I think it is time for me to move to a network disk (array?) for storing images. File sizes keep increasing and it has become a bit of a hassle to manage all these external drives. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Pete D.
Posted by Mark Seaver on August 23, 2012 at 5:37 PM
Pete, I just bought a 4 TB thunderbolt external for my iMac. While I think it's still early for Thunderbolt, the fact that it will show up for Windows soon makes it likely that the prices will come down a lot and availability will go up. Given that we've been without electricity after storms for a total of more than 7 days in the last two years, I'm very nervous about Cloud storage. My Western Digital drive also allows for me to swap out 2 TB disk, should there be a problem or one get full. I don't know if that's a long term answer, but it should keep me in storage space for a couple of years. At least this way, if we get some kind of backup electricity, I can "play" with my pictures without internet access.
Posted by Mark Stahlke on August 24, 2012 at 2:37 PM
Random thoughts on Network Attached Storage (NAS):
NAS is best suited for situations where you need to share data between computers. If all you need is storage capacity, eSATA or USB 3.0 connectivity might be a better choice.
If you go with NAS, put it on a high speed network (Gigabit) for best performance. I would also put it on a separate network and not the same network as my internet connection.
Whatever storage you choose, you'll still have the issue of backups. RAID is not a backup.
I dislike cloud storage. It's fine for transferring files that are too big for email but I wouldn't trust it for anything else. Look at what happened to MegaUpload. It was rife with copyright infringement. When the federal government shut it down and seized the servers, legitimate users lost all their data. I guarantee other cloud storage providers are hosting copyright infringing files too.
I am using a ReadyNAS NV+ system (for two years). Inexpensive, reasonable speed. In addition to serving as a backup for my files, it is also used to stream HD video and I have not had problems.
However, it does not stream audio file well to my Sonos audio system.
The nice thing about NAS is that it allows you to easily share files among multiple machines. Being able to configure the system as a RAID is also important to me. While RAID is not a backup (as pointed by Mark), at least when I store my backup files on it, I know that my backup copies are pretty reliable.
Discussion
3 repliesPete D.
NAS is best suited for situations where you need to share data between computers. If all you need is storage capacity, eSATA or USB 3.0 connectivity might be a better choice.
If you go with NAS, put it on a high speed network (Gigabit) for best performance. I would also put it on a separate network and not the same network as my internet connection.
Whatever storage you choose, you'll still have the issue of backups. RAID is not a backup.
I dislike cloud storage. It's fine for transferring files that are too big for email but I wouldn't trust it for anything else. Look at what happened to MegaUpload. It was rife with copyright infringement. When the federal government shut it down and seized the servers, legitimate users lost all their data. I guarantee other cloud storage providers are hosting copyright infringing files too.
However, it does not stream audio file well to my Sonos audio system.
The nice thing about NAS is that it allows you to easily share files among multiple machines. Being able to configure the system as a RAID is also important to me. While RAID is not a backup (as pointed by Mark), at least when I store my backup files on it, I know that my backup copies are pretty reliable.