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I recently got a Mac laptop for the first time, and now have 4 computers in the house (2 Mac laptops, 2 Windows desktops). The idea of the laptop is so that I can have more computer time because I can use it in the living room while others watch TV - otherwise I was being extra anti-social I guess which wasn't appreciated :)
The problem is that I have everything on my desktop still, and I want to do some work that requires me to use those [documents, photos, notes, a little video, etc]. I don't want to just copy everything to my laptop since then I'd the headache of multiple versions. I'd like to be able to work from either computer. One of those desktops is used as an HTPC as well, but all that media will continue to be stored locally on it.
I feel like a home NAS would solve the problem, though I'd be using it as my primary storage which is probably unlike a lot of people. I'd move everything there that's on my data drive, so then I could work from either computer using the same data.
So my question is would accessing data on the NAS be fast enough to not be a nuisance? And how much would this vary between different NAS options? I can stand a little bit more sluggish data access, but not really slow. For example, if I was going through photos in a directory using Windows picture viewer, I'm sure flipping thru photos would be a bit slower - that's probably one of the tougher things. I think Windows picture viewer actually preloads the next image.
Would there be other pitfalls to using a NAS as primary data storage? Would applications mostly be able to access things the same? Would saving new items to the NAS from various applications work ok?
I'll say that I do keep a backup, and I would continue to do so if everything was moved to the NAS (using an external HDD).
My network is currently on a Netgear WNDR4000 N750 router (has gigabit, wireless-N, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, 300Mbps + 450Mbps theoretical). I did try out the USB connection on the router with an external drive (ReadyShare) and it worked but was painfully slow. Looking around I see lots of complaints about that and it appears to be just something related to the router.
I have been liking the looks and pricing of the QNAP devices, maybe a 4-bay one. I know they have different options for processors, but I'm not sure if the fast ones would be worth it for my purposes. Does that mainly help out IOPS or actual throughput?
Thanks for any help!
It's really good to have your primary store of data in one place (your NAS), but if you run into something that's too slow, you could also keep a full copy of the relevant data on your notebook (if it will fit). You just need to setup something like rsync (should be available cross platform) to keep the two copies in sync with the latest changes. If you use rsync, then a NAS that allows you to run rsyncd, the backend part, would really come in handy. Some NAS hardware will run nas4free which will do that and more, but it's Linux, so there'd be a bit of a learning curve. – Joe – 2015-07-20T23:03:32.637
@Joe Your idea with rsync seems like it would add more complexity. What if rsync hasn’t run yet? What if there are more than 2 copies (since I plan on using 2 computers with the NAS)? What if the relevant data I’m working on changes a lot? It would keep the most recently modified versions? – mikato – 2015-07-21T01:40:07.983
I actually installed NAS4Free on a machine at work - had a cheap deal on a ThinkServer with i5 and put a 6TB in it. It will likely be faster than something like a QNAP, plus the network hardware is different. We’ve only used it for backups. NAS4Free runs on FreeBSD, not Linux - but it installs everything in one shot anyway. My 1st experience with something like that. ZFS is really cool but has more config than I need or want at home. I'll have to load up some photos and flip through them to see how it works at least. – mikato – 2015-07-21T01:41:16.270
That's partly why I made it a comment rather than an answer. If you're the only one using the data, then keeping it synced should be relatively easy because there's only one of you. If others modify it too, then it gets complicated very quickly. You can always run a manual sync whenever you get done editing a secondary copy. It's just some place to start until you find a "real" solution. – Joe – 2015-07-22T07:00:37.497
@Joe Cool thanks. Yeah I would be the only one modifying the data. Just two of us in this house, we'd keep our data in separate directories. Actually the wife would probably just use the NAS as backup only. – mikato – 2015-07-29T17:41:27.563
I thought I'd add - I have paged through photos located on the NAS at work using Windows Photo Viewer and it was plenty fast, barely slightly slower to access directories than locally, and the photos paged fine with no noticeable difference. That's fantastic. I will go with a home NAS. – mikato – 2015-09-03T16:14:36.037
An update: I've found this works pretty well for me, I'm happy. I switched all my main Library objects in Windows to corresponding folders in my home directory on the NAS. Things are fast enough. The only thing that worries me is when I'm moving files off my phone or dumping my camera to my photos directory (since that is slower already and has a chance of stopping) so now I use an intermediate directory on my local disk and then do a copy instead of a move so I can make sure everything copied before deleting just to feel safer. – mikato – 2016-07-29T16:22:22.383
That's a way safer way to go. Trust, but verify ... Great that your solution works. BTW, you do know that you can answer your own question and get reputation points for it ... This would also mark your question as answered/solved if you accept your own answer. – Joe – 2016-07-30T07:01:50.343
Oh yeah, I guess I should do that since there aren't any answers here and I've gone ahead with it all. – mikato – 2016-08-04T14:56:50.710