I was hoping to do a full blown review after having my devices for 6 days now (It arrived Tuesday) but due to the capacity and time taken to get the device ready and put the data on there – this cannot be the case. Unlike a new graphics card or a new monitor, a NAS box is generally not something you get excited about, it’s storage after all but it does play a very important role in getting all your information in one place and be able to access it from the LAN.
The Pre-NAS Days
I think it is important to go over what I used to do before going for such a device. Like a lot of people (tech’s maybe?) I build up my collection of computers and wired them all up to a gigabit network for sheer speed. As I needed storage space, I would buy normally a cheap external USB Drive – whichever was on offer at the time which had the biggest capacity. In my case I had bought the iomega range, first the 50GIG model and later the 1TB model. I shared this out on the network but it involved the computer been on and of course USB Speeds are slower then say e-sata.
My problem came when my current collection got filled to the brim with files, do I buy some more drives? Do I delete maybe some of the files I do not need? Do I store them on other places across the network? I did not really want to waste more money on USB Drives so that is why I felt NAS was the Answer.
Building the NAS
It took me from 6pm Tuesday to 10:30pm on Thursday to get the drive ready before I could even start to put anything on there. My first course of action was to move the files from the USB Drives over the the correct shared drive. The NAS Box had set up some folders due to the services I clicked such as Audio, Video and so forth. The next issues was speed and to start off I had the NAS Box plugged into the router which only has 10/100 ports. Once I moved the NAS box across to my gigabit switch – I noticed a big difference in speed. At the end of each night, I stopped any file moving in progress and powered down all computers.
Finally it was ready
Now that I had all the files off the external USB Drives and the 1TB Drive fitted inside the Dell – this now allowed me to plug in all the drives into the NAS Box as well as fit the 1YB Drive into an external case I had to give me yet more space.
Of the Original RAID 1 formatted 2x2TB Drives – it came out with 3.57TB Free. We have the 1TB, 1TB, 500GIG and 320GIG Drives fitted to a USB Hub (as there is only 3 ports on this device) and these are shared as usbshare1 through to usbshare4. Now as all of the files are indeed stored on the NAS drive and I still have 1.88TB left, I do not really need to power the external drives on just yet but as you can see, it gives me extra space for now and the future.
Speed of the device
Connected to a gigabit network, the device shows up on the network share as the default name of DiskStation, this can changed on the device if needed of course. You map drives and in my case I used V: for Video, M: for music and P: for Pictures. I would suggest it is as quick as copying files to another machine, definitely a lot quicker then when I used the PogoPlug, but this is understandable. I do notice when starting iTunes or the background switcher that the NAS box will rattle the hard drives for a while before coming up.
The built in programs
The NAS Box has various services that allow you to share out your audio, video and music collection as well as download services and other bits. Now the beauty of the download service is that you can just add a program to your local machine, add a torrent or a NZB file and the box will sit in the background downloading the file allowing you to switch off the machines around it.
The Photo album while handy I suppose is not something I can see myself using, I already have a gallery online and sharing files across an limited upload will not be a fast experience. I cannot for some reason to get the program to thumbnail all my pictures.
Sharing USB Printers
I tried this and on Windows 7 the printer came up as usbprinter and while the NAS box knew what the printer was, it had no idea on the driver for the features. In the end I have up on this method of sharing and plugged it back into my machine. Sahring via the network means no signs of ink been low and so forth.
Was it worth the money?
I could have bought 4x2TB Drives for the money I spent on this lot (I only bought 2 remember) and used a spare machine and had a total of 10TB worth of space on share (thats including the 2x1TB external drives). I can imagine the machine would have been a lot louder, this devices is very quiet indeed. 4 HD inside a machine and in use would have caused more heat and thus more noise. I do feel what I did buy was a good investment, yes I am limited to 4TB Internal but have the ability to add USB Drives as needed.
