Network Storage Tips Articles

Small Business NAS Recommendation

We received an inquiry from a reader regarding a Small Business NAS Recommendation.

Here it is:

I want to move our company off of a really poorly configured server that we simply don’t use as a server anymore. I simply would like to store files using a few shares between a few computers.

The one issue I have would be using the NAS in a multiple subnet network. We have 4 remote offices all using a different subnet 192.168.1.x to 192.168.5.x. Will this be a problem for a NAS as we can ping and print anywhere?

What is the best poduct for our needs. Thanks in advance.

Here is our response:

If you can ping and print anywhere then the subnets is not an issue. Bandwidth, however, can be an issue if the files are very large.

Without knowing anything else I can only give you general guidance on a new NAS. ReadyNAS is one of our favorites because they have good quality, good support and pricing that is not extreme (QNAP, for instance, has more features – that you probably wouldn’t use, but is much higher price), less pricey NAS units usually come with more problems. ReadyNAS have a decent warranty also.

For business I like to recommend a business class product, but that does come with a higher price than just buying a consumer unit like many businesses do – and often regret later.

For a 4 drive NAS that allows you RAID5 capability, the ReadyNAS Pro 4 is an excellent unit. If you want more storage, expandability, or want the dual-redundancy of RAID6 then the ReadyNAS Pro 6 would be appropriate.

Note, these are desktop units, if you are looking for a rack mount style, let me know.

The Pro 4 is what we ordinarily setup a small business with.

You can find links to the different configurations available at our full review on the ReadyNAS Pro.

Note that the Pro 4 & Pro 6 that come with hard drives in them are enterprise class hard drives with 5 year warranty and longer life expectancy which accounts for some of the higher cost than a consumer unit. You can also buy diskless and put your own disks in.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any further questions.

There are lots of Small Business NAS devices to choose from, that is for sure. Here are some of the questions you want to ask when trying to determine which NAS would be best for your business.

What services will the NAS perform (some NAS servers can run SQL, for instance)?
How many concurrent users will be accessing data on the NAS?
How much total storage do you need now, assuming no more than 50% utilization?
How much do you expect your storage to grow over the next 3 to 5 years?
What level of redundancy do you want? (RAID1, RAID5, RAID6)?

If you need RAID6, for instance (X-RAID2 with dual redundancy is the terminology with ReadyNAS), then you need a 6 drive bay unit with ReadyNAS but fewer with QNAP.

If you are buying disks for a diskless unit, we have various hard drive compatibility posts with links for 2TB and 3TB drives. The latest is the 2TB QNAP compatible hard drives.

We are always happy to help you determine what NAS is right for you, just use our Contact page and give us as much detail as possible.

Posted in SMB Network Storage | Comments (0)

2TB Hard Drives For QNAP NAS

2TB hard drives for the QNAP TS-459 PRoII NAS device we mentioned we are looking at are kind of hard to find with the Thailand flooding issue (and the complete lack of supplier diversification on the part of MAJOR corporations!).

3TB hard drives are, if available, insanely priced, especially in the enterprise class category that we prefer.

One of the highly rated, enterprise class 2TB hard drives on the QNAP compatibility list is the Western Digital 2 TB RE4 SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive – WD2003FYYS.

Hitachi is on the list too, but when you start reading user reviews you find that many are finding DOA drives and very early drive failures. This is in line with some of our own experience as well.

So to make your chore of finding 2TB hard drives for QNAP NAS devices easier we have assembled the table below with links directly to Amazon.com.

Sure, there are other places that sell them, but when we check prices, shipping costs, (taxes), availability and combine that with Amazon’s great service if there is a problem, we bought ours from Amazon.

2TB Hard Drives From QNAP Compatibility List

We have these NAS hard drives marked as enterprise class (longer warranty, better reliability) if they are, otherwise assume consumer class (lower price).

Vendor	Class	Model #	SATA	RPM	Cache	Vibration Safeguard	Warranty (Years)	Notes
Hitachi	Ultrastar 7K3000 (Enterprise)	HDS723020ALA640	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	NAS firmware upgrade to v3.4.0 or later best
Seagate	Constellation (Enterprise)	ST2000NM0011	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	None
Hitachi	Ultrastar A7K2000 (Enterprise)	HUA722020ALA330	3Gb/s	7200	32MB	Y	5	None
Seagate	Constellation (Enterprise)	ST32000644NS	3Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	None
Western Digital	RE4 (Enterprise)	WD2003FYYS	3Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	None
Western Digital	RE4-GP (Enterprise)	WD2002FYPS	3Gb/s	#	64MB	Y	5	Get latest drive firmware
Seagate	Barracuda XT	ST33000641AS	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	N	5	NAS firmware upgrade to v3.4.0 or later best
Hitachi	Deskstar 7K3000	HDS723020BLA642	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	N	3	None
Hitachi	Deskstar 5K3000	HDS5C3020ALA632	6Gb/s	#	32MB	N	3	None
Seagate	Barracuda LP	ST32000542AS	3Gb/s	5900	32MB	N	3	None

# – Intellipower / Coolpower “Green” hard drives do not rate at a particular constant speed

———————

3TB Hard Drives From QNAP Compatibility List

(If you can find them and afford them)

Vendor	Class	Model #	SATA	RPM	Cache	Vibration Safeguard	Warranty (Years)	Notes
Hitachi	Ultrastar 7K3000 (Enterprise)	HUA723030ALA640	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	None
Hitachi	Deskstar 7K3000	HDS723030ALA640	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	3	NAS firmware upgrade to v3.4.0 or later best
Seagate	Constellation (Enterprise)	ST33000650NS	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	NAS firmware upgrade to v3.4.0 or later best
Hitachi	Deskstar 5K3000	HDS5C3030ALA630	6Gb/s	5400	32MB	N	3	None
Seagate	Barracuda XT	ST33000651AS	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	N	5	None

# – Intellipower “Green” hard drives do not rate at a particular constant speed

Please note that some Western Digital drives not listed here, but listed on QNAP’s site as compatible also have a “Note #9″ which states that even though compatible, Western Digital recommends NOT using them in a RAID system. Therefore we have NOT included them above.

Samsung drives are not included because of personal experience and a Note at QNAP’s site about downloading a special tool to improve data integrity. Does that scare anyone else besides us?

So check the list (and check it twice!) and grab yourself some 2TB hard drives for a QNAP NAS. 3TB will eventually be affordable, and prices can change daily so check first if you think that might be your preference.

Posted in NAS Hard Drives | Tagged 2TB, 3TB | Comments (0)

QNAP Has RAID6 Advantage Over ReadyNAS

The QNAP 4-Bay Turbo NAS Tower Server TS-459 ProII is a premium 4 drive bay NAS that offers RAID6, and, BTW, USB 3.0 as well.

These are two features that you won’t find in our otherwise favorite small business NAS, the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro 4.

Granted, though, the QNAP is much more expensive.

Does it do more? Yes, the feature list is quite expansive. But many of these features are not going to be important to most buyers.

Yet the USB 3.0 ports in themselves are a welcome addition that we only find on the 2 drive bay ReadyNAS Pro.

For us, though, being rather enamored by the security of RAID6 data protection, find the QNAP attractive since you can configure the 4 drives in it for RAID6. Netgear, for some reason, dose not allow this on any of their 4 drive offerings; you have to buy a 6 drive system to get it with ReadyNAS.

RAID6 only requires 4 drives, so why not, Netgear?

So we are looking seriously at making the QNAP 4-Bay Turbo NAS Tower Server TS-459 ProII our next NAS for in-house data storage.

The QNAP come without any hard drives installed; be sure to check the compatibility list before buying.

Posted in NAS Comparison | Tagged QNAP, raid6, ReadyNAS | Comments (0)

Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage

The Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage, available in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB sizes, is one of the “cheap NAS” devices that are currently available that will probably do the job for you.

Not everyone can afford or even wants to spend the money on a “real” home NAS like the ReadyNAS Ultra 2, and that’s OK.

If you just need the equivalent of an external USB hard drive that is available to multiple computers and other devices, both PC and Mac (The WD My Book is Apple Time Machine compatible) then this could be for you.

The key consideration is that a cheap home NAS like this should not be the ONLY copy of any data that you have unless you have a scheduled backup being performed as frequently as the data changes, hopefully daily.

The problem with a home NAS like this is that it is a single hard drive, no RAID protection against a failed disk.

Fortunately, the hard drives included in these Western Digital My Book network storage devices are decent quality drives in the first place and even spin at 7200rpm, so it’s not the bottom of the line drive. But that does NOT mean that it cannot fail and even fail early in life.

How Do Users Review The Western Digital My Book Live

There are lots of reviews on Amazon.com for this home network attached storage unit. And, interestingly enough, are pretty much equally split between 1 star and 5 star.

What this means is that one size does not fit all; not speaking of drive size.

Some buyer of a unit like this know absolutely nothing about computers or networking and that is what the product is targeted for. Yet some that have certain internet service providers may have some difficulty setting it up because of the ISP’s desire to “help” with domain name searches that fail.

More experienced buyers of this product might feel a little bit restricted in what they are able to do with it.

So while you will never find a cheap home NAS as our top recommendation, we nonetheless recognize the legitimate market for a product like this and admire consumers who at least are attracted to one of the top names in storage, in this case, Western Digital.

A Word On Price

Keep in mind that those who feel this device is overpriced are probably comparing it to other brands that have stuck a cheap, 5400rpm hard drive in a box and are selling it to very price conscious buyers who may end up extremely disappointed when that “cheap, cheap NAS” goes belly up with their data.

How Do You Backup The Western Digital My Book NAS

Online Backup is a great way to protect yourself against data loss both from hard drive failure but also from geographic (location) disasters like flood, tornado, fire and theft.

The thing is, though, many if not most online backup services do NOT support network drives or shares. (Find out which ones do support network drives here)

So make sure that, unless your WD My Book is FOR backup (and even then you might do well to have OFF-SITE backup) get it onto a scheduled online backup software that will support it.

If you are in the market for a quality (yet cheap) home NAS then give the Western Digital My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage a look.

Posted in Home Network Storage | Tagged cheap nas | Comments (0)

Replacing Microsoft SBS With A Small Business NAS

We have used Microsoft SBS in our own small business office for over 10 years now, and overall been quite happy.

Yet as our SBS 2003 box ages, I worry more and more about the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) which causes a piercing feeling to crash through my chest whenever it happens.

Will a cold reboot fix it?

Will I need to reinstall Windows?

How good are my backups?

What about all the little tweaks that didn’t get written down in the documentation?

Will I miss any important emails while I hastily rebuild the server?

I’m tired of having those kinds of worries. And while I made a lot of money as a consultant for other small businesses preventing problems like that and creating contingency plans if it did, no one pays me for working on my own stuff.

I bypassed SBS 2007 and have no interest in getting up to speed with the lastest version. First, they took away all of our graphic tools saying they were a security threat and now they are moving back to them (probably because of revolt).

For us it’s time to determine just how valuable it is to have our own mail server, deal with the spam and the required bandwidth versus the convenience of instant emails. And while I used to archive all emails, that takes space and time, and I almost never need to refer back to them.

As for storage space, the really big stuff we are already storing on our ReadyNAS NVX. And while the NVX is not what I would buy today (I’ll get to that in a bit) it’s really nice that it just plain works. There have been only a couple of firmware updates the entire time we have owned it and any questions regarding operation are easily answered by ReadyNAS tech support or the community forum.

Even adding storage to a new ReadyNAS couldn’t be easier. Whether you are adding a drive to an empty drive bay or even upgrading to larger hard drives, with ReadyNAS you do NOT need to backup all your data, wipe the RAID array clean and restore!

(Yes, still make sure you have a good, current backup, but that is advice that is valid 24/7/365 anyway.)

Steps To Migrating From SBS to Small Business NAS

First and foremost, we have to replace Microsoft Exchange. Fortunately we are not using SQL Server for anything or, thankfully, SharePoint.

Exchange has always been nice, but in the early years recovery from a disaster was a major undertaking requiring great skill; and experience didn’t hurt either. Fortunately it is now easier to recover from an Exchange problem these days but it can still take a lot of time, especially if your database is large as most are.

While I am looking at several hosted Exchange solutions I am also considering just migrating to gmail and not bothering with our custom domain. In any business with a customer presence, you want your own domain but for us it’s not that big of a deal. At one time there was some prestige involved but not anymore.

Any more we forward other email accounts through gmail just to get the anti-spam services for free.

Outlook

Outlook is still my calendar and email client of choice, but that will work without Exchange. I have to be more diligent about backup and make sure that my online backup service will support open and locked files such as an Outlook PST file, but the best do.

When it comes to shared calendar’ing, we don’t, so that is not an issue for us.

Once Exchange is out of the way, the rest is easy.

Network Printers

In the world of Windows 7 and almost every copier also being a network printer – even the relatively cheap all-in-one’s – there is no real need to run all of our printing through the server anymore.

With some companies there may be permissions or special drawer usage for checks and things but not for us. Simply connect up all the printers directly via the network to each PC is fine.

Windows AD Security

Windows AD is one thing that has probably spoiled me over the years. With that is the ability to run policies to control program and user behavior.

What I may consider, though, is a simple Windows Server 2008 VM solely for the purpose of continuing AD as before. We’ll see.

File Shares

This is the easy part.

If you do not use Windows AD, just create users on the Small Business NAS using the same Windows user names and passwords as on the Windows workstations. If you don’t need password security, just open up the NAS for Guest access. Note: Don’t open up the NAS to the internet this way!

File shares and permissions are what network attached storage (NAS) units do, so just create the shares you want, create the mapped drives on the Windows workstations and you are done.

Data Backup Using A NAS

Just because you setup your business NAS with RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6 doesn’t mean you don’t need backup. Online backup is the easiest and gets your data off site automatically.

Not every online backup service will support a NAS from a workstation, though. ReadyNAS units offer scheduled backup to an attached USB hard drive for local backup and have their own online backup service named ReadyVault built-in to the ReadyNAS unit if you choose to subscribe to that.

The online backup service we use with small businesses that does support network drives such as your NAS is Mozy Pro.

Workstation Profiles

If you do choose to dispense with AD, then your workstations need to be disjoined from the domain, and unfortunately your profiles will be trashed. That’s Windows, thanks a lot.

With XP and prior you could copy profiles but good luck with Windows 7 (I never used Vista, thank God!). You can export profiles of Firefox (or sync them in current versions), copy favorites, etc and I recommend you do that.

What Small Business NAS Would I Buy Today?

With all of the network attached storage vendors out there you might find it difficult to settle on a vendor. Personally, I have been happy with Netgear ReadyNAS over the years so I would stick with them.

Service and support are important and the user community for ReadyNAS is the best I have seen.

And since we would be interested in a “pedestal” (free standing desktop) unit, the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro would be the lineup that interests us. See rackmount small business NAS if you would want a NAS mounted in your equipment rack.

The ReadyNAS Pro 2 is a great little unit, even has 1 USB 3.0 port, but two drives in a mirror is not quite enough for us.

The ReadyNAS Pro 4 is more like it, but if we want X-RAID2 with dual redundancy (RAID 6), for some reason Netgear does not allow it except with 6 drive units and above, even though only 4 are required.

So we may opt for a ReadyNAS Pro 6 just to make sure we have all the expandability we want and the option of dual redundancy.

Conclusion

If you have a small business network you no longer need to be shackled to Microsoft.

With Microsoft the cost of software is high, the cost of hardware is high, the cost of ongoing maintenance is high and when it crashes the downtime can easily exceed 24 hours.

With a quality small business NAS device, the cost of hardware is reasonable, their is no cost of software, the ongoing maintenance is almost nil and the crashes almost non-existent.

That’s the direction we are going.

Posted in SMB Network Storage | Tagged SBS, small business nas | Comments (0)

What Is The Difference Between ReadyNAS Ultra 6 And ReadyNAS Pro 6?

ReadyNAS Ultra 6

Since so many ask what is the difference between the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6 and ReadyNAS Pro 6 we thought we better address that issue before more people bought the wrong one.

And just to make things interesting we will throw in the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Plus!

They look pretty much identical, all hold up to 6 hard drives and have very similar features, yet the price difference is fairly significant.

In short, the ReadyNAS Ultra 6 is a premier home network attached storage device well suited to large amounts of data, multimedia storage, streaming and remote access. With 6 drive bays, you can start with RAID5 or RAID6 (X-RAID2 enhanced) and still have room for expansion.

Next comes the ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Plus. The ONLY difference between the Ultra 6 and the Ultra 6 Plus is that the “Plus” is powered by a dual core CPU whereas the straight Ultra is a single core CPU.

That’s it. So why would you want to pay extra for the dual core CPU? Probably if you intend on having several users accessing the NAS device simultaneously ESPECIALLY if that includes any video streaming.

Video requires encoding in addition to processing lots of bytes of data from the hard drive array to the network interface so the extra CPU core is noticeable.

ReadyNAS Pro 6

Now let’s discuss the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro 6 and what distinguishes it from the ReadyNAS Ultra 6 and Ultra 6 Plus.

The ReadyNAS Pro 6 is targeted to Small Business NAS customers, where the Ultra 6 (and Plus) are considered “Prosumer”. With Ultra’s emphasis on multimedia, this is appropriate.

While the Pro 6 is capable of everything the Ultra 6 is, some of the multimedia features may not be enabled out of the box. Enabling is not difficult.

Horsepower-wise, the ReadyNAS Pro 6 is powered with a dual core CPU like the Ultra 6 Plus is. This makes sense since business NAS applications are more likely to have multiple users accessing data at the same time.

Additional features that just are not needed in home environments that the Pro 6 supports are:

Security – Selectable Security Modes

User Security Mode
ADS/Domain Security Mode

Networking

VLAN Support
NIC Teaming/Failover
SNMP

Hard Drives

Pre-populated NAS devices incorporate Enterprise Class hard drives

Volumes

Snapshot with Scheduling
Backup from Snapshot
Share-level Quotas

Warranty

5 year warranty in Pro 6 vs. 3 year in Ultra 6 and Ultra 6 Plus

Other

ReadyNAS Replicate Support

Looking at the above list of additional features included with the Business oriented Netgear ReadyNAS Pro 6 over the Prosumer ReadyNAS Ultra 6 and Ultra 6 Plus should make it fairly easy for you to determine if you need to choose an Ultra 6 Plus over an Ultra 6 or a Pro 6 over an Ultra 6 Plus.

All three are high quality units that can give you years of satisfied service and all come with the excellent support of both Netgear and the ReadyNAS user community.

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6
	Diskless
	6TB (3 x 2TB)
Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Plus
	Diskless
Netgear ReadyNAS Pro 6
	Diskless
	3TB (3 x 1TB)
	6TB (6 x 1TB)
	12TB (6 x 2TB)
	18TB (6 x 3TB)

Posted in NAS Comparison | Tagged readynas pro 6, readynas ultra 6, readynas ultra 6 plus | Comments (0)

Which Home NAS Is Right For Me?

Lots of people with growing data files are asking which home NAS is right for me? There is a lot of information out there about the various network storage devices for sale but little that really describes what they do.

Let’s start out by finding out if you are in the category of most first time network attached storage buyers.

Often people will start out with a computer whose hard drive fills up with lots of photos, music and some video, so they buy an external hard drive.

Then, one of two things happens.

The get tired of moving that external hard drive from computer to computer and wish they could easily access that data from any computer in their home over the wireless network already in the house.
Or, they find out the hard way that keeping your only copy of an important file on a single external hard drive is a good way to suffer data loss when that hard drive crashes. That’s when they find out about RAID data protection – which is offered on most home NAS devices.

The 2 Drive NAS

A natural step up from the external hard drive is the 2 drive NAS device. Strictly speaking, the 2 drive NAS, configured in RAID1 where both hard drives are simultaneous copies of the same data for redundancy, is just an external hard drive with network access and protection against a single hard drive failure.

Certainly these home network storage devices do a lot more than that, but usually those are features that the NAS owner comes to appreciate later on.

Considering the increased cost of a home NAS over a cheap external hard drive, this is and important first step for anyone serious about their data to take.

Which Home NAS To Buy?

Naturally our personal preference is to buy the best home NAS, which arguably is the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus, but we realize that this is not in everyones budget (especially these days) and may be more than some people need.

So if you want to get a decent home storage device that meets your needs now but won’t break the bank, take a look at a 2 drive home NAS that:

Is made by a reputable manufacturer like Netgear, DLink, Synology, Buffalo, QNAP, Thecus, etc.
Has a warranty that you are comfortable with (1 year goes by quickly, so look for longer – 3 year will probably be max for consumer NAS)
Has at least 2 hard drives (or diskless that you can put 2 or more drives in)
Gets 4 star or above user reviews based on lots of reviews. (The Synology pictured above is 4.5 stars at Amazon.com)
Has a gigabit (10/100/1000) network connection, not just 10/100.
Offers good support options

Don’t Forget RAID

Many of these home NAS units will come with just 1 hard drive or will offer JBOD (just a bunch of disks) configuration. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, don’t do that!

Choose RAID1 for two drives or RAID5 for 3 or more drives (RAID6 is great but only on larger, more expensive units).

RAID0 is touted as being fast, so some people choose it. Please DON’T! RAID0 does NOT protect your data against drive failure.

You are going to want to make sure that your new home NAS is properly configured for RAID1 (or above) before you start copying any data to it. Contact tech support if you have any doubts.

Here Are Some Highly Rated 2 Drive Home NAS Devices To Choose From

These less expensive home NAS devices (not “cheap”, don’t want that!) are rated well by most people who own them. We have not tried out each and every one ourselves, but would be comfortable having our “mom” buy one.

There are other great 2 Drive NAS’s but we want to show you some of the more affordable ones. And certainly, you can buy a 4 Drive Bay NAS and start with only 2 drives in it.

Understand, though, that some Network Attached Storage vendors make it easier to add disks or migrate arrays than others. That’s another reason we really like the Netgear ReadyNAS devices with X-RAID2 technology and array migration ability.

Posted in Home Media Network Storage | Tagged 2 drive nas, home nas | Comments (2)

3TB Hard Drives For ReadyNAS Ultra

Find 3TB Hard Drives Guaranteed Compatible

- ReadyNAS Ultra and Ultra Plus -

A list of 3TB hard drives will vary day by day, but when searching for ReadyNAS Ultra and ReadyNAS Ultra Plus hard drives for your diskless NAS device or to add storage capacity, you want to guarantee compatible hard drives.

Crossing the 2TB boundary for many devices will make the hard drive either not recognizable or not seen at its full capacity.

Note in the table below the minimum firmware version needed for any 3TB hard drive to function properly.

Buying 3TB hard disks that ReadyNAS has tested means they will stand behind the drive working in their Ultra NAS devices.

This will likely save you the trouble of having to seek out tech support in the first place, but if you do need support when adding or upgrading a hard drive, having bought one that was on their ReadyNAS compatibility list will certainly make their job – and your life – easier.

In fact, it’s possible that Netgear will even deny support if you do NOT buy your 3TB hard drive from their compatibility list.

3TB Hard Drives – Netgear ReadyNAS Compatibility List

Vendor	Class	Model #	SATA	RPM	Cache	Vibration Safeguard	Warranty (Years)	Notes
Hitachi	Deskstar 7K3000	HDS723030ALA640	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	3	Must be used with 4.2.16 or newer firmware
Seagate	Constellation (Enterprise)	ST33000650NS	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	Y	5	Must be used with 4.2.16 or newer firmware.
Western Digital	Caviar Green	WD30EZRS	3Gb/s	#	64MB	Y	3	Must be used with 4.2.16 or newer firmware.
Hitachi	Deskstar 5K3000	HDS5C3030ALA630	6Gb/s	5400	32MB	N	3	Must be used with 4.2.16 or newer firmware.
Seagate	Barracuda XT	ST33000651AS	6Gb/s	7200	64MB	N	5	Must be used with 4.2.16 or newer firmware.

# – Intellipower “Green” hard drives do not rate at a particular constant speed

As you can see from the table above, you have a wide array of choices in picking a 3TB hard drive for your Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra or Ultra Plus NAS.

By wide array, not that five hard drives to choose from is that many, but the combination of performance, price and warranty covers a fair span.

How to Choose a 3TB Hard Drive from the List

Depending on the number of hard drives you have to buy to populate your ReadyNAS Ultra, the difference of about $150 per drive from the most expensive model on the list to the cheapest hard disk on the list can really add up.

Here is the way I would decide what hard drive to buy:

First, how important is it how fast the hard drive performs? The SATA rating of 3Gb/s or 6Gb/s really does not tell the whole story. Rotational speed and cache size will certainly matter, especially in multiuser environments.

If you spent the extra money for a ReadyNAS Ultra Plus over the Ultra model to get the dual core processor and the maximum performance, then it really does not make sense to scrimp on the hard drive. That would narrow it down to the Hitachi 7K3000 or Seagate Constellation.

If warranty is important, then take the Constellation’s 5 year warranty AND the knowledge that the Seagate Constellation, being and Enterprise grade hard drive, is probably less likely to fail and require you to take advantage of the longer warranty.

Power Consumption

If being “green” is your thing, or you just want to save as much money on energy as possible, then take a look at the Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive. It combines a decent amount of performance while saving on energy consumption.

And if your usage of your Netgear NAS device is infrequent over the course of the day and usually only one user accessing it at a time, then performance that falls short of other 3TB hard drives on the compatibility list really will not matter that much.

Posted in NAS Hard Drives | Tagged 3tb hard drives, readynas ultra | Comments (0)

How Do I Share and Back Up Files in My Home?

One of the reasons we began this website was that so many people are asking “How Do I Share and Back Up Files in My Home?” and we wanted to help with that.

Since Amazon.com is one of our preferred vendors for home network storage anyway, we thought that we would pass along a link to a video that Amazon has especially for people like you wanting to share and backup files on their home computers.

Watch this Video at Amazon

People everywhere are accumulating digital photos, video, music (iTunes, MP3) and an ever accelerating rate. Maybe your songs can be downloaded again if you lose them from the service you bought them from – if they are all paid for, but precious photos and video of children, grand-children, etc, are lost every day due to lack of a good backup when a single hard drive fails.

Similarly, as people become increasingly alarmed at the risks of sharing photos on Facebook and other sites, users are wanting ways to directly share photos with family and friends without using a third party website.

Here is the link again for the video.

Posted in Home Network Storage | Comments (1)

Can You Use Online Storage Instead Of Network Attached Storage?

Online Storage Customer Loses All His Data

The difference between Online Storage and Online Backup is that storage items no longer exist on your computer system, they have been “archived” to the online storage provider and then deleted from the local system, usually to save space.

You are then trusting a company you may have had a relationship with for a while, but chances are you really don’t know much about them and personally know no one there.

It’s tempting to save money by archiving data to an online storage provider (note: few online backup services offer to store files no longer on the computer being backed up!) instead of buying a quality network attached storage device, or NAS, of adequate capacity to store them yourselves in addition to backing them up online.

That is, it’s is tempting UNTIL, you read a horror story like this one I just found as a comment at an online backup review site (emphasis mine):

I had a pre-paid, unlimited account with for several years that I renewed annually. In 2011 the company sent me a note stating that I was using too much space and that they were cutting off my access to the service. Many emails from me to various employees went unanswered. I lost all of my backup data, including some data that I had no other copy of.

In addition, I’m out the balance of my prepaid subscription.

The only thing worse than having no backup of your data is to pay a company to keep your backup data and have them not do so. I would not recommend that you trust this company with your data or your money.

Now, this particular user suggests not trusting this particular company. Yet, how do you know until something like this happens? I’ve taken a look at this company before and they look as trustworthy as the next online backup vendor.

What you need to ask yourself are these three questions:

Who values your data as much as you do?
Who suffers if your data is lost? (Just you!)
What will you do if you lose it? (If it’s no big deal then why pay someone to store it?)

We are all for online backup, don’t get us wrong. We just happen to believe that any data important enough to pay someone else to store better also reside somewhere you have control of a copy.

Start now by checking out our NAS Reviews.

Posted in Network Attached Storage | Comments (0)

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