NAS Requirements

I have always been worried about data loss. It’s a nightmare scenario losing all those 1’s and 0’s which could be your:

• Documents
• Photos
• Music
• Movies
• Any other thing stored on your computer

Just like buying a house, car or anything expensive you’d set some goals the new device, vehicle, building must have. For my NAS device these are:

• RAID
Redundant storage so any drive failures would be protected by keeping data on other drives. It may not be RAID technology but it must be RAID type redudancy.
• Scalable
Must be able to add and remove drives dynamically.
• Networked
The first acroynm of “NAS” it must be network attachable so that networked computers can access the contents on the drives.
• Minimum 4 HDD
My reason for this is because RAID requires 2 drives minimum. RAID 5 works best in terms of redundancy and available space for the prosumer.
• Multiple Continous Streaming
Ability to watch or listen to a video or music over the network. This is a must have and although limitations may lie outside of the device (such as network capacity).
• Cross Platform
Must be accessible to Linux, Mac and Windows. This means the filesystem it supports is crucial as well as some of the services it may support.

The nice to have features include:

• Print Server
Ability to act as a printer server is very nice, removing the need for a separate server box.
• USB / Firewire External Drive
Allowing the user to plug USB storage devices and share them over the network is a very useful. It can expand the capacity of the device although the USB storage won’t be backed up in the RAID array.
• Remote Access
Services like FTP to allow remote access to the data for flexibility.
• Open Source
I support the FOSS movement.
• Wireless Connectivity
Probably won’t be used as it will never match up to wired speeds but it’s a nice to have feature in case a cable is not viable.

All in all price will be a high influencial factor.

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Hardware. Bookmark the permalink.

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