Network Storage – Silent Storage for the Digital Home

2 Bay NAS

What is a NAS?
So what is a NAS and why do you want one?
Wikipedia states (a)“ Network-attached storage (NAS) is file-level computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous network clients” but ignore that as it makes little sense to humans. Essentially a NAS is a small box with some computer components in it such as motherboard, RAM, CPU and a network card connected to a network and accessed by all manner of devices from PC’s, laptops, media players and security cameras, the list goes on and on.

NAS devices require no monitor, keyboard or mouse everything is setup via a built in web based control panel much like the router you use to connect to the internet with. A NAS will run an embedded operating system rather than a full-featured OS, this embedded OS is generally based on a stripped down version of Linux, but don’t worry everything is presented to the end user in a simple easy to understand user interface. This is not to say you can’t tinker around with the operation system but more on that later, in fact you can do so much I can’t wait to tell you about it.
A NAS has room in it for one or more disk drives, generally the more drives the NAS can take the more expensive but the more storage it has to offer; it tends to be safer too. There is generally a NAS solution to suit every pocket and scenario.

That is the general gist of it – it’s a small box that sits at the end of a network cable that is accessible from various devices and acts as a hard drive for anything on the same network.

Why do you Need a NAS?
The internet / digital cameras / camcorders / mobile phones are all to blame for filling our life’s and computer hard drives with digital content. When the internet just started out floppy disks were all we had to share and store this information; 15 years later the storage needs of the average person far exceed the capacity of floppy disks and you will be hard pressed to find a floppy drive let alone the disk.
Home users and businesses now create an increasingly large quantity of electronic content including documents (pdf/word etc) and PowerPoint presentations with embedded sound or video for work.
Home users can take up even more space with MP3 music files and JPEG images direct from a camera and don’t forget the gigabytes needed to store DVD or Blu-Ray rips of movies, its old fashioned to watch a film using physical media . Home movie files recorded in HD using a small camcorder also take up space all of this content requires greater, more convenient storage than ever before.

4 Bay NAS

To be honest not everyone would want or need a NAS, for example I wouldn’t recommend one for my dear old mum, she uses a computer once a week doesn’t know or care about digital cameras and her phone is out of the Ark regardless of my best efforts to introduce her to the 21st century. My father in law on the other hand has just started ripping MP3’s out of his vast CD collection, he also records his own music to digital format and stores that on the NAS and his son has started to save his university course work on the NAS after losing a terms worth of hard work due to an external USB drive failure.

Nor do they make exciting of purchases. I remember taking home my first NAS (ED: nostalgic moment while we all remember our first NAS) and received that “What have you been wasting money on this time” look from my wife, but having every season of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy in full HD a click away via our Media Player has made her come round to my way of thinking. She even stores all our digital photo’s (arranged by year and event) on the NAS and has just started ripping her CD collection (Take That and Whitney Huston mainly) to it.

A lot of people are unaware of what a NAS is so it is not unusual to buy a few extra hard drives to keep all this information on, some people have stacks of cheap USB hard drives connected to PC’s or media players some people have dedicated PC’s sitting whirling away 24/7 sharing digital content. Now there is nothing wrong with this, I did It myself before the cost (especially the electricity bill) and fear of losing information of the setup made me think again.

One of the best reasons to purchase a NAS is Redundancy (RAID) – Hard drives fail, it’s a sorry state of affairs but it’s only a matter of time before that silver 3.5” block of high speed spinning metal platters begins to make a clunking noise or develop sector errors. The good news is file recovery software is pretty good these days but it is a PITA because file names and properties might get altered in that operation, the even better news is a NAS box with two or more hard drives in it can take advantage of RAID.

Through the use of redundancy, most RAID levels provide protection for the data stored on the NAS. This means that the data on the NAS can withstand even the complete failure of one hard disk (or sometimes more) without any data loss, and without requiring any data to be restored from backups. This security feature is a key benefit of RAID and probably the aspect that drives purchase of a NAS than any other. All RAID levels provide some degree of data protection, depending on the exact implementation, except RAID level 0.

RAID can get fairly technical and there are various levels of RAID but the most popular one that the majority of NAS boxes support is RAID 1. RAID 1 involves two hard drives, two copies of the any data are held on the drives, and the data is always identical. RAID1 has a performance advantage, as reads can come from either disk, and is simple to implement. However, it is expensive, as twice as many disks are needed to store the data. If one hard drive should fail the faulty drive can be removed and a replacement drive inserted and you are back up and running again. With the larger NAS models RAID 5 tends to be the best option, be sure to read up on all the different configurations.

The more expensive NAS boxes offer various levels of raid normally RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, if you are unsure what is for you then just send us an email or give us a call. In the end, one must assess what value there is in securing certain data, I have some friends who are still in the bad books with respective wives after a hard drive failure and no backup plan in place.

Last, but certainly not least, RAID systems improve performance by allowing the controller to exploit the capabilities of multiple hard disks to get around performance-limiting mechanical issues that plague individual hard disks. Different RAID implementations improve performance in different ways and to different degrees.

feature01 A NAS can do as much or as little as you want and I don’t have enough space to discuss it all here but some of our customers are using their NAS’s to download from torrent websites or newsgroups using built in software on the NAS. Other people are hosting websites or using them for home security coupled with some IP cameras.