NAS vs. Router Hard Drive

[Grizzly Adams]

After a stressful experience with an external hard drive that is ongoing and may result in the loss of about 4 years worth of photography, I've been looking into alternative storage options. I currently have a Linksys router that has a USB port and can accept an external hard drive, but it's always something of a pain to access, and slow to transfer. That's actually the chief reason I'm in this pickle -- the annoyance of accessing my 8TB HDD through the router causes me to delay doing it, sometimes for years, and the images sit on my PC or my smaller portable external HDD (the one that's failing now).

I'm considering a NAS setup with at least 12TB of storage, but I'm getting less technically-savvy as I age. (Were it 40 years ago, I suspect I'd have trouble setting up my VCR to record something.) I don't know the pros, cons, or even functional differences between "NAS" and just attaching an external HDD to my router. Is NAS preferable to a router-attached HDD? Are there circumstances where the router option might be preferable? How difficult would it be for an amateur to set up an NAS system?

My ideal system consists of two storage devices, one at each end of my house. Both are accessible by wi-fi. They are not required to be super-secure, as they are not intended to be accessed from off my own network. My priorities are: ease of access, speed, and reliability in that order. (Reliability is placed low on the list because it's more likely to be a manufacturer quality than a system setup choice, and the fact that I want two devices for redundancy lessens the importance of this factor.)

Any insights would be appreciated.

 

[Cosmo]

• NAS = device that connects to your router and operates the hard drive.
• Some routers have a NAS subsystem built in so you can connect the drive to it.

Either way, you're at the mercy of the mechanical reliability of the hard drive you're using. Neither a "NAS" nor a router can improve that.

However, many "NAS" systems have multiple ports and allow two or more drives, cloning the contents of one onto the other. It costs twice as much (you need two drives instead of one), but you get to basically completely avoid the risk of mechanical failure since all the info is cloned from one drive to the other in the mirrored RAID. If one drive fails, you just replace it. Both drives have to fail at once for you to lose your data, which is basically impossible.

You're still vulnerable to ransomware attacks and natural disasters since your drives are in the same place. For that you have to use a backup system, which is often subscription-based (but quite cheap). Many NAS systems come with such systems built in, so you just have to enable them and pay for them, and you're basically totally safe.

If you're talking photos, it's probably very little in terms of filesize, and you might get away with a free Google Drive account. Just back it up to that every month.

 

[phoenix2020]

After a stressful experience with an external hard drive that is ongoing and may result in the loss of about 4 years worth of photography, I've been looking into alternative storage options. I currently have a Linksys router that has a USB port and can accept an external hard drive, but it's always something of a pain to access, and slow to transfer. That's actually the chief reason I'm in this pickle -- the annoyance of accessing my 8TB HDD through the router causes me to delay doing it, sometimes for years, and the images sit on my PC or my smaller portable external HDD (the one that's failing now).

I'm considering a NAS setup with at least 12TB of storage, but I'm getting less technically-savvy as I age. (Were it 40 years ago, I suspect I'd have trouble setting up my VCR to record something.) I don't know the pros, cons, or even functional differences between "NAS" and just attaching an external HDD to my router. Is NAS preferable to a router-attached HDD? Are there circumstances where the router option might be preferable? How difficult would it be for an amateur to set up an NAS system?

My ideal system consists of two storage devices, one at each end of my house. Both are accessible by wi-fi. They are not required to be super-secure, as they are not intended to be accessed from off my own network. My priorities are: ease of access, speed, and reliability in that order. (Reliability is placed low on the list because it's more likely to be a manufacturer quality than a system setup choice, and the fact that I want two devices for redundancy lessens the importance of this factor.)

Any insights would be appreciated.

You are correct to want something better than a USB hard drive hung off the router - those ports are almost always throwaway with abysmal transfer speeds.

A decent NAS device can address the issues you’re seeing but there is some cost and complexity you need to be aware of. Since file transfer is something you want to be reliable, you really want the NAS to connect to the router via gigabit Ethernet as a minimum. If it’s connected via WiFi, you’re likely to experience a different but similarly frustrating kind of inconsistent performance.

I’ve always had a multi-tier storage strategy at home that for the last decade has included a NAS in flavors that vary from home-rolled to purchased. In recent years with time being a bit more scarce I’ve become very fond of Synology devices, currently owning two different 8-bay units (one at home here, one at a home out-of-state for more remote and protected mirroring) and they’re utterly reliable. They do cost, however. And as they are increasingly pivoting to their own branded drives, I don’t know if I’ll stick with them when I make the next transition.

NAScompares (website and YouTube channel) tends to have the best NAS reviews from entry level 1-2 drive units up to the large behemoths.

 

[RedAkston]

If you have the room in your case, I'd suggest adding an SSD. They're relatively inexpensive and they're far less likely to fail as compared to an HDD (assuming your external drive is an older HDD drive). You can also set up an SSD as an external drive, I just prefer it be enclosed in my case as it's far less likely to get damaged.

As others have noted, backing up the photos online is a great option as well. Google drive space is cheap if you have more storage than will fit in the free space they provide. Microsoft also has One Drive, which has relatively inexpensive pricing as well. The upside of online storage is that you can access the photos on multiple devices from anywhere.

 

[Slartibartfast]

Unleash Your Hardware

Unraid is an operating system that brings enterprise-class features for personal and small business applications. Configure your computer systems to maximize performance and capacity using any combination of OS, storage devices, and hardware.

unraid.net

(easier to use, has a licensing cost)

or

FreeNAS Is Now TrueNAS Community Edition | Open Source NAS

FreeNAS has evolved into the TrueNAS Community Edition—our unified, open source NAS platform combining CORE and SCALE.

www.truenas.com

(better technical foundation, no licensing cost)

These are great solutions if you have an old computer lying around, but either one will require a bit of setup.

Unraid's setup is pretty minimal though by my own experience. I have never tried FreeNAS but it has a great reputation. I tend to stick with unraid because you can basically stick any old drive in it and have it work while FreeNAS needs matched drives due to it supporting a more traditional drive bank setup. In both cases you can set up local network services or even VMs if you want to do that.

One thing you can look into is a program called syncthing, which can automatically sync directories over a network. This program has versions that works on anything from a Windows PC to a NAS OS (like above) to a Synology NAS. That can solve the replication question. It can even be configured with strong encryption and sync over the internet. I strongly suggest using onling backup though.

 

[Loulit01]

Pardon this old man's ignorance, but don't people just back things up to the cloud now?

 

[phoenix2020]

Pardon this old man's ignorance, but don't people just back things up to the cloud now?

I suppose everybody has a different level of risk aversion.

Cloud is reasonable but it’s important to understand the T&Cs, specifically (a) what happens when your payment lapses and (b) if there is a failure, what does recovery look like? For me, cloud backup is not a primary or secondary backup but actually a tertiary backup because a lapsed payment — even due to something innocuous like a credit card date expiring — can leave your bits in limbo. I run cloud backup with Backblaze and have been doing so for close to a decade at this point; the prices are reasonable, they have options to both upload/download via wire or shipped drives, and capacity is not an issue.

My primary backup is a NAS unit on site, a Synology DS1823xs+. Secondary backup is a Synology DS1821+ at our home in the Midwest that I bought for my sister & parents to backup/store their stuff but use as a replication site over VPN. Tertiary backup is Backblaze cloud off the Synology that’s in our home here. It’s massive overkill. But I’m a nut who has successfully backed up nearly everything I’ve had going back to 5.25 and 3.5” floppy discs holding code I wrote when I was a kid.

I do think that if your main device is something like an iPhone or iPad, it’s just easier to use the manufacturer’s cloud backup service aka iCloud. This has been super easy and transparent for family members.

 

[Loulit01]

I suppose everybody has a different level of risk aversion.

Cloud is reasonable but it’s important to understand the T&Cs, specifically (a) what happens when your payment lapses and (b) if there is a failure, what does recovery look like? For me, cloud backup is not a primary or secondary backup but actually a tertiary backup because a lapsed payment — even due to something innocuous like a credit card date expiring — can leave your bits in limbo. I run cloud backup with Backblaze and have been doing so for close to a decade at this point; the prices are reasonable, they have options to both upload/download via wire or shipped drives, and capacity is not an issue.

My primary backup is a NAS unit on site, a Synology DS1823xs+. Secondary backup is a Synology DS1821+ at our home in the Midwest that I bought for my sister & parents to backup/store their stuff but use as a replication site over VPN. Tertiary backup is Backblaze cloud off the Synology that’s in our home here. It’s massive overkill. But I’m a nut who has successfully backed up nearly everything I’ve had going back to 5.25 and 3.5” floppy discs holding code I wrote when I was a kid.

I do think that if your main device is something like an iPhone or iPad, it’s just easier to use the manufacturer’s cloud backup service aka iCloud. This has been super easy and transparent for family members.

Thank you for taking the time to inform me.

 

[WorldWatcher]

However, many "NAS" systems have multiple ports and allow two or more drives, cloning the contents of one onto the other. It costs twice as much (you need two drives instead of one), but you get to basically completely avoid the risk of mechanical failure since all the info is cloned from one drive to the other in the mirrored RAID. If one drive fails, you just replace it. Both drives have to fail at once for you to lose your data, which is basically impossible.

This, a NAS with mirroring/backup is the way to go. A drive failure does not mean the loss of important data.

WW

 

[Infinite Chaos]

Pardon this old man's ignorance, but don't people just back things up to the cloud now?

Personally, I am not interested in or need NAS for usual scenarios and I would rather pay a subscription to a massive company like Google or Microsoft for online cloud storage but friends of mine have built different use-cases for NAS including storing all their music and then having that accessible (via the design of their personal system) so you can have the music piped around your home as you walk through the house.
There's nothing worse than watching a movie and then having the dreaded whirring wheel showing that your online provider's movie is buffering just at the most dramatic or exciting scene so for me - that kind of scenario or even having my music on a NAS within the home to have instant playback anywhere would tempt me but for photos and text documents, I just use online services.

 

[Slartibartfast]

Personally, I am not interested in or need NAS for usual scenarios and I would rather pay a subscription to a massive company like Google or Microsoft for online cloud storage but friends of mine have built different use-cases for NAS including storing all their music and then having that accessible (via the design of their personal system) so you can have the music piped around your home as you walk through the house.
There's nothing worse than watching a movie and then having the dreaded whirring wheel showing that your online provider's movie is buffering just at the most dramatic or exciting scene so for me - that kind of scenario or even having my music on a NAS within the home to have instant playback anywhere would tempt me but for photos and text documents, I just use online services.

There are a few personal media systems, such as plex, emby, jellyfin, etc.

Here is a whole slew of them that work with a lot of NAS operation systems: https://www.linuxserver.io/

 

[Infinite Chaos]

There are a few personal media systems, such as plex, emby, jellyfin, etc.

Here is a whole slew of them that work with a lot of NAS operation systems: https://www.linuxserver.io/

Fabulous thanks!
Part of me would prefer to keep listening to my analogue Jazz and Blues copies but they won't last forever and I guess transcribing to digital will help them last.

 

[Slartibartfast]

Fabulous thanks!
Part of me would prefer to keep listening to my analogue Jazz and Blues copies but they won't last forever and I guess transcribing to digital will help them last.

There is a whole ecosystem of stuff you can do. I don't know how much you know about computers, but you may want to look up a technology called "docker" if you aren't familiar with it. Its like running an OS on top of your OS and that secondary OS is responsible for doing a single thing well, but its built in a certain way that it can easily be administered and doesn't require a lot of setup, once you are used to the technology.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

If you're talking photos, it's probably very little in terms of filesize, and you might get away with a free Google Drive account. Just back it up to that every month.

We just got back from a 12-day vacation. Not counting the stuff from Vancouver that I haven't taken off the card yet, I have ~200GB of images. Just from that trip.

 

[Slartibartfast]

We just got back from a 12-day vacation. Not counting the stuff from Vancouver that I haven't taken off the card yet, I have ~200GB of images. Just from that trip.

Good on you. I am all engineer all the time and have almost zero artistic impulse. In this way, your horizons are bigger than mine.

 

[eohrnberger]

You're never going to get computer components that never to fail.

So HW mirroring is the only safe way, one device of a pair can fail, be replaced and the mirror reestablished, all without the loss of a single byte.

Further, multiple of these mirrors can be added together in a storage pool to present a single large disk storage place as a network mountable shared connection, via Windows sharing or UNIX NFS.

I've priced out such SSD based storage, still pricy, 4 TB drives in paired should be just right.

 

[Infinite Chaos]

There is a whole ecosystem of stuff you can do. I don't know how much you know about computers, but you may want to look up a technology called "docker" if you aren't familiar with it. Its like running an OS on top of your OS and that secondary OS is responsible for doing a single thing well, but its built in a certain way that it can easily be administered and doesn't require a lot of setup, once you are used to the technology.

Never heard of docker but thanks - I'm no coder but I can usually work things out when needed.

 

[Cosmo]

We just got back from a 12-day vacation. Not counting the stuff from Vancouver that I haven't taken off the card yet, I have ~200GB of images. Just from that trip.

There's always terabox. 1TB is free. Can't vouch that it will be that way for good: they can always email you one day and say your account is being closed unless you upgrade, but it's worth a try.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

I’ve always had a multi-tier storage strategy at home that for the last decade has included a NAS in flavors that vary from home-rolled to purchased. In recent years with time being a bit more scarce I’ve become very fond of Synology devices, currently owning two different 8-bay units (one at home here, one at a home out-of-state for more remote and protected mirroring) and they’re utterly reliable. They do cost, however. And as they are increasingly pivoting to their own branded drives, I don’t know if I’ll stick with them when I make the next transition.

I used their little picker app and they decided the DS223j is best for me. It seems like it checks my boxes, but I see mixed reviews, though it seems it's mostly people saying it doesn't meet their needs, making it a selection problem rather than a hardware one. Still, perhaps the DS224+ is a better choice.

If you have the room in your case, I'd suggest adding an SSD.

I'm definitely looking to replace my "failing" portable 4TB WD easystore with an SSD for temporary storage, especially considering it gets carried around with me on trips and is subjected to somewhat rougher use than my home drive. Considering this SanDisk 4TB SSD. Criticisms and/or alternate suggestions are welcome. It's not for nothing that I suspect my current HD woes may have been caused by this drive falling about 8 inches onto a hard surface while the disks were spinning. It turns out I have just a single corrupted .CR2 RAW file that was jamming everything else up, along with some other, less important .JPG versions of the same RAW files that may also be problematic. Seems a little unlikely a head crash would cause such limited damage to the files I need, but I'm considering that drive to be trash anyway at this point and need something to replace it with.

They're relatively inexpensive and they're far less likely to fail as compared to an HDD (assuming your external drive is an older HDD drive).

Both my WD externals are pre-pandemic. Not sure how much older they are.

As others have noted, backing up the photos online is a great option as well. Google drive space is cheap if you have more storage than will fit in the free space they provide. Microsoft also has One Drive, which has relatively inexpensive pricing as well. The upside of online storage is that you can access the photos on multiple devices from anywhere.

This is probably the easiest option, even though accessing my files remotely isn't a priority to me. The biggest downside I see to this option is the fact that it would take about two days of continuous transfer just to upload the images from this last trip at my upstream rate (10 Mbps), and roughly two months to transfer everything I've accumulated so far.

Thanks to all for the advice so far.

 

[phoenix2020]

We just got back from a 12-day vacation. Not counting the stuff from Vancouver that I haven't taken off the card yet, I have ~200GB of images. Just from that trip.

Yeah, that’s an issue these days especially with video. I’ve come back from trips with upwards of a terabyte of 4k pro res video, spatial/stereoscopic video, even 8k raw, and the storage costs absolutely explode.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

Yeah, that’s an issue these days especially with video. I’ve come back from trips with upwards of a terabyte of 4k pro res video, spatial/stereoscopic video, even 8k raw, and the storage costs absolutely explode.

Most of the "problem" comes from the fact that I never delete any of my images, and when I take a picture it's stored in RAW and JPG. To top it off, I have a Canon 5DS, which spits out monster files because of its 50MP sensor.

 

[phoenix2020]

Most of the "problem" comes from the fact that I never delete any of my images, and when I take a picture it's stored in RAW and JPG. To top it off, I have a Canon 5DS, which spits out monster files because of its 50MP sensor.

Nice camera! I can relate, I travel now with a R5Mk2 and always seem to return from short trips with hundreds of RAW+JPG shots and an hour or two of full-bitrate 8k footage virtually none of which ever use. I'm trying to get better about using return flights to review and curate shots before I get home.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

UPDATE!

After trying almost everything possible (I have an uncle who makes his living in forensic data recovery who I have not yet tapped), I've been able to salvage everything, in one form or another. I lost one RAW file out of 677 images. I lost about thirty JPGs, not overlapping with the missing RAW file. The RAWs are the important ones. I used Bridge to batch process the RAW files into new JPGs, and spent most of yesterday and today fumbling through attempts at transferring original JPGs from my portable HDD to my laptop, narrowing down the corrupted/damaged files, and omitting them from the next transfer attempt.

I'm still hunting for a new storage solution, and it now appears I should probably invest in a new router as well (I guess my 12-year-old Linksys WRT1200AC is no longer top-of-the-line -- who knew!?!?).

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions!