Could really use a dumbed down answer, what is a NAS?

[Jack Burton 98]

Feel silly asking after I've had a home server for a few years, but I just can't quite piece it together. I've done a bunch of research but I feel like I'm missing the absolute basics and can't fully grasp the concept. It's my understanding that it'd basically be a pc with say 2 drives, and one mimics the other in some kind of RAID setup, and the drives can be accessed over network. Is that right? If so, what does it look like? A standard PC with drives inside or is it more of a fancy server looking thing outside of a PC?

 

As far as FreeNas/OMV go, that's just software right? What is the physical NAS you would use the software with? I feel like I'm missing some small piece of info to get this to make sense.

 

Finally, currently I have 3x4TB and 1x8TB external drives that house my media (I know, external slows things down, but monies). The plan is to eventually build a new PC with internal drives, probably 3x8TB, is that essentially a NAS, is there a better way?

 

Thanx for any info, sometimes ya just gotta ask for help 

[aspdend 177]

A NAS is Network Attached Storage so rather than having your hard drives directly attached in your PC there is a box that is connected onto your network that houses the storage drives and you access the drives via you rnetwork

[Jack Burton 98]

A NAS is Network Attached Storage so rather than having your hard drives directly attached in your PC there is a box that is connected onto your network that houses the storage drives and you access the drives via you rnetwork

Thanx, pretty simple. So it's a physical machine that houses drives outside of your PC. Does it have it's own OS and connects to a monitor, or does it just have a basic interface to connect to a network (like a printer) and you do everything through the network on your PC?

[aspdend 177]

You don't necessarily need a RAID configuration for a NAS, but most people would run some sort of RAID to help protect against data loss when a drive fails. For example, I run an UnRAID server that stores all my media - TV shows, films, music, music videos, photos e-books etc. To create mine, I took a PC case that I wasn't using along with a normal PC processor, motherboard and RAM, added an expander card to allow me to connect more hard drives to the motherboard and re-purposed a load of hard drives I had either directly attached or sitting in the garage as they had been superseded and jammed 17 drives into the case. Run the UnRAID software on a flash drive and hey presto - I had a NAS sitting on my network that all my devices can access.

[Jack Burton 98]

Oh cool, so you don't even need to buy a NAS designed machine, just use an old PC. Do you find a minimum processor/ram is necessary? Do you notice any lag or slow down not having any drives connected to a PC? I generally have my main PC wired to the network and the drives directly connected to it, which I suppose serves as a NAS to my other devices

[aspdend 177]

You can buy dedicated NAS boxes that are pre-configured and you just need to add the hard drives and it will work. Many people are fans of these, but I find that they are too restrictive in terms of capacity for my needs 

 

However, I was on a strict budget. My UnRAID box was run by an AMD 720BE 3-core CPU with 8Gb of RAM and is quite old. TO be honest, the only real noticeable lag was either on my htpc (which was a dual core sempron CPU with 8Gb of RAM) or when a disk on the UnRAID box needed to spin up. I created my system when I was upgrading my main PC from the AMD 720BE so form my point of view I already had the guts of the NAS and the hard drives and I literally had to spend some money on the UnRAID Licence and some cable extenders as well as the expander card and I was set up - cost me less than £200 for a 20Tb NAS server. 

[Jack Burton 98]

Awesome, thanx for taking the time. Definitely gonna look into setting it up with old PC guts and minor upgrades. Money for storage to finally get things backed up is gonna be the real kick in the jimmies.

 

One more question, do you run EMBY on your NAS PC or a main PC?

[aspdend 177]

Regarding a minimum processor/RAM specification, it depends on what you are doing with it. For my purposes, because I am running emby Server on my htpc and I don't need to transcode anything generally, the NAS box never gets overloaded with CPU or RAM demands. However, I am currently in the process of upgrading everything because it's all a bit ling in the tooth and I want to extend my storage capacity of my UnRAID box as I have upgraded some of the Hard Drives to larger capacity models so have some spare drives kicking around again so I am digging another old box out of the garage to create a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) box that essentially draws power from a power supply in the JBOD box and is connected to another expander card in the UnRAID box for the data signal. (The sata cables run out of the UnRAID Box and into the JBOD box). This will allow me a further 8 hard drives in the JBOD box to be connected to the UnRAID box to give me a total 25 disks...

 

Some people here use UnRAID, other Drivepool drive bender (I think) and FreeNAS as well as dedicated NAS boxes from WD and Synology.

 

I chose UnRAID because of what I saw was the stability of the OS and the excellent user forums to provide assistance and the fact I can use any old sized disks (my initial setup used disks from 320Gb in size up to 3Tb) plus the updates and facilities.

[aspdend 177]

If you are looking at backups - you may want to consider either a second NAS for backing up or a mirrored RAID configuration. Personally, I use Crashplan to backup my system off site