DAS/NAS for primary storage (UPDATED, please take a look)

<p>Hello, I would like some advice on choosing a solution for primary storage and access of my photos. I work on a Windows 7 64 bits PC, use Lightroom3, and have my LR catalog on one of two internal harddrives. For now, all of my photos are on several external 1TB hard drives with USB2 connection. I have 3 copies of all files for backup and protection. I find the amount of seperate hard drives running continuously starting to get a bit complicated, so I would like to have a DAS/NAS for primary storage and fast access, and keep the other hard drives as secondary/tertiary storage. I was looking into Qnap and Synology, and thought that eSata might be the connection of preference ? I had a Synology DS1511+ in my mind, but am not sure that this would be the right choice for me. I would very much appreciate some feedback on my thoughts, because I consider myself not too knowledgeable on the IT side of things. Best regards, and many thanks in advance, Karin.</p>

<p><b>ADMIN EDIT:</b> I had to fix this post as something happened that only allowed the first sentence to appear when Karin made it. I hope everyone will take another look and respond based on her full question. -Josh</p>

<p>For primary storage and access, I'd prefer something attached directly via a sufficiently fast interface (eSATA, firewire, USB3.0, for example).<br>

A NAS can work well too, if you have gigabit network, a gigabit NAS, else I think you will notice that the network slows you down. Also, a NAS is typically more expensive and makes more sense if you need multiple PCs to access the data stored on it. If you have one PC/Mac on which you work on your photos, DAS can be cheaper and faster.</p>

<p>agreed. I have/use a NAS (QNAP) but I have to share the data between 2 Macs and a PC and it functions as my iTunes library etc etc.</p>

<p>A direct attach disk w/ fast interface is all you really need unless you have more complex requirements than a single PC/Mac (although you could always *share* that DAS)</p>

<p>For <em>primary</em> storage, I would want DAS, but I would also want SATA. Firewire would be my 2nd choice if necessary. USB and/or NAS (gigabit only) would be my last choice. There will be more overhead, transmission protocol wise, with either USB or gigabit. </p>

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<p>... all of my photos are on several external 1TB hard drives with USB2 connection. ... I would like to have a DAS/NAS for primary storage and fast access, and keep the other hard drives as secondary/tertiary storage</p>

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<p>Keep it simple and you'll be happier all the way around. Use a single 3TB internal SATA drive for primary storage. Get an eSATA disk dock and use bare drives for backups and archives. Set up a nightly schedule and let Windows do the rest. </p>

<p>Buy a spare 3TB bare drive or two. When you're so inclined for archiving, do a generic disk dump from the internal drive out to media in the external dock. Remove the external copy when done and keep it somewhere else for extra safety.</p>

<p>A problem with the low end NAS boxes is that they're usually way under powered. Many can sustain only a small fraction of the available bandwidth on a gigabit LAN (and even that's not all that fast these days.)</p>

<p>Much what Robert said: keep the primary storage simple; if external: eSata is the preferred connection. Find a box that can hold 2 drives, which let's you treat it as 2 seperate drives. Get 2TB drives (3TB is much more expensive - but if money is no objection, the larger ones). Use one drive as the primary storage in Windows, and let Windows sync it with the second one (which is then your first backup) - a tool like <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=15155">SyncToy </a>and the Task Scheduler can make that light work.<br>

A second advantage, in my view, in taking DAS over NAS is the filesystem. With a directly attached drive, you can format the hard disk in NTFS; if anything happens, you can extract the drive and try it on any other Windows (or Mac, Linux) system and retrieve your files. With a NAS, you typically get another filesystem which may not be readable without the NAS box itself. So, the advice stays a directly attached box indeed, and avoiding RAID configurations which you may not be able to access if the box breaks down.</p>

<p>For the secondary/tertiary backup, getting a NAS box might still be a good idea, since you can place that physically somewhere else, reducing risk a bit further. The Synology unit looks a bit overkill, to be honest. Something much simpler will probably already do the trick. From all I heard, Synology is good stuff, though.</p>

<p>Another fair word of warning: hard disk prices are not nice at the moment.</p>

<p>I currently have a ds411J, and I am getting a new two disk version in the next week or so, the 712+. The benefits of the synology are that you can raid the disks, I have two 2TB hard drives set up to mirror each other. My network is a wired GB. I think that for editing photos, it might be a little bit slow, but for storage, it is a great product. Being able to access all of your photos on one network drive would certainly be a benefit.<br>

The nice thing witht he 1511+ is that you can expand it very easily with the expansion moduals to 45TB, which if you set up in RAID and still have over 20TB of storage.<br>

You can even set it up so you can easily access your photos remotely.</p>

<p>Thank you all for your much appreciated advice; I am still thinking things over, taking into account all of your input. Best regards, Karin.</p>