(melancholy music)
(door opening)
Hey, I found your hard drive and fish photos on it.
(melancholy music gets louder)
♪Every minute with you I stumble ♪
♪Baby that's why you're still here ♪
(hard drive hits the floor)
♪That makes me love you even more ♪
♪ Even more ♪
Thanks to Bellroy for sponsoring this video.
Check this thing out. It looks pretty cool, right?
Well, it's allowed me to replace
all of these random hard drives
and store all of my data in one single place.
I can also use it to backup my Macbook over wifi,
safely access my data from anywhere on the planet
and drag and drop files between all the computers
on my wifi network.
Regardless of if it's a Mac or PC,
I've also saved a small fortune because I no longer have to
pay for expensive Google drive or Dropbox plans.
Now, going back to that cheap little external hard drive,
you know, the one my cat currently uses,
it probably contains all of your important information and
probably the last 10 years of memories
in the form of photos and videos.
Sounds convenient, right?
Well, the bad news is every drive will fail at some point,
or you could lose it or break it,
which means you can lose everything
if you're not properly prepared.
Plus if you ever need more storage space,
you're probably going to end up with a collection of random
drives spread across your entire house.
Now, if you're using cloud storage like Google drive,
that can get expensive real quick and not to mention the
security and privacy risks of having your photos and files
stored with companies known for selling your personal data.
(shutter sound effects)
Now, if you're someone who takes a lot of
photos or videos on vacation
or likes to download and store your own movies,
or even just has a lot of devices that you need to back up
a proper storage solution is essential.
And in this video, I'm going to be exploring
how a NAS or Network Attached Storage device
will streamline and improve your life as well
as protect your important data.
So, first of all, what is a NAS and why is it important?
Well, skipping all of the technical jargon,
a NAS is essentially an enclosure with a couple of hard
drives inside it, that you can then connect to your computer
via an ethernet cable or via your wifi network.
Yes, this does mean you can back up
your desktop or laptop wirelessly,
and you can also transfer and drag and drop files
easily between computers.
No matter if it's a MAC OS or a Windows computer.
Now there are two main advantages to having a NAS.
Firstly, if a drive does fail,
there is redundancy and protection
built into the NAS system.
So you won't actually lose any data,
but this is something I'll talk about a little bit later on.
Secondly, it allows you to scale your storage amount,
depending on your needs.
For example, if you only need two terabytes
of storage, you can do that.
Or if you're like me,
you can go for a 96 terabyte NAS
that will hold tons of video footage.
But this is just one example
out of many different configurations.
Now, before we get into my personal NAS setup,
that allows me to edit 4K footage in real time,
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Now, in this video, I wanted to mainly talk
about my particular NAS setup and
how you can make your own relatively
inexpensive version of your own NAS.
Now I have here a Synology DS 1621+.
This is a NAS enclosure.
As you can see, can take up to six hard drives
and guys, full disclosure:
I did receive this from Synology for free.
I reached out to them last year to see if
they could send me this model.
However, this video is in no way
sponsored or influenced by Synology.
All the opinions are entirely my own.
Now, the reason I went for a machine
like this is I wanted a really fast NAS
to be able to actually edit 4K footage
off in real time.
I also wanted protection against drives failing.
So I set up a RAID
which stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
It boils down to: if one of the disks in this machine fails
or stops working, I won't lose any data.
I can simply remove that disc, replace it with a new one.
And the NAS software will rebuild the RAID array
and I can continue on using it.
This also extends to increasing the
storage capacity of this NAS.
If I want to add additional drives
right now I have four,
I've got an option to add another two drives
to increase my storage capacity.
Now you don't have to go for a 6 bay version.
You can go for a 2, 4, 6, 8, even up to 12,
some are even bigger than that, as well.
You don't have to go for Synology either.
There are other NAS providers and manufacturers out there,
but this 6 bay NAS was sort of
a good middle ground for my needs.
Now, what I really liked about Synology
what made me actually reach out to them personally
in the first place was their user-friendly interface
called Disc Station Manager or DSM.
And that allows even the most newbish users
to set up and configure their own NAS easily.
Now, if you're interested in a really
in-depth video on this particular NAS
how I set it up, how I upgraded it
to actually be able to edit 4K footage in real time,
do let me know down in the comments section below.
So how can you make your own NAS
and how expensive can it be?
Well, first of all, you need to consider some costs.
What happens if you lose all of your data
and how upset are you going to be, if that happens?
Also consider how much you're willing to spend on cloud
services like Google drive or Dropbox over the next 5 to
10 years to store all of your data.
Both Google drive and Dropbox are around
$10 a month or $120 a year.
And getting a NAS actually might end up
being much cheaper than what you thought.
Coming in as an entry-level option,
you have, for example, the DS218play
which is a 2 disc enclosure.
That's going to cost you around 250 US dollars.
And in terms of storage,
you can pick up two 4 terabyte Seagate IronWolf
hard drives for around $95 each,
but don't forget, you can go all the way up
to an 18 terabyte capacity drive if you need.
Now, this is a total of $440 for
4 terabytes of redundant storage.
So if a drive fails, you don't lose data.
And 4 terabytes is double what you get
from Dropbox or Google drive,
and you'll save enough money
by not using those services to
pay for your NAS within two or three years.
And yes, you can still access the data
on this NAS from anywhere in the world,
using Synology's software or the other software from other
providers, if you go with a non-Synology device.
Now, if your budget is relatively limited,
but you can afford another couple of hundred bucks,
you can get the latest and greatest DS420+,
4 bay NAS enclosure for about $500.
And this just gives you more room
to add storage in the future.
Now, these entry level setups,
aren't quite as fast as my custom one here,
but you'll be able to do pretty much everything
except 4K editing on it.
And if you are the type of person that maybe edits a bit of
1080P footage, depending on the footage,
you'll probably actually be fine
with an entry-level NAS for that.
So let's move on how you can connect your NAS
to your network or your computer directly.
So firstly, you can do it via wifi.
You just need to connect an ethernet cable into the back of
your NAS and then connect the other end
into the back of your wifi router.
Depending on your network, speeds will vary,
but I found it very useful for transferring small to medium
sized files between my MacBook and my NAS or other
computers on the network.
Now you might ask why I don't use airdrop and yes,
while airdrop is a very similar process,
it's just a lot easier to be able to drag and drop files and
folders from, for example, the desktop on my MacBook,
into my NAS and just use the existing file and folder
structure I've set up on my NAS.
Now, if your computer does have an ethernet port,
for example, you have an iMac or a Mac mini
or a windows desktop.
If you actually connect your computer directly to your
network or your modem,
you can actually get much higher speeds.
This is because the NAS essentially uses the same network
cable to transmit data to and from your computer.
Now, the second way is via the direct attach method.
And as long as your NASA setup is fast enough,
you can get some pretty crazy
read and write speeds from your NAS.
I installed a 10 gigabit ethernet network card in my NAS.
And with the addition of a relatively
inexpensive adapter for my MacBook,
I can have my up to 96 terabytes of storage
attached to my computer with a read and write speed
of almost 1000 megabytes per second.
That is faster than most external SSDs.
At the moment I get between 300 to 400 megabytes per second,
but that's because I don't need
any faster than that currently.
This is great for moving large amounts of files or editing
4K, 6K and even 8K footage from my NAS in real time.
Now conveniently, the M1 Mac mini
can be upgraded to a 10 gigabit ethernet port on the back.
And this is going to allow you to connect your NAS directly
to the Mac and get those super fast speeds.
But bear in mind, this upgrade does cost extra.
It's around a hundred US dollars at the time of this video.
Now, something I wanted to mention quickly
is a saying some of you guys may have heard before.
And that saying is three is one, two is none.
And this relates to backing up your data.
So ideally it means you should have
three different types of redundancy for your data.
So for example, this right here is two.
So I have everything inside the NAS.
If one of those hard drives do end up failing.
That's where the second level of
redundancy kicks in because
I have a RAID array that spreads
the data across all of the hard drives.
So if I do lose a hard drive,
my data is still intact.
And then the third level of that is
having one of these off-site.
So maybe having one of these in
my parent's house or backing it up online,
such as a cloud based backup like
Synology C2 or Backblaze B2.
Now these are similar to Google drive and Dropbox,
but they're much, much cheaper
because they're aimed at simply backing up
the data from this machine.
It doesn't mean you can necessarily go on and
access it like you can on Google drive.
It's only there for a worst case scenario in case this thing
goes up in the flames or something like that.
So that is my NAS setup.
Again, if you guys want me to go into
a lot greater detail on my
specific customized NAS here do let me know,
but I hope I've really conveyed to you guys
just how useful one of these machines is.
Especially if you're like me
and maybe you do a lot of editing
and you have all this footage,
all of these files you need to collate
and combine together a NAS just makes it super, super easy.
And now after having a NAS for six months,
I really don't see how I could ever
go back to my old ways
of having 10 different hard drives
scattered across the house.
(upbeat music)