External Storage Advice

[Jonnydobbo]

Hello everyone, I hope you can help me.

I have been thinking for some time about buying a new storage solution. I've tried several paths previously all pretty poor budget stuff, and have decided its time I got something that fulfills my needs properly.

Essentially, I'm looking for an external device, probably a 4 bay enclosure that I can run RAID 5 or 10 on to store my vast music collection (I'm a DJ and music producer). I want this drive to appear as another drive in windows explorer rather than as a network device. I'm planning on sticking 4 x 2TB drives in it giving 4-6TB of storage depending on which RAID config I go for. This would mean the device gives me redundancy in case of a failure or problem, but also be the source of data I use when working in my studio.

I had been thinking of connecting to my PC via USB 3.0 to give high speed access, I have my eye on the QNAP TS-419P II, will this work this way? Can I then also connect it to my network and take advantage of its features by being able to access it across the network from other devices and have it run my squeezebox for example?

I previously had an awful Netgear Stora and trying to access that across the network was painfully slow with the drives seemingly always having to spool up before doing anything. I want to avoid this hence thinking about USB 3.0.

Any advice and suggestions and explanations is greatly appreciated, I'm not a great techy, so be gentle please

Sincere thanks in advance.

 

[RealBeast]

That is a great little NAS but I don't recall that it has USB3, although it does have eSATA connectors and gigabit Ethernet. If you use good quality 7200rpm drives the access times will be very fast over your network if your other devices support gigabit speeds. It will do everything that you want and more.

I store BluRay images to a homebuilt NAS box and over my gigabit Ethernet I get around 100MB/s (a little over 800Mbps due to the network overhead), and I think that QNAP model in RAID 5 will hit reads in that range, with writes just a bit lower.

In any case, do not rely on an NAS as your only backup, as all devices can fail and you don't want to bet the farm on any single source.