MB/s. Many good desktop or NAS drives can hit near or over 200 MB/s. So if you want to get the most out of HDD performance in a NAS you are going to want to consider aggregation (the use of multiple network links). This adds cost as well and most people don't already have network gear to support aggregate connections. Long story shorter NAS storage has expensive buy in and is limited by the network. One could benefit from installing multiple drives in there desktop system or even buying an external multi drive enclosure for much cheaper. Things such as windows storage spaces are a great way to add storage and redundancy while in majority of cases performing better than a NAS on Gbe. Keep in mind you can always host a share from your primary system. There are many ways to tackle large storage needs but I think most people will find the best performance/value from local storage (installed in the system or externally attached). I could go on with pros and cons for either method.
Jay P Yeah I agree with you for the most part. I built a NAS myself which runs on Windows (yeah deal with it lol, it works so idc) and I can use it to download data from the internet overnight without having to leave my main computer on all the time.
I think you're overplaying the performance bit. Unless you're downloading/uploading tens of GBs of data at a time, you're not going so notice any difference in performance. Other than movie files, you're not going to encounter large files that would need that much performance. Even for movies, you can stream it and watch it as you go, so it wouldn't matter what the download speed is. As long as it's enough to serve your content then it's good to go.
I ended up using an older apu computer with windows 10, and just plugged all my drives into it. I then network attached this computers drives to my other pcs, I was able to store steam games and movies across multiple computers that any computer could access as if it was its own. I did this so that I could run two separate plex servers originally and steam was just a bonus.
Best intro to any unboxing and vid anywhere. 150 blue rays etc, is there a cassette ie juke box thingy to load 5 in and copy to your NAS thingy. One at a time is a pain. Have Apple app for movie collection it is perfect. Want the movies pulse music CDs for a new RV.
I have a Synology DS416play with 4 6TB drives in SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid) for a total of 15.7TB of usable space, and a Synology DS418 with (for now) 2x6TB + 2x4TB to backup all that precious data. I use it to store basically everything except for my games (movies, series, music, pictures, documents, etc.). It works nicely with my OpenELEC HTPC (old PC hardware and a 60GB SSD crammed into an old Onkyo AVR with a bit of help from a Dremel, a soldering iron and a sacrificial ATX case). :)
I don't REALLY need a NAS but I am a sucker for tech toys so I got one any way. I got the WD MyCloud Home and I know that it gets lots of bad reviews and serious users aren't going to like it at all, but it does what it says on the box and it is ludicrously easy to set up. The main thing though, is it is only about one third to one half the price of more serious NAS boxes of comparable capacity so if you like the idea of having a NAS but only want to spend less than $200, then I'd say WD mycloud home fits the bill.
A NAS is a must for us we are currently using QNAP TS 563 raid 5, 10TB x4 one ssd for cache. We are still one 1gb network working on migrating to 10gb.
Yes, Nas is a very usefull thing. I have got one for 4-5 years, and it contains images and backups of all of machines at home. As I have had one or two hdd/ssd failures in that time period, Nas saved my data, all of my images and work was easly restored. I don't say it has to be Nas, but anyone who cares about his data, should have some kind of backup.
I think so. I use retrospect to backup to an external USB 2.0 drive, an internal SATA drive and an external eSATA drive ... basically 10-15 scripts backing up to three devices. One script can take 3-4 hours if it happens to be a recycle backup, slowing the PC down to a crawl. If this were done via an NAS I would release the PCs CPU for PC work and the backups would complete a lot faster. The problem with RAID 1 is that all drives are installed at the same time, if one fails the other may soon follow, potentially leaving one without a backup if this happens before the failed drive has been restored.
You should do an update for this video, I think NAS and DAS setups are nice to have these days considering the direction of streaming sites and how important data is becoming, and other reasons. Also, love your vids! : )
I got Synology NAS, it is very useful and easy to set up. I got larger space than Google Drive and more secure than Baidu Drive. More important I got version control, so no more worry about miss delete files. I tried raspberry pi with OwnCloud, but it is not a reliable solution for business.
Be aware that you shouldn’t use a single device as the only place where you store your files. If it goes up in smoke (house burns down / device faulty) all your data will be lost. RAID is not a backup.
IcePee Positive mate! infact I setup a 200GB iSCSI purely just to test that idea and see if it would work. I installed GTA 5 and Black Ops 3 and both games worked flawlessly. Distance between NAS and PC with a Switch in between was 31 metres. Most data sent is mainly just when you start the game and it's loading after that data transfer is minimal until the next loading screen as the game loads most data to the RAM when you actually start the game.
I do this for my Steam games, all you need to do is go into Windows and add a new drive location from your network location (so your NAS or your share shows up with a drive letter). Then, you need to go into steam and go to Steam Settings -> Downloads -> and select "Steam Library Folders" to add a steam library that way. The way that you showed is just selecting preexisting steam libraries.
My solution is a server. I have a Dell PowerEdge T610, works as a NAS, NVR, Plex server, home control, active directory server and web server. And I still have 90% resources left. More yet to come :) its not the cheapest solution, but it's perfect for what I need.
Given that most modern TV's are connected to the internet and have the ability to display media from DNLA source, and most households typically have more than one TV, having a NAS is an ideal way to share media around the house. I've had an old NAS Duo for years now, and use it as a media server and centralised storage system. I do back up files to it, but do not class it as a backup solution in a true sense given it's not off site. It's small and compact, four times smaller foot print than a PC), and with the hot swap option a drive can be replaced without loss of data.
You can use a Raspberry Pi and USB drivers to make a NAS if you don't need Speed and Just want all your Files in one location.Raspen supports Raid as well.
1 tip for anyone who has a NAS and currently only use it for one PC. Look into a function called iSCSI, its superfast, even 2x faster than gigabít tcp/ip (125MB/s) another great benefit is that the drive actually appears in your computer as a real harddrive (not a network drive) this works so that you can even install programs and map backups when restrictions in programs doesn't allow installations on a typical network drive. I think there's a limit that only allows 1 PC to map the iSCSU drive at once.So it's not really benificial for a "file server" or "media server" setup. I even expanded a companys server "harddrive space" with an external nas connected with iSCSI, the drive simply appears as a secondary partition.
Good luck getting twice the speed throug the same network cable... I am well aware that both my NAS's have 2 ports, but my PC only have a singel Gbit port. Oh, and even if I could get twice the speed, it would still be much slower than my NVMe SSD...
@@HepauDK You still get gigabit speed but every packet carries almost twice of usable data. Tcp/ip has a lot of ecc bits and hand shakes iSCSI skips these bits and you get faster speeds.
I think for most consumer users the answer is no. I used one for 2 years or so but I ended up replacing it with 2 4TB 2,5" external drives: One inside the house that we can plug into laptops, tv, tablet and one sitting in my office for offsite backup. In my case the simpler old-fashioned solution was better than the automation offered by a NAS.
Any random PC can create a RAID array from multiple disks. You don’t need a NAS for that. Much more efficient is to use one enormous disk and use an online backup service like Carbonite. Keep all the expensive and fire hazardous geek stuff out of your house. I do have a 400€ NAS but i haven’t used it for years.
Gave a thumbs up, thanks for the info/vid. I'm researching a NAS. I'm a YT / minds.com content creator and am looking to have a NAS to load up and also access, all the footage I record. I will also get into remote live-streaming in the future. The live streams would potentially be from a mobile Internet connection and be between 3 - 5 hours long on a weekly basis. So a lot of storage would be required. I've seen two options for my situation: - DIY with NAS4Free / FreeNAS with a NAS specific hardware (such as the ASUStor unit you unboxed) - as opposed to using recycled PC hardware. Meaning, I would like to avoid using PC hardware. I'm looking for something with hardware (processor/RAM/NIC) robust enough to be relevant for at least the next 5 years. - Purchase a branded NAS unit and use the software that is pre-installed on it. My first choice would be Synology in this case. They make an eight drive unit that's very respectable. I looked at the DIY option because I thought the ZFS file system option on NAS4Free and all the available plug-ins (like PLEX media server) were exactly what I was looking for and much cheaper than buying a branded unit. I'd prefer to have hardware that would specifically use 2.5" drives if possible, rather than larger drives. I also favor SSDs rather than mechanical drives but am flexible on that point. I haven't seen anyone make a video on the differences between using a NAS with SSDs only and compare it to another unit loaded up with spinning drives only. So I'm still researching on some points. I'd love to be able to get away with having a server style 2U Unit, with multiple 2.5" drive bays that are hot swappable and load from the front. 2 NICs (preferably 4) would also be a nice feature, with an aggregation configuration feature for load-balancing or increased bandwidth would be a wet dream. Whatever I end up going with has to be reliable and scalable. Also has to be rack mountable or not too difficult to DIY a rack mount solution. I'd prefer not to have it sitting on a shelf. Any comment/opinion/information?
Step one is to disregard this guys video. RAID is NOT backup. Your RAID array can and will fail at some point and you run the risk of losing everything. You still need to have an actual backup. Building your own NAS is obviously the cheaper route, however it will be more time consuming as you'll have to set everything (including the software) up yourself. You don't need a beefy processor or even more than 2gb of RAM. If you have stupid money to burn, then by all means, run SSD. However HDD is the cheaper route to go and given that everything will be in some form of RAID, you'll likely get a performance boost anyway. (depending on what RAID). If you aren't worried horribly about power consumption, then there's no actual reason to get an entirely separate computer just to store files. A full tower with the right board will easily fit 8 HDDs and a couple SSDs. You can run SSDs(or even a couple NVME if you have the cash) as a boot drive and other as gaming/work drive, then RAID the other 8 HDDs and utilize them as a built in "file server".
@@mephInc Not sure what prompted you to reply, I feel like you're not telling me anything I don't already know and it also sounds like you're answering a someone else's comment, not mine. Anyway, thanks for the reply?
you can use a NAS to store some rare played games on it via iSCSI, this will see your OS as internal Drive not a Network Drive, as long your NAS support iSCSI. Windows 10 pro already have build in iSCSI initiator which here you can connect to your NAS LUN's
@@Engineer9736 i know that normal network map can put a drive letter but a iSCSI also the diffrenrence is that your OS know that a normal network can't install a program there because it can change and with different file system while a iSCSI one your OS know that it is a network drive but it uses different protocol which is mostly use by enterprice and apparently more stable where your OS acknownledge it as a inter drive as like your normal SSD and HDD interlnal drive you need to format with the file system that your OS needed or you want and also you can directly install your software or app or OS to that as long your mother board support iSCSI boot up
For me, the main benefit of my DIY NAS is that I can use my Plex Pass subscription and watch all my media while away from home, without worrying about killing my electricity bill. My NAS consumes about 12 dollars a year in electricity.
Just ask yourself this: Do i have electronic storage like photo's on my phone? Do i want to keep those? then the answer is "Yes! you need a backup!" . For some people nas maybe overkill but even just to use it to store pictures until drive is full and then swap it out for new drives makes you live way easier then to connect to a seperate hard drive all the time ( and is also cheaper!)
I use an older Qnap 459-pro, probably overkill as my media server but came cheap. Used to use external drives but after losing family photos and vids i was done with it. Raid 5 redundancy is prefect for speed and safety, replaced 1 drive in 3 years and never lost data, hotswapped the faulty drive the NAS warned me was failing and done. I bought the Qnap NAS and used hd's from cex, NAS £50, 1.5tb hd £22 and they have a 24 MONTH WARRENTY, double what i get if i buy one new.... Whole setup with roughly 3gb storage in a Raid 5 array cost £110 (NAS & 3 drives, with space for a 4th). If i need more space i can add a drive or just swap out what i have for bigger drives. Big bonus is everyone in the family can find and access everything whenever they want, when they want and can store their photos and vids too easily. Previously was half a dozen portable drives, and twice as many random usb sticks, costing a lot more than £110. It can also be accessed securely through the internet so as long as i have wifi wherever i am, i have everything.
Yes the world needs nas his inspirational music that highlights the shortcomings of the black community and the dangers we face as a whole whole, whilst also dropping consistent hits in the 90s, yes we need nas
I think NAS's are over stated these days. The same as the ridiculously unnecessary RAID capabilities of many of them as well. It's certainly a nice system to own and makes centralizing your data very easy and accessible for multiple devices. But most people simply don't need them. I mean you can buy two USB powered portable drives of 5TB each these days for around £100 each. You then just mirror each drive as a good home back up and mirror in the cloud and your good to go. This basic setup would suit even the most avid of amateur photographers and data hoarders out there and for a whole lot less cost. For most other users even less cost. I do wish you UA-camrs would give people the real choices that exist out there for them. Rather than getting carried away with all the shiny new tech that's probably only necessary for around 20% or less of the market.
The biggest problem with most of these NAS devices is that many come with no redundancy at all, and for those that do they sell RAID as if it's a backup solution and help to proliferate that very dangerous idea. Everybody repeat after me "RAID IS NOT BACKUP!"
It's easy. Create a symbolic link to your network drive e.g. a steam library linking a folder on an internal drive/partition to a folder on the NAS. The problem I believe is you cannot have 2 steam library on the same partition so you can't have C:\games and C:\games as drive. Also if e.g. D:\ does not have enough space and D:\games as drive does, steam will say you don't have enough space as it sees the remainder of D:\ and not \ as-drive\F:\games\steam where the D:\games as points to
We have a four bay 1 TB buffalo NAS. It is it has always worked and suited us well. When a drive failed I simply replaced it with a new drive and we lost no data or service. Our only problem is that when we did the windows 10 upgrade 'Quick Access' and 'Recent Files' only remember the last NAS file. You cannot pin things to favourites (or at least you can but it won't remember them!) And whenever I try to copy a file into or out of the NAS I get warnings from Windows saying that the files might be unsafe because of where they have come from. If somebody could solve this problem so that it workds just like it was when we were in Windows 7 they would earn total hero status!
I bought a Buffalo NAS as well for backup purposes (backup of my main NAS). I had to drop it though, as it didn't support NAS-NAS sync, wich meant that I would have to use a PC to run the sync. So I bought another Synology, now I don't have to give backup a second thought. :)
I just built a $130 pentium computer (not including hard drives) and installed windows 10 on it then create a shared folder and call it a day lol. And it can double as a seedbox which I think is something you can’t do with those NAS enclosures with their own OS.
RAID 1 is not secure by definition. Redundancy and security are totally separate. RAID 1 allows for all data to be mirrored across the installed amount of drives. This would be incredibly inefficient for a 4 drive NAS. I would fully recommend RAID 5 which allows for a 1 drive fault tolerance while giving you the most amount of storage with that tolerance. If a drive then fails you will still have full operation from the NAS and that's all you would have to do, if the NAS is smart enough, is switch out the dead drive and it should start rebuilding the RAID. If the NAS isn't that smart then you might have to manually start the rebuild process in the online management interface/menu.
GREAT video. Very helpful. Clearly presented. Do you have a video on how a NAS drive can work with storing files recorded on a Humax DVR i.e. how it can manage/back up digital recordings of programmes & films broadcast on a home TV? Our Humax often gets overfull over the year - especially at Christmas! - so we have had to use external USB drives, but these are "only" ,-) 2TB in capacity, so a NAS drive would store FAR more files.
There is the QNAP 128 (1 bay) and QNAP 228 (2 bay) on ebay.co.uk for £120 and £160. Both have modern web UI and support 12TB drives as they sell them with 1x12TB and 2x12TB. I'm tempted but I'll give a router a shot at being a dedicated nas, otherwise I'll buy one. May end up getting the 1 Bay as NAS usually support USB drives.
I have collected lots of hard drives over the years. Now I bought a NAS to store everything in 1 place, without connecting a bunch of HD to the computer. But in my case, if you have everything stored on these HD already, why would I need to have backups taking half of the space on my NAS? I already have everything stored on these hard drives, which have become redundant and won't get used anymore. If anything goes wrong with my NAS, I already have my backup laying around in a closet somewhere. It would take me a while searching for everything I need, but I'm happy with that, if it saves me hundreds of dollars.
You don't need to use RAID 1 or 5 for having redundancy. You can also configure your nas a JBOD (just a bunch of drives) or raid 0 (creating 1 large "volume" from all your HDD's in the NAS). Then you have the advantage of having a large storage space which is available on all your devices in your network and also accessible from all over the world as long as you have internet. You can then indeed keep all of your current external hard drives as back-up (on- and off-site).
Just a tip. You're very detailed and clear, but you might want to think how... you.... end... a... sentence. Because everytime you start quite snappy, but you keep ending like ... my ... history.... teacher. ;P Also, CPU speed determines a lot about the processing speeds of photo albums or video transcoding when streaming via DLNA. (love that feature) and the ups and downs of what type of RAID you're gonna use. I'm currently rocking a Synology DS416play with 4 × 8 TB drives in RAID-5, So I effectively have 24GB and I had to split it up with partitioning because the CPU of the NAS was 32bit, which means I can't make bigger partitions than 16TB.
not sure if i would need one because I would just be using it for archiving and saving photos and videos. i think for now it'll be best to get a simple external drive but maybe in the future i would like to have it. makes sense to not get it for now and save for similar one like you have. thanks for the video.
mohammed farrag I use the cloud myself but the only question I ask people is how reliable is your cloud storage, do you know or are you just hoping that Google, Microsoft, DropBox are doing their jobs properly? Personally I have multiple account mainly free and duplicate my data to them, won’t stop me getting a NAS though for my media Library.
Would have been nice to see the software that come with it and how to configure, what options are available. Can Sonos/TV stream from it... how does the hdmi on the back work... so many questions you don't answer.
Setting up a NAS varies greatly from brand to brand. The features also varies greatly. I have a Synology DS416play myself, wich can be set up as a Plex media server. It is also able to transcode in realtime.
You’re all the time talking about backing up on your NAS, but RAID is not a backup. It’s only redundancy. If your house burns down or your little brother presses shift delete, you will have nothing anymore. A proper backup has history and is stored off-site.
@@maplenerd22 It doesn't take expertise, Level1Techs has multiple tutorials on it, and that's just one resource. It does take time, but if you need a large capacity NAS they are absurdly expensive, and even those won't have much capacity.
praetorxyn - Maybe expertise is the wrong word. But it is a skill you have to research and learn to do. For a general user, this may not be worth it especially if you have to buy all the parts to begin with. Also keep in mind, these off the shelf NAS is designed for 24/7 access with minimal power consumption. They also have small form factor that people can easily tuck in a corner or closet. Building your own server with some old/new parts may be cheaper, but in the long run with added power cost, it may not be that much different. As far as capacity goes, I think the commercial NAS that are available will satisfy majority of consumers. Of course, if you do need a larger capacity, then a self made NAS maybe a better choice.
@ASUSTOR TV The problem with NAS boxes is that they typically use proprietary / OEM / tiny components that are either impossible or expensive to replace. For example if a NAS with a proprietary (proprietary in this sense meaning you can't buy one) Power Supply has a power supply failure, even something like a short in a wire,, your only recourse is typically to buy another model of the exact same NAS so you can avoid data loss. If you build a server it's a matter of swapping power supplies or swapping the cable with the short (assuming the power supply is modular). Gamers Nexus has recently done videos on 2 Synology NAS failures in a matter of months. Ease of use only matters as long as it works. Then what matters is ease of fixing it, and NAS boxes fail really hard here because of their extremely small form factor.
I *want* a NAS, but, given that my 4 TB internal storage drive had only less than 100 GB of stuff on it, it would be hard to justify....; so to satisfy my 'tinkering urge' of playing with a NAS, I play with a FreeNAS VM in Hyper-V..... :)
Happy New Year mate. Very good video. Thank you. Just one question. What about the security when it comes to NAS, I read news about the data/access being compromised, or hacked maybe the right word. Pls help
is cheaper to just get a new or your old pc , and use it as nas ,, and if you have window 8 and up on both machine you can add multiple network card (smb3 multichanel ) and have faster acess than 70 -100mbs from typical nas , if you use a raid 10 or 5 ,
The biggest problem with a NAS... £400+ For a decent 4 bay one. Not including the price of the HDDs. Cheaper by far to put those drives inside a computer and share them out.
Hey PC Centric, Nice video. Could you tell me if this would require a static IP by my ISP? Also is there a way for the NAS to go on stand-by mode when not in use to conserve electricity and life on the HDD but still be activated back remotely when needed?
It should work out of the box with the standby, but configure it your circumstances. I didn't need to change my router / IPS settings for full functionality.
I have experience with Raid1 nas and in the most cases when there is an error on one disk the other disk does have the same error. It is beter to backup from one drive to the other nas drive.
but does NAS using internet bandwith from the isp? my bandwith is capped and pretty slow (around 1 mbps)... it would take a year to move from my 4TB external to my NAS if i gonna buy NAS later on...
5:10 Wrong, My Personal XP, Steam/Origin Load before windows will mount and login to a network share so whens team looks for the share to load the game library it wont be able to find it, once steam is restarted after the share is loaded it works fine
i have a few questions about this, can i start with 1 harddrive and then keep adding more as i buy them? meaning lets say i buy the same one in this video, can i start with 1 harddrive and start using it then after 1 month I buy another one and add it to the NAS and have twice the space? then add a 3rd one and a 4th one etc till i fill up all the bays?
NAS for people who have the money but no knowledge, any other solution is more reliable and cost effective on the long run. A NAS basically is a mini PC and the added benefit which is basically the software can't justify the high price. Any 3th or later generation Intel CPU based PC would perform much better with the same power consumption and probably with more drives. I would suggest NAS for small businesses who can't afforrd an IT admin or doesn't want to pay for a montly service. If you have 2 or more network attached TV, big movie library and you willing to buy a new hard drive every 2 years, then NAS made for you. (Pluging external hard drives in the back of your TVs is still way cheaper.) Here is a question, does this NAS have any security when you access the drive (password)? What happening if your PC infected by an encryiption virus, is it encrypt your attached NAS drive too?
Perfect use of a NAS -- whenever I get a new DVD/Blu-Ray my husband makes a copy for the server and puts the disk in another location so that we don't scratch the disks when we want to watch a movie. The explanation of our server setup in an IT job interview is the reason why my husband now does IT for a living. :-)
I'm looking to set up a little test server, and you did a good job at thoroughly putting me off getting a NAS.
If you have lots of storage use, computers then yes. Otherwise no you don't.
Anyone streaming media to handheld devices and/or a home theater could benefit from a NAS. I have my entire media collection (6.4TB) on mine.
Loved that intro!
Yup I could really do with a NAS.
Storing thousands and thousands of family photos, over a weeks worth of music and now my videos would be so much easier and efficient if they were stored centrally with redundancy.
Great video as always.
The question is not NAS or not NAS but NAS vs ever running low energy PC. And the PC usually wins.
@@llothar68 error: no truth detected
@@llothar68 Good luck making a file server as energy efficient as a NAS with old bits you have already.
Oh, and also good luck getting it as compact as the typical NAS.
Aaaaaaand good luck getting it set up properly for use with anything else than a typical Windows PC unless you *really* know what you're doing.
For most people, a NAS is the smart choice!
@@HepauDK Building it energy efficient isn't a problem anymore, even with normal old parts. Living in the most energy expensive country in the world (Germany) even here the difference of 10Watt is a no brainer and when you read webpages you soon find out which motherboards/cpu's to buy. Space is a non difficult problem because a NAS can be put in every corner of your house. What is wrong with you people who jump on the Apple idea that everything should be as small as possible? I don't care at all for non mobiles. I like big towers which lots of space to make it easy to add huge fan's and 10 or more disks. Try to buy a 8/10 bay NAS and compare the prices again. Especially when you think about your energy saving bill. The only point where you are right is that the software is complicated to setup. If home users can really setup SAMBA and a backup solution is indeed questionable. For them a NAS is better. But for me who also needs to run a Jenkins server firing up virtual machines on the fly while building my hobby software ... i would need another build server anyway.
Please do not rely on one NAS as your backup. RAID is not a backup. Your backup should be off-site and not synced 1-on-1 with your active disk. If your house burns down or someone messes with your NAS you will loose everything you mentioned in your post.
Can be that it just went past me, but what he forgot to mention in NAS vs Cloud services is that YOU are in control of your data. The data is only accessible by those you choose to give access to, not google,microsoft or whichever corporation. To me, that i already worth atleast a small sum of money.
And if your home burns down or someone hacks your NAS you will loose everything. RAID is not a backup. A cloud service actually is. And requires zero maintenance and comes with zero fire hazard.
@@Engineer9736 Well i am assuming that if you actually intend to use a device of this caliber, you want/know how to tinker with stuff. A cloud service can be shut down, go bankrupt, or be hacked aswell. Cloud services sometimes also come with limitation even if you pay, like forbidden file types or capped size of files. Both comes with its own limitations. Still, privacy in this age is worth more than a house to many.
@@Engineer9736 you can backup your devices to a nas regularly and backup the nas to the cloud a little less frequently. Backups can be uploaded after being encrypted. This way you have an offsite backup without undermining privacy.
I had a bunch of spare parts hanging around doing nothing, so i essentially made something similar with a raspberry pi and a hard drive :) works great for my purposes
I did the same thing lol
use old PC with raid card + freenas OS it will be cheaper than buy all-in-one NAS
not a good idea. you dont get hot pluggable drive slots, ergonomically designed, labeled, with error LEDs. considering the above plus that an old pc is not that cheaper, consumes more power, it really comes as an expensive, bulky and not easy to maintain solution (even for geeks like me) that in the end, in a couple of years of continuous use, can get much more expensive and tragically less effective.
Yep home made servers are more practical for small Enterprise that need modularity and most of all have an IT employee that can check the server on a daily/weekly basis
The amount of time you can put on a diy server can be ridiculously high compared to a all in one even if this last is an investment.. having more power is good but at the end if you're 1 or 2 only to use the Nas this only extra power sleeping in a box pumping extra juice every day..
Not to mention that to build an home made Nas that is practical, small , hot swappable and that didn't require an entire closet (plus extra câble tu rien in this closet) is expensive
At the end the only viable alternative to all in one Nas is a DAS connected to a tiny computer using Windows share function even if I don't trust this solution to open the storage to external network access
@@constantinosschinas4503 it you have and old PC is a good alternative.
A good nas its expensive.
Agreed! For me Always Make your own NAS as it will be cheaper and can be configure to your requirements. On Top of that you can learn from it and troubleshoot yourself if it failed instead of left stranded when it failed. For a home made NAS, You can always upgrade it to more powerful/capacity because of your know how. That my opinion, And of course if you have the bucks, Why bother?
@@constantinosschinas4503 are you serious? Who need leds when I have email notification who needs hotswap HDD....
Interesting video. Personally I don't need 24 x 7 access or even sharing with others and would prefer to turn off the unit when not using it, or maybe automatically at night. What you could have mentioned is that if the NAS hardware fails then you could end up with corrupted data. Also a NAS can apparently be noisy in operation so might be best to keep elsewhere in the house.
An alternative is to use old pc bits and create a homemade NAS, there are open source operating systems which can help also. Nice video buddy.
Tao of Tech planning on turning my old Dell Dimension 2400 into a NAS. Got a PCI SATA RAID card and a new network card! Just need to pick new HDDs, the old 40GB I had to repair to get running again so it won't last long lol
that what I did but it still can be expensive but worth it in the end.
Yeah but what about the power consumption?
This video is about “do you need a NAS” ...it is not about what kind of NAS you need. Homemade NAS is still a NAS.
Homemade NAS can do the job and have all the functionality you need and maybe more, but the benefit of having out-of-box NAS are space saving, power saving and time saving.
Building a NAS using old computer running 24 hours is taking up so much room in your house, will use so much powers and and it is not easy might be too complicate to maintain depending on your tech skills. Because of that, it is very fun to play with.
They both have their pros and cons. NAS can be as cheap as $0 using old computer hardware or as expensive as $1000+ using server grade hardware. Depends on what you need.
Make sure the network card you get is 1Gbit as well as at least a good cat 5 cable. Also idk why he said you can't download games to a NAS. I have mine set up to do that nativly. Just if that is something that you were interested in.
You missed my main issue.
When I upgrade my hardware, I used to get a bigger hard drive. I then found my main computer had several drives. As I dual boot, I was getting lots of drives.
I built a NAS from an old computer to see if I liked the idea. I now have smaller drives in my computer and my long term storage, family videos and family pictures are on the nas.
I recently parted out a dedicated NAS computer.
The intro to this video was perfect.
For those wanting to this for games:
Yes, it works for some Steam games. It doesn't for instance for Clustertruck. For ETS2 loading times are huge. Despite 120MB/s write and read speeds. For Origin it works, but for instance Payback stutters first 5 mins and you need to change a parameter in regedit to download and run the games from there. Uplay isn't worth it at all imo since ForHonor, FarCry, etc. can't run the antihack software via network shares.
Use iSCSI. It's much more reliable.
An old unused laptop/pc, 2 or more hard drives, a flash disk to install FreeNAS or Linux, put in Owncloud/Nextcloud in it, put in ftp in it, put in samba share in it, use BTRFS/ZFS for the filesystem. That's your NAS.
Agreed, but that is a more nerd/enthusiast option, this Video more aimed towards people that dont understand how to make a new hardrive work.
Or a raspberry pi with open media vault installed
The PC method would be great if power consumption is not a concern.
The Raspberry PI method will be ok as well for light use, however you might run into issues if you're a power user.
If you're like me and you're building a new PC, you can turn an old PC into a NAS too with something like FreeNAS
Yeah... you could... but it would cost a lot more in electricity consumption... a nas is seriously low power
@@LaurenceReeves But you have to see the advantage it brings from a different point of view:
- Consumer-degree NAS like the one mentionned in the video is just slappin' a bunch of hard drives in the unit, load the firmware and voilà! Ready to use!
- DIY homemade NAS is an interesting project which identifies you with your ( new ) equipment. You know its hardware hierarchy, its operating system, how many hard drives are used in what way, how many spare drives are provided and who is in control over the system. And you are more likely to know what to do in case a malfunction occurs. On the consumer-degree NAS you might have a hard time figuring out what's going on due to the proprietary software, and calling up 24/7 phone services only to get unskilled personnel on the line won't help you out unless you are willing to pay minute-metered skyrocketing fees which gather up on your monthly phone bill.
I jumped off that train some time ago and rerouted to DIY NAS which has proven to be the best solution for me. Hakuna Matata!
Bandicoot803 it means no worries! For the rest of your days! 🎵🎶🎵🎶
do I need to buy the software for a NAS and do I have to pay every year ?
I started out with a WD My Cloud 1 TB years ago. Can't live without a NAS now. At the very least it allows me to watch movies and listen to music on all my SmartbTV's that support accessing network storage such as the "DLNA Server" on my Panasonic TV . Very very awesome devices.
Just stumbled on your video, unfortunately some arguments about NAS at home are not relevant or not explained.
- NAS is not competing with portable drives, they are simply not made to be portable, and if a external drive is used as backup that's not to be active data and it's inexpensive.
- NAS is not the only way to share data across network, Windows is a widely used OS and it allow sharing across network with ease.
- NAS is build to easily install drives but so can be a PC computer installing a storage bay with hot-swap capability, if you don't know how go to you trusted computer shop (help them survive)
- NAS is an advantage if you have devices that already have limited storage extension (Tablets, Phones, Laptops)
- NAS (most) offers pre-installed softwares/services that add more functionalities without having to install them on your computer.
- NAS is more energy efficient than leaving your main computer (hosting the disks) powered-on on a 24/7 basis.
I am sorry but these valid points are not supported by this video sponsor.
@@TheKingArabia LOL
Having a movie and music collection 24TB 32TB or larger all in one nice cabinet or smart rack mount with an OC255 built for best long life of HDD's fan speed RAID cards built in app bundled package maintained by whom ever does the legwork still with remote subsonic or plex for the lamers , surveillance cameras etc..........
No a PC running 24 hours a day with non WD RED or purple would not last half the life or even a quarter fan bearings would go out all the time free NAS platform is very basic the cost would be enormous and operating costs too .many components to reach GB speeds , tons of software to run just to have a small makeshift media server with no support. Bottom line BUY A NAS run ADM, DSM, QTS whatever company you choose but dont take the piss on this guys video with windows as an alternative lmao! vm or linux kernel also NAS technology there windows is out for this type of arena . You belong back on isdn 1997.
@resigned liberal
But is it failsave? No! A nas is made to last and not loose data even if one drive failes. Beside if you just plug am external drive in a router it will soon break due to much vibration and not made for constant operation
@resigned liberal nas is network attached storage. You have storage attached to network so you have a nas. You run the drives in raid. Is it that badly explained in the video?
Using a NAS can be used in steam by adding a library folder under View > Settings > Downloads. Upon which you can select the location to install as normal shown in the video.
You don't need that large contraption to put all your drives into and make a NAS server, if your needs are limited to personal use you will be well off with just a raspberry pi 3 (at 40 bucks) and a couple 1 TB hard drives (70 bucks).
The Asustor device shown in the video is mainly for professional environments or for use in an enterprise.
I run a Core i7 Socket 1155 on an Intel board and it is fast as hell and only draws 15W on idle. The case takes 10 disks, i have 8GB and so the system can run private cloud apps.
There is no need for a NAS except easy maintainance, but setting up SAMBA on Ubuntu was very easy. And it was 200 Euro as used parts on ebay.
Lothar Scholz if you have 10 disks running on your computer then, that’s kinda a NAS. Like a homemade NAS. The name NAS not only means those out-of-the-box NAS. Network attached storage can be just a computer on a network to save files.
any RAID protection ?SAMBA is NAS CIFS on *nix like systems
Lothar Scholz can you name your 1155 motherboard please?
Good intro!
simple solution that I use:
Get an old pc repurpose it for ubuntu server. Buy gigabit PCI card. Configure Samba. Get a 1tb hdd. And boom your done, I also use a small 250gb hdd to back up the real important stuff. That I copy over from the 1tb drive, like pc backups. Then you can expand later if youd like. Buy another 1tb drive and configure raid if youd like for redundancy. I just finished converting my network to cat5e making it gigabit compatible so When I upload backups to the server its much quicker than what it was before.
steam doesn't let you do it because your describing your steam install as installed on your hardrive whilst trying to install the games on the nas separately. Put steam on the nas as well and have the shortcut to it on your desktop and you should be good.
you must make iscis and then lunar i have done it with Nas . I make 2 lunars first is 200 giga for normal use and the second is 1 tb for install games at steam , the only problem is if the hard drive is not connect 1 time you must install the game again
and you can use normal hdd to put at nas
First off, good video!
I have a NAS I think it is great but I think that most people even with fairly large storage demands could simply do without. There are a lot of advantages to a NAS but there are also a list of negatives. One of these being that a decent modern 3.5" HDD will perform vastly better installed locally in the system being used or attached via USB 3.0 or greater for instance. The biggest down side to a NAS is current network handling capabilities (cost and standards at consumer level). A gigabit connection simply cannot keep up with modern HDD. You'll see around 115 MB/s over a gigabit network if you are the only one pulling data at a time. Theoretical limit of 125 MB/s. Many good desktop or NAS drives can hit near or over 200 MB/s. So if you want to get the most out of HDD performance in a NAS you are going to want to consider aggregation (the use of multiple network links). This adds cost as well and most people don't already have network gear to support aggregate connections. Long story shorter NAS storage has expensive buy in and is limited by the network. One could benefit from installing multiple drives in there desktop system or even buying an external multi drive enclosure for much cheaper. Things such as windows storage spaces are a great way to add storage and redundancy while in majority of cases performing better than a NAS on Gbe. Keep in mind you can always host a share from your primary system. There are many ways to tackle large storage needs but I think most people will find the best performance/value from local storage (installed in the system or externally attached). I could go on with pros and cons for either method.
Jay P Yeah I agree with you for the most part. I built a NAS myself which runs on Windows (yeah deal with it lol, it works so idc) and I can use it to download data from the internet overnight without having to leave my main computer on all the time.
I think you're overplaying the performance bit. Unless you're downloading/uploading tens of GBs of data at a time, you're not going so notice any difference in performance. Other than movie files, you're not going to encounter large files that would need that much performance. Even for movies, you can stream it and watch it as you go, so it wouldn't matter what the download speed is. As long as it's enough to serve your content then it's good to go.
I ended up using an older apu computer with windows 10, and just plugged all my drives into it. I then network attached this computers drives to my other pcs, I was able to store steam games and movies across multiple computers that any computer could access as if it was its own. I did this so that I could run two separate plex servers originally and steam was just a bonus.
Best intro to any unboxing and vid anywhere.
150 blue rays etc, is there a cassette ie juke box thingy to load 5 in and copy to your NAS thingy.
One at a time is a pain. Have Apple app for movie collection it is perfect. Want the movies pulse music CDs for a new RV.
Great intro. The quality of your editing is really improving
I have a Synology DS416play with 4 6TB drives in SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid) for a total of 15.7TB of usable space, and a Synology DS418 with (for now) 2x6TB + 2x4TB to backup all that precious data.
I use it to store basically everything except for my games (movies, series, music, pictures, documents, etc.). It works nicely with my OpenELEC HTPC (old PC hardware and a 60GB SSD crammed into an old Onkyo AVR with a bit of help from a Dremel, a soldering iron and a sacrificial ATX case). :)
I don't REALLY need a NAS but I am a sucker for tech toys so I got one any way. I got the WD MyCloud Home and I know that it gets lots of bad reviews and serious users aren't going to like it at all, but it does what it says on the box and it is ludicrously easy to set up. The main thing though, is it is only about one third to one half the price of more serious NAS boxes of comparable capacity so if you like the idea of having a NAS but only want to spend less than $200, then I'd say WD mycloud home fits the bill.
A NAS is a must for us we are currently using QNAP TS 563 raid 5, 10TB x4 one ssd for cache. We are still one 1gb network working on migrating to 10gb.
Yes, Nas is a very usefull thing. I have got one for 4-5 years, and it contains images and backups of all of machines at home. As I have had one or two hdd/ssd failures in that time period, Nas saved my data, all of my images and work was easly restored. I don't say it has to be Nas, but anyone who cares about his data, should have some kind of backup.
I think so. I use retrospect to backup to an external USB 2.0 drive, an internal SATA drive and an external eSATA drive ... basically 10-15 scripts backing up to three devices. One script can take 3-4 hours if it happens to be a recycle backup, slowing the PC down to a crawl. If this were done via an NAS I would release the PCs CPU for PC work and the backups would complete a lot faster. The problem with RAID 1 is that all drives are installed at the same time, if one fails the other may soon follow, potentially leaving one without a backup if this happens before the failed drive has been restored.
You should do an update for this video, I think NAS and DAS setups are nice to have these days considering the direction of streaming sites and how important data is becoming, and other reasons. Also, love your vids! : )
I got Synology NAS, it is very useful and easy to set up. I got larger space than Google Drive and more secure than Baidu Drive. More important I got version control, so no more worry about miss delete files. I tried raspberry pi with OwnCloud, but it is not a reliable solution for business.
Be aware that you shouldn’t use a single device as the only place where you store your files. If it goes up in smoke (house burns down / device faulty) all your data will be lost. RAID is not a backup.
You can use a NAS for steam, origin etc. Just convert some space of you NAS into iSCSI and it works fine.
I thought that. Are you sure? Have you actually attempted this?
IcePee Positive mate! infact I setup a 200GB iSCSI purely just to test that idea and see if it would work. I installed GTA 5 and Black Ops 3 and both games worked flawlessly. Distance between NAS and PC with a Switch in between was 31 metres.
Most data sent is mainly just when you start the game and it's loading after that data transfer is minimal until the next loading screen as the game loads most data to the RAM when you actually start the game.
I have the AS-6104T model and I second this :)
I do this for my Steam games, all you need to do is go into Windows and add a new drive location from your network location (so your NAS or your share shows up with a drive letter). Then, you need to go into steam and go to Steam Settings -> Downloads -> and select "Steam Library Folders" to add a steam library that way.
The way that you showed is just selecting preexisting steam libraries.
Yeah our only problem was our switch was throttling our connection haha
I just got a Synology DS918+ and 2 Seagate Ironwolf Pro 6TB Drives!
My solution is a server. I have a Dell PowerEdge T610, works as a NAS, NVR, Plex server, home control, active directory server and web server. And I still have 90% resources left. More yet to come :) its not the cheapest solution, but it's perfect for what I need.
Given that most modern TV's are connected to the internet and have the ability to display media from DNLA source, and most households typically have more than one TV, having a NAS is an ideal way to share media around the house. I've had an old NAS Duo for years now, and use it as a media server and centralised storage system. I do back up files to it, but do not class it as a backup solution in a true sense given it's not off site. It's small and compact, four times smaller foot print than a PC), and with the hot swap option a drive can be replaced without loss of data.
You can use a Raspberry Pi and USB drivers to make a NAS if you don't need Speed and Just want all your Files in one location.Raspen supports Raid as well.
1 tip for anyone who has a NAS and currently only use it for one PC. Look into a function called iSCSI, its superfast, even 2x faster than gigabít tcp/ip (125MB/s)
another great benefit is that the drive actually appears in your computer as a real harddrive (not a network drive) this works so that you can even install programs and map backups when restrictions in programs doesn't allow installations on a typical network drive.
I think there's a limit that only allows 1 PC to map the iSCSU drive at once.So it's not really benificial for a "file server" or "media server" setup.
I even expanded a companys server "harddrive space" with an external nas connected with iSCSI, the drive simply appears as a secondary partition.
Good luck getting twice the speed throug the same network cable...
I am well aware that both my NAS's have 2 ports, but my PC only have a singel Gbit port.
Oh, and even if I could get twice the speed, it would still be much slower than my NVMe SSD...
@@HepauDK You still get gigabit speed but every packet carries almost twice of usable data.
Tcp/ip has a lot of ecc bits and hand shakes
iSCSI skips these bits and you get faster speeds.
I think for most consumer users the answer is no. I used one for 2 years or so but I ended up replacing it with 2 4TB 2,5" external drives: One inside the house that we can plug into laptops, tv, tablet and one sitting in my office for offsite backup. In my case the simpler old-fashioned solution was better than the automation offered by a NAS.
Great video! Keep it up
I used to use a portable hard drive also, same model except black version and 2 TB. (used like 85% of the storage already :P)
Any random PC can create a RAID array from multiple disks. You don’t need a NAS for that. Much more efficient is to use one enormous disk and use an online backup service like Carbonite. Keep all the expensive and fire hazardous geek stuff out of your house. I do have a 400€ NAS but i haven’t used it for years.
Nice to see you're using Seagate hard drives, in my mind there the best of the best.
but have one of the biggest failure rates, looks like your done your homework ;)
but i guess their adventure racing team is the best of the best ;)
Best combo I think is NAS in raid 0 (no redundancy) for faster access and online backup for online redundancy and long time storage/security.
It would cost me a small fortune every month to backup my 6.53TB online. Those monetos are better spent on a 2. NAS (in fact I have)...
Definitely would recommend a RAID 5 option if they have one available. Faster, more storage overhead, and still has a parity.
Raid 6 is better
Gave a thumbs up, thanks for the info/vid.
I'm researching a NAS. I'm a YT / minds.com content creator and am looking to have a NAS to load up and also access, all the footage I record. I will also get into remote live-streaming in the future. The live streams would potentially be from a mobile Internet connection and be between 3 - 5 hours long on a weekly basis. So a lot of storage would be required.
I've seen two options for my situation:
- DIY with NAS4Free / FreeNAS with a NAS specific hardware (such as the ASUStor unit you unboxed) - as opposed to using recycled PC hardware. Meaning, I would like to avoid using PC hardware. I'm looking for something with hardware (processor/RAM/NIC) robust enough to be relevant for at least the next 5 years.
- Purchase a branded NAS unit and use the software that is pre-installed on it. My first choice would be Synology in this case. They make an eight drive unit that's very respectable.
I looked at the DIY option because I thought the ZFS file system option on NAS4Free and all the available plug-ins (like PLEX media server) were exactly what I was looking for and much cheaper than buying a branded unit.
I'd prefer to have hardware that would specifically use 2.5" drives if possible, rather than larger drives. I also favor SSDs rather than mechanical drives but am flexible on that point.
I haven't seen anyone make a video on the differences between using a NAS with SSDs only and compare it to another unit loaded up with spinning drives only. So I'm still researching on some points.
I'd love to be able to get away with having a server style 2U Unit, with multiple 2.5" drive bays that are hot swappable and load from the front. 2 NICs (preferably 4) would also be a nice feature, with an aggregation configuration feature for load-balancing or increased bandwidth would be a wet dream.
Whatever I end up going with has to be reliable and scalable. Also has to be rack mountable or not too difficult to DIY a rack mount solution. I'd prefer not to have it sitting on a shelf.
Any comment/opinion/information?
Step one is to disregard this guys video.
RAID is NOT backup. Your RAID array can and will fail at some point and you run the risk of losing everything. You still need to have an actual backup.
Building your own NAS is obviously the cheaper route, however it will be more time consuming as you'll have to set everything (including the software) up yourself. You don't need a beefy processor or even more than 2gb of RAM.
If you have stupid money to burn, then by all means, run SSD. However HDD is the cheaper route to go and given that everything will be in some form of RAID, you'll likely get a performance boost anyway. (depending on what RAID).
If you aren't worried horribly about power consumption, then there's no actual reason to get an entirely separate computer just to store files. A full tower with the right board will easily fit 8 HDDs and a couple SSDs. You can run SSDs(or even a couple NVME if you have the cash) as a boot drive and other as gaming/work drive, then RAID the other 8 HDDs and utilize them as a built in "file server".
@@mephInc Not sure what prompted you to reply, I feel like you're not telling me anything I don't already know and it also sounds like you're answering a someone else's comment, not mine.
Anyway, thanks for the reply?
@@RipVanWinkle_Nature_Discovery
Given the last line of your comment it appeared as though you were looking for advise...
you can use a NAS to store some rare played games on it via iSCSI, this will see your OS as internal Drive not a Network Drive, as long your NAS support iSCSI. Windows 10 pro already have build in iSCSI initiator which here you can connect to your NAS LUN's
You know already that you can assign drive letters to network shares in Windows?
@@Engineer9736 i know that normal network map can put a drive letter but a iSCSI also the diffrenrence is that your OS know that a normal network can't install a program there because it can change and with different file system while a iSCSI one your OS know that it is a network drive but it uses different protocol which is mostly use by enterprice and apparently more stable where your OS acknownledge it as a inter drive as like your normal SSD and HDD interlnal drive you need to format with the file system that your OS needed or you want and also you can directly install your software or app or OS to that as long your mother board support iSCSI boot up
For me, the main benefit of my DIY NAS is that I can use my Plex Pass subscription and watch all my media while away from home, without worrying about killing my electricity bill. My NAS consumes about 12 dollars a year in electricity.
Just ask yourself this: Do i have electronic storage like photo's on my phone? Do i want to keep those? then the answer is "Yes! you need a backup!" . For some people nas maybe overkill but even just to use it to store pictures until drive is full and then swap it out for new drives makes you live way easier then to connect to a seperate hard drive all the time ( and is also cheaper!)
I use an older Qnap 459-pro, probably overkill as my media server but came cheap. Used to use external drives but after losing family photos and vids i was done with it.
Raid 5 redundancy is prefect for speed and safety, replaced 1 drive in 3 years and never lost data, hotswapped the faulty drive the NAS warned me was failing and done.
I bought the Qnap NAS and used hd's from cex, NAS £50, 1.5tb hd £22 and they have a 24 MONTH WARRENTY, double what i get if i buy one new.... Whole setup with roughly 3gb storage in a Raid 5 array cost £110 (NAS & 3 drives, with space for a 4th).
If i need more space i can add a drive or just swap out what i have for bigger drives.
Big bonus is everyone in the family can find and access everything whenever they want, when they want and can store their photos and vids too easily. Previously was half a dozen portable drives, and twice as many random usb sticks, costing a lot more than £110.
It can also be accessed securely through the internet so as long as i have wifi wherever i am, i have everything.
Would highly recommend terramaster F2-220 for a more affordable NAS, dual bay, intel dual core processor and 2gb of ram for £150 (Diskless).
Yes the world needs nas his inspirational music that highlights the shortcomings of the black community and the dangers we face as a whole whole, whilst also dropping consistent hits in the 90s, yes we need nas
For digital distribution platforms (steam, gig, origin, etc) is iscsi or other block storage objects (.vhd) is your friend.
you could repurpose or even build your own nas using freenas and some older hardware, latest version requires 8 gigs of ram and 64bit cpu
Bruv, the beginning was mad aggressive. I dig it (sub). Kill the music tho. As a new subscriber can you review a new NAS? Streach?
GOD DAMN!! This channel is awesome! how are you so underappreciated?
Also great intro
I have one 4TB HDD in my DIY NAS, and two seperate 4TB HDDs in a secondary PC for Backups. Don't want to live without anymore
I have 2 Nas's, one always on, the other only on when syncing with the other.
Trying to save the planet, one sync at a time. :)
I think NAS's are over stated these days. The same as the ridiculously unnecessary RAID capabilities of many of them as well. It's certainly a nice system to own and makes centralizing your data very easy and accessible for multiple devices. But most people simply don't need them.
I mean you can buy two USB powered portable drives of 5TB each these days for around £100 each. You then just mirror each drive as a good home back up and mirror in the cloud and your good to go. This basic setup would suit even the most avid of amateur photographers and data hoarders out there and for a whole lot less cost. For most other users even less cost.
I do wish you UA-camrs would give people the real choices that exist out there for them. Rather than getting carried away with all the shiny new tech that's probably only necessary for around 20% or less of the market.
The biggest problem with most of these NAS devices is that many come with no redundancy at all, and for those that do they sell RAID as if it's a backup solution and help to proliferate that very dangerous idea. Everybody repeat after me "RAID IS NOT BACKUP!"
“RAID IS NOT BACKUP!”
"RAID IS NOT BACKUP!"
It's easy. Create a symbolic link to your network drive e.g. a steam library linking a folder on an internal drive/partition to a folder on the NAS. The problem I believe is you cannot have 2 steam library on the same partition so you can't have C:\games and C:\games
as drive. Also if e.g. D:\ does not have enough space and D:\games
as drive does, steam will say you don't have enough space as it sees the remainder of D:\ and not \
as-drive\F:\games\steam where the D:\games
as points to
We have a four bay 1 TB buffalo NAS. It is it has always worked and suited us well. When a drive failed I simply replaced it with a new drive and we lost no data or service. Our only problem is that when we did the windows 10 upgrade 'Quick Access' and 'Recent Files' only remember the last NAS file. You cannot pin things to favourites (or at least you can but it won't remember them!) And whenever I try to copy a file into or out of the NAS I get warnings from Windows saying that the files might be unsafe because of where they have come from. If somebody could solve this problem so that it workds just like it was when we were in Windows 7 they would earn total hero status!
I bought a Buffalo NAS as well for backup purposes (backup of my main NAS).
I had to drop it though, as it didn't support NAS-NAS sync, wich meant that I would have to use a PC to run the sync.
So I bought another Synology, now I don't have to give backup a second thought. :)
Cant believe my eyes!, your Films and TV app on win10 works!
I use one for my videos. It works great (Synology). Ive not seen you before and you are very good looking!
I see you used those Philip Bloom film skills in the intro ;)
+Jamie Whiffen haha shhhh
To game on nas just create separate iscsi share for your games. Windows will see it like drive in your pc.
I just built a $130 pentium computer (not including hard drives) and installed windows 10 on it then create a shared folder and call it a day lol. And it can double as a seedbox which I think is something you can’t do with those NAS enclosures with their own OS.
RAID 1 is not secure by definition. Redundancy and security are totally separate. RAID 1 allows for all data to be mirrored across the installed amount of drives. This would be incredibly inefficient for a 4 drive NAS. I would fully recommend RAID 5 which allows for a 1 drive fault tolerance while giving you the most amount of storage with that tolerance. If a drive then fails you will still have full operation from the NAS and that's all you would have to do, if the NAS is smart enough, is switch out the dead drive and it should start rebuilding the RAID. If the NAS isn't that smart then you might have to manually start the rebuild process in the online management interface/menu.
GREAT video. Very helpful. Clearly presented.
Do you have a video on how a NAS drive can work with storing files recorded on a Humax DVR i.e. how it can manage/back up digital recordings of programmes & films broadcast on a home TV? Our Humax often gets overfull over the year - especially at Christmas! - so we have had to use external USB drives, but these are "only" ,-) 2TB in capacity, so a NAS drive would store FAR more files.
There is the QNAP 128 (1 bay) and QNAP 228 (2 bay) on ebay.co.uk for £120 and £160. Both have modern web UI and support 12TB drives as they sell them with 1x12TB and 2x12TB. I'm tempted but I'll give a router a shot at being a dedicated nas, otherwise I'll buy one. May end up getting the 1 Bay as NAS usually support USB drives.
you can run games stored on NAS, you just need to utilize iSCSI
Perfect intro! Good video and well reviewed for those considering a NAS.
Ya, a NAS would be nice but it ends up being cheaper to convert an old desktop or something into the NAS.
Pro presentation as usual - so much eye for detail /salute ;)
I just use an old dell pc that someone didn’t want... slapped 4 hard drives into it and opened it on the network and done....
I have collected lots of hard drives over the years. Now I bought a NAS to store everything in 1 place, without connecting a bunch of HD to the computer. But in my case, if you have everything stored on these HD already, why would I need to have backups taking half of the space on my NAS? I already have everything stored on these hard drives, which have become redundant and won't get used anymore. If anything goes wrong with my NAS, I already have my backup laying around in a closet somewhere. It would take me a while searching for everything I need, but I'm happy with that, if it saves me hundreds of dollars.
You don't need to use RAID 1 or 5 for having redundancy. You can also configure your nas a JBOD (just a bunch of drives) or raid 0 (creating 1 large "volume" from all your HDD's in the NAS). Then you have the advantage of having a large storage space which is available on all your devices in your network and also accessible from all over the world as long as you have internet. You can then indeed keep all of your current external hard drives as back-up (on- and off-site).
Just a tip. You're very detailed and clear, but you might want to think how... you.... end... a... sentence. Because everytime you start quite snappy, but you keep ending like ... my ... history.... teacher. ;P
Also, CPU speed determines a lot about the processing speeds of photo albums or video transcoding when streaming via DLNA. (love that feature) and the ups and downs of what type of RAID you're gonna use.
I'm currently rocking a Synology DS416play with 4 × 8 TB drives in RAID-5, So I effectively have 24GB and I had to split it up with partitioning because the CPU of the NAS was 32bit, which means I can't make bigger partitions than 16TB.
not sure if i would need one because I would just be using it for archiving and saving photos and videos. i think for now it'll be best to get a simple external drive but maybe in the future i would like to have it. makes sense to not get it for now and save for similar one like you have. thanks for the video.
hi , I know this is an old video but for home user I recommend CLOUD STORAGE as WD CLOUD, it's cheaper and as good as NAS for home users
mohammed farrag I use the cloud myself but the only question I ask people is how reliable is your cloud storage, do you know or are you just hoping that Google, Microsoft, DropBox are doing their jobs properly? Personally I have multiple account mainly free and duplicate my data to them, won’t stop me getting a NAS though for my media Library.
WD My Cloud is half-decent as long as you don't need more than a file server. Otherwise it's trash.
You do reallize that a WD Cloud is just a NAS with a fancy name, right?
Nice topic i really didnt know about nas as storage device
Would have been nice to see the software that come with it and how to configure, what options are available. Can Sonos/TV stream from it... how does the hdmi on the back work... so many questions you don't answer.
Read the title. The video is on the question "do you need a NAS?". It's not about how to set up NAS or the different features of a NAS.
Setting up a NAS varies greatly from brand to brand. The features also varies greatly. I have a Synology DS416play myself, wich can be set up as a Plex media server. It is also able to transcode in realtime.
I have a freenas server, but you have great looking compact server, nice mate☺️ how much did you spend?
You’re all the time talking about backing up on your NAS, but RAID is not a backup. It’s only redundancy. If your house burns down or your little brother presses shift delete, you will have nothing anymore. A proper backup has history and is stored off-site.
I use a nas for overall files that are important to me, but also big and chunky (e.g 40gb)
Nice explanation bro and also very helpful for beginners.
Forget a buying a NAS, build a server using something like FreeNAS with ZFS and buy a disk shelf to attach to it for the disks.
That takes time and expertise that not all users have. Sometimes it's easier to just buy something off the shelf.
@@maplenerd22 It doesn't take expertise, Level1Techs has multiple tutorials on it, and that's just one resource.
It does take time, but if you need a large capacity NAS they are absurdly expensive, and even those won't have much capacity.
praetorxyn - Maybe expertise is the wrong word. But it is a skill you have to research and learn to do. For a general user, this may not be worth it especially if you have to buy all the parts to begin with. Also keep in mind, these off the shelf NAS is designed for 24/7 access with minimal power consumption. They also have small form factor that people can easily tuck in a corner or closet. Building your own server with some old/new parts may be cheaper, but in the long run with added power cost, it may not be that much different. As far as capacity goes, I think the commercial NAS that are available will satisfy majority of consumers. Of course, if you do need a larger capacity, then a self made NAS maybe a better choice.
@@praetorxyn Our NAS featured in the video is just basically turn it on, follow a few steps and you're ready to go. We build our NAS for humans.
@ASUSTOR TV The problem with NAS boxes is that they typically use proprietary / OEM / tiny components that are either impossible or expensive to replace. For example if a NAS with a proprietary (proprietary in this sense meaning you can't buy one) Power Supply has a power supply failure, even something like a short in a wire,, your only recourse is typically to buy another model of the exact same NAS so you can avoid data loss. If you build a server it's a matter of swapping power supplies or swapping the cable with the short (assuming the power supply is modular). Gamers Nexus has recently done videos on 2 Synology NAS failures in a matter of months.
Ease of use only matters as long as it works. Then what matters is ease of fixing it, and NAS boxes fail really hard here because of their extremely small form factor.
The World is Yours
Whose world is this
I *want* a NAS, but, given that my 4 TB internal storage drive had only less than 100 GB of stuff on it, it would be hard to justify....; so to satisfy my 'tinkering urge' of playing with a NAS, I play with a FreeNAS VM in Hyper-V..... :)
Happy New Year mate. Very good video. Thank you. Just one question. What about the security when it comes to NAS, I read news about the data/access being compromised, or hacked maybe the right word. Pls help
is cheaper to just get a new or your old pc , and use it as nas ,, and if you have window 8 and up on both machine you can add multiple network card (smb3 multichanel ) and have faster acess than 70 -100mbs from typical nas , if you use a raid 10 or 5 ,
stelio darkphotographer
Would be faster than that for a nas more like 200+ meg a second
yes my is runing at 300mbs+ with 4 nic , the botelnek is the harddrive on the nas side ,raid10 with a ssd it can go up to 400 ,
The cloud is not easily accessible for people whos primarily internet is a cell with data caps...
The biggest problem with a NAS... £400+ For a decent 4 bay one. Not including the price of the HDDs. Cheaper by far to put those drives inside a computer and share them out.
Hey PC Centric, Nice video. Could you tell me if this would require a static IP by my ISP? Also is there a way for the NAS to go on stand-by mode when not in use to conserve electricity and life on the HDD but still be activated back remotely when needed?
It should work out of the box with the standby, but configure it your circumstances. I didn't need to change my router / IPS settings for full functionality.
Nice video; Loved the content.
Say i'm at school and I need to get a file off my homemade NAS and its at home, how would I do that?
I have experience with Raid1 nas and in the most cases when there is an error on one disk the other disk does have the same error. It is beter to backup from one drive to the other nas drive.
but does NAS using internet bandwith from the isp?
my bandwith is capped and pretty slow (around 1 mbps)... it would take a year to move from my 4TB external to my NAS if i gonna buy NAS later on...
5:10 Wrong, My Personal XP, Steam/Origin Load before windows will mount and login to a network share so whens team looks for the share to load the game library it wont be able to find it, once steam is restarted after the share is loaded it works fine
You can use steam with a NAS if you map it as a network drive. Steam doesn't know the difference between a local drive and a network drive.
i have a few questions about this, can i start with 1 harddrive and then keep adding more as i buy them? meaning lets say i buy the same one in this video, can i start with 1 harddrive and start using it then after 1 month I buy another one and add it to the NAS and have twice the space? then add a 3rd one and a 4th one etc till i fill up all the bays?
Yes. You can even change the RAID levels live without losing data.
NAS for people who have the money but no knowledge, any other solution is more reliable and cost effective on the long run.
A NAS basically is a mini PC and the added benefit which is basically the software can't justify the high price. Any 3th or later generation Intel CPU based PC would perform much better with the same power consumption and probably with more drives.
I would suggest NAS for small businesses who can't afforrd an IT admin or doesn't want to pay for a montly service. If you have 2 or more network attached TV, big movie library and you willing to buy a new hard drive every 2 years, then NAS made for you. (Pluging external hard drives in the back of your TVs is still way cheaper.)
Here is a question, does this NAS have any security when you access the drive (password)? What happening if your PC infected by an encryiption virus, is it encrypt your attached NAS drive too?
How much Luck have you with those Seagate Ironwolf drives? I see a lot of bad reviews on them. Price per TB worth it over the Seagate Barracuda Pro?