I have been thinking about creating a central storage for my home computers. I have been using dropbox but I don't feel comfortable putting all my files in the cloud. So I finally pulled a plug on Synology ds212j. I was debating between synology and QNAP. I decided to go with Synology because it was less expensive and appeared to be more popular. I also ordered 2TB WD Red hard drives, courtesy amazon.com recommendations.
If you are in the market for a NAS, here are a few things to keep in mind;
1. Hard disk size: If you are planning to buy a new drive, it is recommended to go with a bigger size because it would save you the effort to reconfigure the volume. But if you are on a budget and want to use existing hard drives then you may find Synology Hybrid RAID useful. It allows you to make the most of available storage and provides simple steps to replace the hard drives in future.
2. It is not a backup: I was surprised when I read in forums that RAID is not a backup because that was the primary reason why I wanted to setup a NAS. However, the more I read about it I realized that the word backup has very specific meaning in technical terms. I was looking at NAS as a secondary backup in case my computer goes bad. The technical definition for backup refers to the ability to retrieve deleted files due to user error or system error. In that sense RAID is not a backup because if you delete a file on your computer it would also delete it from RAID during next sync. However, it provides redundancy in the event of a hard disk failure, which is what I was looking for.
3. Central storage: I have multiple laptops at home. A couple of them are very old and takes a long time to respond to a click. But I often have to go back to look for data such as tax returns for previous years etc. I have an external USB hard drive but I wanted a more convenient way to access data from any laptop, just like my internet connection. NAS can be connected to a router via ethernet cable and therefore it becomes very easy to store and retrieve data from any laptop on the network. Also, I now have a mix of mac and pc laptops and the mac is unable to write to the external hard drive since it is NTFS. So I would have to reformat the harddrive to use either FAT or FAT32.
4. DLNA certified: Although I haven't tried this yet but I am looking forward to pairing the NAS with my panasonic viera tv. If all goes well, I should be able to stream personal videos and downloaded media directly to my TV. This would make it fun to watch photos and home videos on a bigger screen. If you have a tv that is DLNA certified then it may be useful to get a NAS that supports streaming to other DLNA devices.
I will post my experience of installing and setting up synology ds212j in next post.
If you are in the market for a NAS, here are a few things to keep in mind;
1. Hard disk size: If you are planning to buy a new drive, it is recommended to go with a bigger size because it would save you the effort to reconfigure the volume. But if you are on a budget and want to use existing hard drives then you may find Synology Hybrid RAID useful. It allows you to make the most of available storage and provides simple steps to replace the hard drives in future.
2. It is not a backup: I was surprised when I read in forums that RAID is not a backup because that was the primary reason why I wanted to setup a NAS. However, the more I read about it I realized that the word backup has very specific meaning in technical terms. I was looking at NAS as a secondary backup in case my computer goes bad. The technical definition for backup refers to the ability to retrieve deleted files due to user error or system error. In that sense RAID is not a backup because if you delete a file on your computer it would also delete it from RAID during next sync. However, it provides redundancy in the event of a hard disk failure, which is what I was looking for.
3. Central storage: I have multiple laptops at home. A couple of them are very old and takes a long time to respond to a click. But I often have to go back to look for data such as tax returns for previous years etc. I have an external USB hard drive but I wanted a more convenient way to access data from any laptop, just like my internet connection. NAS can be connected to a router via ethernet cable and therefore it becomes very easy to store and retrieve data from any laptop on the network. Also, I now have a mix of mac and pc laptops and the mac is unable to write to the external hard drive since it is NTFS. So I would have to reformat the harddrive to use either FAT or FAT32.
4. DLNA certified: Although I haven't tried this yet but I am looking forward to pairing the NAS with my panasonic viera tv. If all goes well, I should be able to stream personal videos and downloaded media directly to my TV. This would make it fun to watch photos and home videos on a bigger screen. If you have a tv that is DLNA certified then it may be useful to get a NAS that supports streaming to other DLNA devices.
I will post my experience of installing and setting up synology ds212j in next post.
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