If I buy a NAS drive, do I have to keep it plugged to router all the time?
Can it also be used like an external hard disk/USB disk while connecting to PC with a USB cable only?
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Its called NETWORK attached storage its designed to be plugged into the Network all the time.
Some may come with a USB port, (can be used concurrently) some dont. Sounds to me like you dont need a NAS, but a USB drive attached to a PC. You can make it shared over the network to other PCs.
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 13 Aug 13 at 09:13
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A NAS is a computer in it's own right running an operating system (often Linux based) which share content via numerous protocols like SMB, AFP, NFS, FTP etc. Often you can plug in USB storage to the ports to expand the storage on offer.
The idea behind a NAS is for it to be always on (or often on at least) and shared with your network devices.
Do you really want or need a NAS movilogo?
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>> Do you really want or need a NAS
That's what I'm trying to find out :-)
Probably I just need a larger external hard disk.
I was under the impression that NAS is best of both worlds - like having NAS as well as USB disk.
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I like NAS as you can use it to serve content to yourself when out and about. For instance I have some music and video on mine, also backups of "important" stuff I may need while travelling. Also it can be seen by my smart TV which is handy. None of that is hard to set up.
Also use it to back up all computers to, and for sharing stuff around the house (again, media, but also other files we may each wnt to dip into from our respective computers)
In terms of power usage, disks and NAS boxes will drop into a power saving mode after x inactivity. so the cost of keeping it on all the time isn't massive. it dos mean that the first access from power saving is a little slower.
It has USB ports but these are for adding USB drives for use on the network, or copying data to/from NAS rather than plugging it in standalone to your PC, so it isn't a portable solution.
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A NAS is a shared device like a network printer. Like Smokie we use ours as a back up and for shared files such as household accounts/correspondence and stuff about the cars. We used to have shared files on my PC but that's NBG if it's switched off or, after changing from a desktop, I've taken the thing out of the house.
It's possible to make the NAS accessible over the web, which might be useful to kids at Uni, but I've not yet set that up.
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I've also setup my NAS to be a VPN server so I can connect to my home network over the Internet. And I can wake up any PC/Mac via the NAS once connected and take control etc.
What I've not figured out (if it's even possible) is to get Sky+ planner access working via VPN. not helped because Sky uses broadcasts to find the Sky+HD box from the app.
I can see why if a 'box' could be connected to using USB3 (as opposed to USB2), getting data on and off could be quicker than Gigabit Ethernet. But that's fairly fast.
Remember a NAS with even two 3.5" SATA drives in it is going to be quite heavy so you're going to want to position it somewhere and leave it. And you will want it plugged into your network using Gigabit Ethernet. Some will offer dual Gigabit Ethernet to improve speed and/or resilience to failure of a network connection.
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"Some will offer dual Gigabit Ethernet to improve speed and/or resilience to failure of a network connection." Only pricey ones. Mine has dual network but it's for a guest network, no load balancing or fail-over. So I have a second Ethernet card in my local PC wired directly into that and on a different subnet to save the traffic going across the router/network (not that there is much other traffic). I still rarely get anything above 25% of Gigabit speed, measured in Windows, even when bulk copying - but nevertheless it's pretty quick. Could be (but not likely) because the drivers are only 5400 (much cheaper at the time!!)
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Drives in my NAS are only 'Green' 5400rpm ones two. 2 x 2TB (mirrored). But for streaming media and most things they are fine. The real bottleneck for higher speed would be the SPARC processor in the older Netgear ReadyNAS.
I got a good deal when buying though. Bought with one drive in it.. Scan provided another drive for free in the box. And a mail-in rebate type thing from Netgear provided yet another (identical) 2TB drive.This third 2TB drive used in a USB caddy to backup the NAS to periodically... it's only mirrored for starters and a filesystem level corruption (or accidental deletion) wouldn't be protected against.*
* But my Mac also backs up to a 'Time Machine' drive. Photos are sync'd to Dropbox. Music is protected/mirrored to Google Music.
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Can NAS drive be used like USB disk? - Zero
