A NAS story
Or, at least, the beginning of one :-)
As some of you know, I have a Drobo for my music files. Trouble is, RAID (multiple hard disks that keep multiple copies of your data) while giving you a greater degree of protection than a single disk enclosure, can still malfunction and lose all your data. So my plan for 2011 was to get another storage device on the network for belt and braces protection - I'm a rabid backer-up of data.
What I really wanted was the networked five-disk Drobo. But look at the price! And that's without disks.
The other issue is that any NAS drive I purchased had to live in our living room, because our router lives on top of a cupboard there. Therefore it had to be as near silent as possible. The Drobo I have can be a bit noisy - it's fine in the office - and I was a bit worried about noise from the networked Drobo.
I've been scratching my head on and off since Christmas, until I saw Chris Connaker's review of the Synology DS411slim on Computer Audiophile. The overwhelming message I got from the review is this thing is small and quiet - just what I needed. I ordered one and two 1TB drives from Amazon last week; the disks arrived on Friday and the NAS today.
Alongside the Drobo, set up is a bit hairy-chested, but was a lot simpler than it first appeared. Just RTFM and follow the instructions.
It is - as the man said - small and very quiet.
Now I'm working out how best to share one iTunes library between 3 or 4 Macs.
Comments
>:-)