hey everybody its Lon Seidman and welcome to NAS 101 where we try to explain the
complexities involved with consumer network attached storage and I've got
some examples from seagate, WD and Synology of what these devices look
like now
I've been reviewing network attached storage devices for the last two years
and I've been getting tons and tons of questions about them as you might expect
so i'm going to do in this video as a very general overview because i do think
sometimes people are buying these devices not understanding what they are
and what they aren't and I want to talk about some of those things. i also want
to talk about how they differ from USB storage which i'm sure many of you are
familiar with so the first thing with USB storage is that it's a lot faster
because you are plugging in a high-speed USB connection to your computer
a USB 3 which is the little blue connector you'll see on the USB plug is
the standard now most modern computer support that most hard drive support
that and are typically three times faster or more than when you might get
over your network attached storage device but USB can only be connected to
one computer at a time and you can only share through the host computer so if
you did want to have more than one person i connect to the dr you can do it
through the computer that it's plugged into but if you ever you know turn off
that computer unplug the drive and nobody can get access to that
another issue with USB storage of course is that you really can't access it off
site so if you are away from home and your hard drive isn't with you your data
isn't with you either
and that's something that might be an issue for a lot of you if you're not
using dropbox or some other cloud providers so where does NAS come in?
NASA is network attached storage that's what the acronym is what NASA does is it
connects via ethernet to your router were to a network switch and allows
multiple computers to connect to your device at the same time if you look on
the back of our my cloud here we've got a little ethernet jack to plug it into
our network
so now if you want to use network attached storage you can also in many
cases because all these consumer devices support this connect off-site through
one of their cloud interfaces and these often involve using some kind of thing
running on the manufacturers server that allows you to connect to the drive
remotely so there are features in every consumer drive to do that and you can
most of the time i get access to your files at home when you're not at
home without having to use a cloud provider but as we said network attached
storage is slower than us be there is no direct USB connection to your computer
so this is a very important point to make because you'll see on the back here
there are USB ports but these are for connecting devices to the dr
I'm not for connecting the drive to your computer the only way to get access to
any of these devices is to plug in an ethernet cable into your router or
switch to get at those files they were just not simply not USB connection
devices so keep that in mind when you're out shopping
as a result of the fact that they're running on your network they can be more
complicated because these really are many servers are little computers
running in here
many of them are running with little tablet or mobile phone processors summer
actually now running with intel processors that are in desktop computers
as well
so these are really computers that are running on your network and they do
require some configuration when you get them all of them have a web interface is
that you log in with a web browser to begin to configure them and they're all
very different they all have the same concept but they all configured very
differently and i'll step through some of those things in the course of the
video as we get from moving forward here now one decision you have to make when
buying a network attached storage device is to buy a single drive device or a to
drive device and i really recommend going with a dual drive device because
what happens is on a single drive device you have a single drive so that drive
fails you lose your data just like you would with a standard USB Drive on a
dual drive device because these the these two hard drives these network
attached storage devices have some intelligence to them
you have two hard drives on board and you get redundancy so what happens is
one driver right to the other and vice versa so if a dr were to fail
all you need to do is just pop the top on the seat on the WD here all of them
have the ability to do this in different ways
Pop's a bad drive out and put in a new one and you are back up and running
without having to do any data restoration or anything like that
so having that ability to mirror things I is really going to give you a lot of
peace of mind while you're at it you know hopefully recovering from a hard
drive failure so you can lose one drive and not
any of your data you just put in a new drive it'll restore everything and been
basically keep everything mirrored as long as both drives are working which is
a really handy thing to have when you want to make sure your data is safe now
one thing to keep in mind when you buy a dual drive unit is that you're really
going to get only half the stated capacity in the marketing so for example
this drive here has to two terabyte drives although they're going to call
this a for Tara by unit and the reason why you're only getting half the storage
is that you're mirroring one to drive to the other so they're copying big data
back and forth which means that you're only getting access to two terabytes as
opposed to for you can make it run as a for terabyte drive but if you were to do
that if you lost one of the hard drives
you would lose all of your data so operating them in a mirror mode they
call it red 1i is really the safest way to go which is that you lose a half the
capacity so again in this example here the six terabyte drive has 23 a terabyte
drives in it and if you're marrying one drive to the other
you only get three terabytes of total storage so that is one important
distinction
especially when you're looking at marketing versus what you're actually
going to be able to use when the drive gets home and plugged into your network
now an important thing about all these drives that you have to have a user
account set up to access them and what a user account is a username and a
password and you set those accounts up and that will grant access to files on
the drive now some of these devices have public folders which I'll explain in a
minute but by and large you're going to want to have everyone broken out into
their own accounts of people can keep their files safe and separate and maybe
you don't want your kids to share or have access to each other's folders or
something like that so
usernames are very important for that but another concept you need to
understand our file shares and these are kind of like top level folder is almost
like hard drives within a hard drive that you set up and then you assign user
accounts to those file shares and each one of these drives does it a little bit
differently but really what happens is you create the user you create the file
sharing and determine which users can access which file shares and that's kind
of the concept involved with getting these things established you going to
look at the reviews i've done all these devices you'll see how each one
implement
it's that a user and a file share strategy
now another thing to talk about what you just mentioned a second ago is the
public folder
most of these devices have a folder that everybody can access and kind of put
files in and share back and forth on the WD drives it's kind of a mandatory thing
as well as on the sea gauge right they're always there you really can't
get rid of them on the technology drives it's a little bit different you can
decide whether or not you want to have one of those public folders it's
important to note though a public folder is public to anyone that's on your
network inside your home or anyone who has access to the drive remotely or
within your home as well so it's not going to be public to the world but it's
going to be public to the world of your home and also the world to anyone who's
coming in from outside to it so again within your network the public folder is
public to everyone and anyone who's got access to the drive coming in from
outside will also be able to see that public folder now it's interesting is
that these devices really operated differently when you're on site versus
off off site so let's look at some of the things you can do on site you can
connect your drive to a smart television of course you can connect them to
computers as well and computers will work through their native operating
system so if you're on a Mac or Windows computer you actually see these drives
show up as almost like on your network as a as another hard drive you can
connect to them you can do a file save as and save files directly onto the Don
to the drive through your network like it was a drive on your computer so it
has some really good flexible ways to work with it when it's on your local
network
you're smart television connect can connect to it through a protocol called
the LNA so if you're on your local network with a TV that supports the
drive you can just connect to it without having to do much configuration and
watch videos you might have stored on the drive or photos or audio files or
pictures but just note that the file format the video is saved and has to be
compatible with your television that's where things can get really complex so
if you really aren't sure where you having trouble getting videos to play
through your Smart TV
look at something like a wdtv which i reviewed on the channel which will
playback just about anything over DLNA it's a great compliment to some of these
devices
there are custom music players for phones and
tablets which will work through apps so you can download an app for your phone
and you can then access files on these devices through the app because unlike
mac and Windows Android and iOS the ipad and iphone don't connect to these drives
the same way they're operating systems do on regular computers so you have to
connect through an app to do that but there's also many internal mass apps
available to so within these drives you can actually install apps like you could
run a wordpress server to run a little website for your family through this
drives a lot of little things you can install on these and again if you go
back and look at my reviews that I've done all of these devices you'll be able
to see some examples of what some of those internal apps are one of the apps
that you might see available on these devices is an iTunes server and at first
blush you're thinking oh great i can connect my apple TV 2 one of these
things and play video all over the house i can get my iphone to connect to it via
itunes
no it only works with mac and windows itunes it's using an older sharing
protocol that itunes used to support and still kinda does but it doesn't work
with the Home Sharing which would allow you to connect to an apple TV or to an
iphone or ipad through one of their native apple apps so I just very keep
that in mind that if you're planning to buy this to use with an apple TV through
itunes
I is not going to work so it's only going to work with the mac and Windows
versions of itunes but one thing that does work really well is time machine
which is the mac back up facility and what's nice about that is that you're
able to just back up your Mac automatically over the network every
hour on the hour in fact i have one at work and one at home so whenever I have
my computer plug into the network every hour just backs up stuff to my
- drive in the basement here and then another dr i have at the office I always
have a good backup of my mac i just happening automatically in the
background and a lot of these drives also come with Windows software that
does pretty much the same thing I want to talk now a little bit about off site
access and how that differs on the important thing to keep in mind is that
off site access is very different than on site access and that the drive is not
going to work the same way remotely as it does when you're on the network so
the important thing to keep in mind here
is that things like the save as feature is not going to work over the internet
like it does when you're on your home network so every one of these devices
has their own strategy for kind of dealing with that I cover all those in
the reviews that I've done before so you can see how that works but bottom line
is it works one way on your network for sharing files with your computer and
another way when you're off site usually involves a desktop app that you have to
install to access the drive remotely so a lot of those on site features we
looked at like the iTunes server in the DLNA server simply won't work and a lot
of the apps depend on the manufacturers servers to be working correctly so what
happens is when you want to connect to one of these drives is that they are
kind of doing a little relayed to me in the case of the WD it's connecting the
WD servers
there's another connection to where you are and it's kind of reeling through WD
to get you into your data so if something happens to the WDC WDC side of
the network
you're not going to be able to gain access to it when that happens so
they've been getting a lot better about keeping those facilities running
correctly but there are times that you may not be able to connect your drive
because the manufacturers server might be down
another thing to keep in mind too is that not all routers play nicely with
all network attached storage devices they rely on a different types of
protocols that some rather support better better than others so if you have
an older router and Mail not always work reliably to connect to something like
good one of these nasty devices remotely so I keep that in mind now it's really
important to back these devices up and i know i just got done telling you to buy
the to drive unit
so you get that data redundancy but think about it if just devices in your
home or office and something happens to your home or office and it burns down
and you lose this you also lose all the data on it and because these things
store so much that can be a pretty destructive thing so it is very
important to back everything up and luckily all of these devices have some
really good backup utilities built in and you can set those up through that
web control panel and again if you go back through all the reviews you can see
how all these drives do and I'll do it a little bit differently but you can use
with all of them is an external USB drives you don't need anything fancy to
say regular external drive plug it into the USB port
I set up that utility in
it will start backing up for you the best part is you can also do it on a
schedule so you don't have to remember to do that back up so you could say
every night at 2am just back up from the internal drive on the NASA to the
external drive one thing also is that your external drive that you're using as
a backup doesn't need to be the same capacity as your network attached
storage device just needs to have enough space to accommodate everything you
currently have stored on here so if we have a four terabyte drive we only have
you know 500 gigs that we even put on it then we really only need maybe a
terabyte external drive to back up to
and another important thing to do is to take those USB external drives off site
on a regular basis so what I do is alternate between two or three different
drives right
I back up to one the next morning I take it with me to work I put it there then I
have another drive at the office that I brought there the day before I bring
that back home and then plug it back in for the next back up so having some
alternating strategies is a really good thing and taking those drives off site
so that if something were to happen at one place your data is safe and secure
at the other place and that is something really important to think about and one
thing these drives also let you do is back up to the cloud as well so most of
them support google drive dropbox amazon s3 and a few others
you can even if you want to get really tricky about it i'd buy another one and
connect the two of them over the Internet to back them up to each other
that's pretty complex depending on which one you choose because there are some
protocols you have to configure and maybe set up a VPN server on one or the
other so there is a little bit more involved with that but you can do it and
it's actually pretty handy i do that with this analogy drive these back it up
to my office over a VPN connection that I set up which is really nice so they
don't have to think about it and I get an off-site backup on to something that
i own and control which is pretty handy now I have the seagate 2wd and thus
analogy on my desk here for a reason and that is because i'm going to recommend
each of these for a different kind of users so if you're somebody that wants
something really simple
then i would take a look at the seagate and the reason is is that it takes away
the complexity of the file share configurations all you have to do on the
seagate is create a user that user gets a file share and you're done the problem
though is that you can't have a file share used by more
more than one user so if you wanted to share files between two different people
who have to go through the public folder and let's say you've got a family of
four or five and you only want two people your mom and dad want to share
some files but not the kids
you can't do it on this one unless they both login with the same account so if
you want to have that kind of flexibility
I then you may want to go for the WD which gives you a little bit more
configuration options without adding too much more complexity so you can set up
those file shares on it
how about the interface is relatively simple to use and it really does walk
you through it in a pretty intuitive way they've done a really nice job on the
interface with these I really introducing the concepts that we talked
about how would that really getting you all tricked up in techno jumbled and
everything else that you might encounter with it now if you are really tech savvy
user then you definitely want to check out the synology because this analogy
drive has a ton of configuration options very granular configuration options in
fact it is really a linux server as these all are but it really gives you
access to most of the linux kinds of configurations you might want to achieve
with it so if you really are looking for something that's more server like in
your to tech savvy person or you're not afraid of this kind of thing in this
analogy is a really good pic for that and they've got a ton of stuff and I've
done a bunch of videos on it already so you can check all those out so if you're
really techie something like this analogy would be a really good choice
for you there and they've got a ton of options
a huge number of products in their product line to choose from as well so
those are some things just to keep in mind for the recommendation standpoint I
think for most users the WD is probably going to be where you end up
but again if you really don't want complexity then definitely check out the
seagate so if you want to learn more about network attached storage you can
go to lon . TV / NASA for all of my network attached storage reviews that
done over the last two years this is hours of content
I do a lot of specific stuff especially the WD because i've had this one the
longest so you can kind of see a lot of different ways you can use it
I try to answer a lot of questions as they come in I've also covered each of
these products individually as well so if you're interested in one particular
product type you can go in and check out all of those who haven't done too much
with the seagate drive yet it's relatively new but as time goes on it
will do that
I
as you need different features get added and I get additional user questions so i
hope this you know kind of gives you some insight as to what network attached
storage is and isn't and i hope i was able to answer some questions for you
these are new things that I've been doing trying to do these simplified
explainers so if there's something I missed or something you'd like me to
cover in more detail
leave it in the comments below and i will certainly do a follow up in a
future 1 a 1 episode this is lan Simon and thank you for watching
yeah