DenaliDave Club 300
Joined: 09 Jan 2016 Posts: 307 Location: Anchorage, Alaska
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Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2017 11:30 pm Post subject: The Qnap |
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Howdy VO-BB!
I've been away for a while -- but I have a new piece of "gear" so to speak that I think is quite handy for VO!
In December I picked up a Qnap TS-431. It's a 4-bay NAS (network attached storage):
It has room for 4 hard drives. Right now, I only have two, three terabyte drives in it. I do have them setup in a RAID-1 configuration though.
What does that mean?
It means that while I technically have two hard drives that are 3TB each, I only effectively have 3TB of storage. Why? Because they mirror each other for redundancy. Yes, they're backed up like that for security! It cuts my storage in half, but it greatly increases the safety of my data.
It connects directly into my wifi router, so I can save files from my any of my computers in the house to it! I can then open them up anywhere as well.
It acts as my own personal Dropbox. We should all be moving away from Dropbox anyway, as they are horrible for security. The Qnap TS-431 acts as home-based server, and I access it outside of my home on any computer or smartphone.
I've even given it a web address, alexandria.viewdns.net
I can also issue download URLS to all my files just like you can with Dropbox.
Also, when you login to the device from a computer, it loads a desktop that looks a lot like Windows or OSX:
I have all my photos, music, video, documents and projects now on this little magical box. It also has three USB 3.0 ports on it. I've plugged in my external hard drives to it as well.
Considering the sizes of the WAV files I record, it seemed only prudent to have a larger, more professional way to store them that is backed up securely.
I highly recommend the Qnap or the Synology boxes. They're easy enough to setup for someone who isn't highly technical, and work far FAR better than the Western Digital "my cloud" products. I have a 4TB WD MyCloud and it's night and day. I'm considering cracking the MyCloud open to save the hard drive and tossing the rest.
With a battery backup or UPS (uninteruptable power supply) I pretty much have a professional level home server with sharing and cloud access for clients worldwide. It can expand as I need it to, as I can get more/larger hard drives for it. I can enable guest access, host my own website, email server, stream movies, download/upload files from it -- you name it.
No more thumb drives, or dongles for portable hard drives. Portable hard drives you connect with USB aren't nearly as robust or reliable as the Western Digital Red hard drives I have in my box. The "red" drives are designed and purpose-built server storage. They have additional vibration damping and run cooler than the normal consumer hard drives found in laptops or portable, external drives. They're what you'd find in some data centers.
Highly recommend![/url] _________________ "The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve." - Buddha
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