NAS Drive

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Hi

I'm after a bit of advice on a NAS drive.

I seem to be going in circles as I'm not technically minded.

What prompted me to look into a NAS drive was my USB WD Drive became full and Time Machine was unable to back up.

I'm after something that will work with my iMac, iPad, iPhones, Android and Windows devices too.

I've heard good things about Synology.

How do these multiple bay units work? Do you use one hard drive and then once that is full, the other gets used or does both get used together just in case one fails, you don't lose all the data?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!
 

Raz0rEdge

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Welcome to Mac-Forums..

NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a generic term used to refer to any storage media that is accessible over the network. Usually, the devices you buy are multi-bay and use some sort of RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) to keep your data safe.

There are varying levels of RAID that employ things like mirroring, striping, or a combination of the two depending on the number of disks you have..

If you have a 4-drive unit, for example, you would use the storage space from 3 disks while the 4th would be your sanity disk to keep the data across the other 3 intact..

The beauty of RAIDs is that if a single disk fails, you can always just swap that one out without affecting the entire system or losing data..

In addition to providing the nice backup solution, NAS' also provide other functionality like the ability to stream audio/video and so on..

Synology makes some very nice NAS'. I currently have a Netgear ReadyNAS that is working pretty well.

As far as accessing the NAS goes, you would have no problems from Windows, OS X or Linux as the NAS supports all of the native formats for each of these operating systems. However, when it comes to iDevices/Android and so on, there might be VERY specific things you can do with it but that all depends on the apps that you have on these devices.

Natively, the iDevices/Android will not really do anything with the NAS..
 
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Thanks for the detailed reply!

I might need a little more help with selecting a particular unit to suit my needs.

So, it's agreed that Synology is a decent start. Any particular models worth going for?

Thinking about it, I do have a Sony W9 smart TV which I guess would be connected to the NAS.

I was thinking possibly a 2 bay Synology but was unsure of the model and disc size to get etc. I'm in the UK, any links or suggestions would be fantastic.
 

Raz0rEdge

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My NAS is fairly old now, but is the 4-bay variety. It supports a maximum of 1.5TB drive in each bay. I'm currently running 4 1TB drives and in this configuration I get just over 2TB of RAID'ed space. For my needs that's definitely sufficient.

I use about 500GB of that space for my Time Machine backup. The rest is for general backup and storing all of my music..

So before you decide what you want to get, you want to decide your use case, how much data you'd like to save and of course your budget..
 
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My Time Machine back up is about the same as yours and have around 400GB of movies that I want to put on the NAS too.

I guess my budget is around £300/£350
 

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