Three days ago I didn't even know was a NAS was - now I have a D-Link one ready for a couple of HDD's .....

So, what I'm hoping to do is use one NAS HDD to hold all our movies, TV shows and music to be available to play from my new HTPC I'm just finishing building, our PC in the bedroom and my daughters laptop. I have CAT5 in the house already.

The second NAS HDD I want to use for an automatic back-up of all our music and photo's/home video's from the HDD in my bedroom PC.

Is there anything I need to set up especially, or do I just treat them like two new HDD's in my network bedroom PC? So I just use a back-up program to regularly back-up my music and photo's folders from my main PC to the NAS? And use the network to access the movies/TV Shows and Music from any PC in the house as if the HDD was in that machine?

I've heard talk of UPnP which I have no idea what it is - do I need this?

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing

UPnP is connected to DLNA- it's to do with streaming media. It's only relevant if you want to stream to a television. Not a problem if you're just using a laptop of computer to play the file over the network.

I've got a Iomega 1Tb cloud edition media drive as a NAS over our home network. Works nicely if you store the file on the network and play using a computer, trying to get it to stream via UPnP works well if it's a MPEG2 file but not if it's MP4, AVI, DivX etc etc. IE quite limited. I end up using Serviio on a laptop to stream via UPnP to our sony TV.

Just dont rely on it totally, back ups of back up etc. I put all my music / films etc onto my NAS, Harddrive died on it before the computer ones did.. Lost everything

I have a bufallo NAS with 2 drives which are a mirror of each other so if one dies the other copy is good ( swap the bad disk and repair).

It hold all music, files Vidio and Photos and just map to PC, Mac, Unix I also copy this perodically to a USB HDD drive that stops in the car. I dont back PC's up just rebuild them when they die ( relies on you keeping software serial numbers safe which i keep in my hotmail account)

ATB agriv8

What's a NAS?

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Originally posted by Daddylonglegs
What's a NAS?

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Funny , but I was just discussing this with a colleague today. He has a mirrored NAS setup in the garage which gives a certain level of resilience and then FTPs critical files to a duplicate set up at his brother's. His brother's set up FTPs the other way. Simples!

Really must get a 2 bay one myself...

If you're doing this make sure the hard disks you get are designed for the job. Most hard disks are not designed to run 24x7 and fail a lot sooner than people expect.

Cheers chaps. Got it all working last night and it's a beautiful thang!!

The NAS only has one HDD in at the moment - but I'll be getting a second one to do a double backup very soon. Then I'll be back to ask how to make it do a mirror of the first!!

MikeR makes a very good point. Whilst all hard-drives may be similar, they aren't.

I have a 4-bay Netgear with 6T of storage in it, and it used to eat disks until I checked the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) that came with the manufacturer. It boils down to things like which drives have auto-spin down and how this can conflict or not with how the NAS wants to do it, etc.

So, if you buy disks on the HCL you stand a much greater chance of having them survive than just slapping any old tat in.

Each drive should also allow you to partition your storage (so it presents multiple virtual disks to the network) to avoid buying more than one.

You should also familiarise yourself with the management console that comes with the NAS (or get it to email you if it can) when it starts to generate errors on the disk. Disks have a capacity to tolerate a certain number of faults, but if you see a steady increase of certain types of faults then it's time to swap a disk.

Be sure (as suggested up in the thread) that you sort out mirroring between disks even though it halves capacity) - you utterly should.

I have found configuring at least part of the drive as an FTP server for backup/archive rather than as a Windows or Samba share is the best way to go. I have found NAS drives more reliable than most USB drives. It should never of course be used as the only backup.


For anbody wanting to try a NAS if you have an old unused PC available then it worth trying FreeNAS it is very easy to setup.

http://www.freenas.org/

Thanks guys, lots more useful info - though setting up an FTP thingy may be more than my knowledges allows!

I'll have a look at the HCL and get the right one ordered.

Just to add my bufallo has been running 24/7 for a year and a half. My Securitc cameras record to it whebn the detect movement !!!

I would love to have a cloud ftp copy of my photos but as have a large number of Large files (digital SLR) this has caused problems with existing vendors when I checked a year ago I will have to have another trawl before I leave for my Summer holidays this year.


ATB agriv8