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Storage related. Need advice.

Heydrax

Heydrax

Junior Member
Hi all,

I am in need of 5TB minimum storage solution. I dont want to break the bank by buying Western Digital Black 4 TB storage HDDs.

What is nas ? I have seen some HDDs from Western Digital that are 6TB, I found it under their NAS section. WD Red.

I got tons of music and hd videos that need a safe home.

Thanks guys for any help.





Moved from GH.

Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi there.

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and it's used to share data between multiple computers across a common network. The link provided by Ken g6 is an useful one if you want to learn more about this storage device.

As for the WD Red, it is the NAS/RAID class drive from the consumer series that is designed specifically for RAID environments and NAS devices. It is tuned and optimized for 24/7 performance, RAID arrays and up to 8-bay NAS systems. Since this HDD is often used for backups, stable secondary storage and in streaming builds, you can set it up in a RAID and use it for a mass storage location for your music or videos. Or, in case you want only a single stand-alone drive, you may consider WD Green as well since it is an energy-efficient drive that works cool, quiet and saves a lot of power, and it is designed for backups and secondary storage and comes in massive media storage capacity up to 6TB.

Hope this helps.

Cheers! 🙂
 
In simple terms, a NAS is kind of like a "Barn for your data". If your PC is your house, then a NAS would be a shed, or a barn. You put your stuff in it, and it's separate from your PC.

NAS units have various numbers of bay, starting with one (ok, there are "NAS adapters", for USB external HDDs, that have zero internal bays), up to whatever number, in increasing amounts of cost.

Generally, most home users use 2- or 4-bay NAS units, which allows you to run RAID on the NAS. RAID is a way of using more than one HDD, to achieve additional speed, or reliability through redundancy, as needed.

I have several NAS units. One Seagate GoFlex Home unit that I got cheap from BestBuy Outlet, and a QNAP 2-bay unit with a pair of Seagate 1TB HDDs in a mirror.

I have a Lenovo 2-bay NAS unit that I haven't assembled yet, I'm debating whether to use two 3TB Toshiba drives (which are on the hardware list for the NAS), or a pair of HGST 4-6TB NAS drives.

A "mirror" is basically a live clone of the data. It gets written to both drives, so if one drive fails, hopefully the other one doesn't go at the same time, and you'll always have one copy of your data left.

Larger NAS units, with 4 or more bays, may use RAID 5 or 6. That's a type of striping, that allows for N+1 redundancy (RAID 5) or N+2 redundancy (RAID 6). That means that you get N drives worth of storage, and 1 or 2 drives can fail, and your data will still be intact.

Edit: I should note, that I don't have any particular preference for Seagate drives. Just that the GoFlex Home came with the drive pre-installed, and the QNAP, I had the pair of brand-new Seagate drives laying around because I got a good deal on them, and I didn't have a pair of WD drives. I actually slightly prefer WD for reliability (but not Greens), but they're more expensive, and like I said, I didn't have them laying around like the Seagates.
 
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MongGrel said:
If you do not know what a NAS is to begin with maybe you should back up and research things a bit.
Click to expand...

I agree. If all you are wanting to do is store your media, a simple HDD or 4 will work pretty well; a NAS can add a layer of complexity you may not want... and my thought is, if buying a 4TB Black is going to break your budget, a NAS certainly will because not only do you have to buy the appliance, you have to buy the drives that go in it.

Whatever you do, make sure your data is backed up in at least one instance, preferably more.
 
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