I take it I should get a NAS over an external hard drive

[BritanniaJaf]

Hi Guys,

I get the feeling this question has been asked a million times before so apologies in advance.

I badly need to upgrade my available disk space and was looking at getting a 2tb external drive for around £90, one of my colleagues in work said I would better off with a NAS instead. I found a 2tb buffalo NAS for £120 so can't grumble at only being £30 dearer.

My questions

1) How is the streaming from the NAS, I currently own a Boxee Box and my internet in the house is having a few issues with homeplugs but I am working on getting that fixed, in the meantime could I just go from the USB port on the NAS straight to the boxee box to play files from the NAS.

2) When I eventually get the network back to its best can I still download files from the net and play files on the boxee box perfectly at the same time.

Anything else you can advise would make me better of buying a NAS well.

Cheers in advance

 

[BritanniaJaf]

Anybody?

 

[bubblegum57]

I bought a synology 212j. Was it worth it, I ask myself. I would say, unless you are going to stream to several TV's, a USB is good enough.
Copying files over the network is painfully slow, there can be issues playing High Def movies over a network.

 

[BritanniaJaf]

I bought a synology 212j. Was it worth it, I ask myself. I would say, unless you are going to stream to several TV's, a USB is good enough.
Copying files over the network is painfully slow, there can be issues playing High Def movies over a network.

So if you had the choice again would you have just bought just a disk drive instead?

 

[bubblegum57]

So if you had the choice again would you have just bought just a disk drive instead?

Short answer, for my needs yes. If you do get a usb drive, you might consider a dual bay.

If you are worried about drives failing, a nas usually has a RAID function. But obviously, you can backup to another usb.

 

[cjed]

1) How is the streaming from the NAS, I currently own a Boxee Box and my internet in the house is having a few issues with homeplugs but I am working on getting that fixed, in the meantime could I just go from the USB port on the NAS straight to the boxee box to play files from the NAS.

Most NAS units will not support operation as a USB client device. They usually have USB ports so you can plug external drives into them for transfer of data to/from the NAS.

If your home network is problematic, then you may well have issues with a NAS as well. They work best when the main devices that are producing/consuming data are wired together on a network (rather than by Wireless or Homeplugs)

2) When I eventually get the network back to its best can I still download files from the net and play files on the boxee box perfectly at the same time.

Most NAS units will support this - provided your network can support the traffic.

Other advantages of NAS units are you can have several PCs/Media players accessing them at the same time, you can usually use then to share a printer on your home network, they can run additional server software (such as DLNA/Media Servers, torrent downloaders etc.). As mentioned, if you plan ahead and get a multi-bay unit, you can have storage expansion and/or redundant storage of data (so a disk failure doesn't wipe out what's on the NAS).

Disadvantages are they are generally *much* more complicated than an external USB drive to manage/configure, they usually work best if left on 24/7 (so use more power and can be noisy), and the multi-bay ones are much more expensive than straight external USB drives.