Need advice on home office network storage options!

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I work at a home office that consists of 5 people using 6 to 7 macs. I'm in charge of tech solutions to have us running as efficiently as possible.

I want to find a way to use some sort of wireless external hard drive to conglomerate all of the files we have been collecting in order to create a single location all of the computers can access.

Transfer speed, ease of use, and reliability are important to me, whereas I'm more flexible on price.

I'd love the help from anyone who has tackled this sort of problem in the past and has some good advice!

Thanks

- Alex
 

pigoo3

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I work at a home office that consists of 5 people using 6 to 7 macs. I'm in charge of tech solutions to have us running as efficiently as possible.

Sounds like a "fancy" way of saying you're the family member with the most technology experience...and got stuck with the IT "expert" job!;)

- Nick
 
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What do you have already? Do you have a wireless network? I don't know of a pure hard drive/wireless solution.

Consider
Time Capsule - can create a wireless network and has a usb and gigabit ethernet. I use it both as NAS and a backup location for time machine.
Apple - Time Capsule - Automatic backup for Mac and an 802.11n Wi-Fi base station

Synology has a bunch of options scaling from SOHO to Enterprise
Synology America Corp. - NEW NAS Experience -

Netgear
RNDP6350 - ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition 1.5 TB NAS (3 X 500 GB)

Or roll your own - build a box and use freenas
FreeNAS | Download FreeNAS software for free at SourceForge.net
Or Ubuntu
Ubuntu homepage | Ubuntu
Then you could make the box wireless
Here is a motherboard with RAID capabilities for up to Raid 5
ASRock > Products > M3A790GXH/128M
 
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What do you have already? Do you have a wireless network? I don't know of a pure hard drive/wireless solution.

Ivan,

I have a wireless network set up already. I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I am a computer (mac especially) savvy person, but I have little experience networking.

What I ultimately want is a way to centrally store all of our project files and have them accessible from any computer on our network. I want everyone to be able to save their research to a single place so I can keep it organized.

I know you can mount drives from other macs on the same network, but I'm not sure if those limitations make this a viable option.

I'm not really sure what NAS is generally used for, but from my research it would seem to accomplish what I need. Is this overkill though?

Thanks again!

-alex
 
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NAS means Network Attached Storage - and it is generally used for sharing files on a network. There are many solutions out there but because of speed and access - most NAS tries to be on etherenet, gigabit ethernet, or multiple gigabit ethernet. Mounting drives is known more of a shared storage solution - i.e. file server.

It just depends on what you are trying to accomplish. The nice thing about NAS is that you don't have to run a full blown OS - just a file server OS. And it can stay on all the time - dedicated to serving files. As I said I personally use the time capsule as a NAS/wireless AP. I can connect drives to the USB hub of the time capsule to extend it's capabilities and the price was reasonable for all that you got.

You just need to make sure that whatever NAS solution (or server solution) can serve to the types of OSes that will be accessing and saving files to it (smb, afs, etc). Other than that you would just mount the NAS on the different computers and it would end up looking like another drive.
 

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