Hi folks,
This is sort of on topic. I find myself generating rather a lot of data these days, mainly photos and videos. A few hours flying can easily yield 10's of GB of data for 4k video. I'm not a fan of deleting everything there and then, I prefer to keep the footgae for a while, and have a clean out every so often.
As a result, I'm rapidly filling my laptop up with data. I do back it up every so often to a little USB drive, but it would be nice to put in place a more robust backup and storage solution. I was thinking about something that was attached to my router, so I can view/edit stuff from my laptop, or my tablet around the house.
Can anyone recommend a device that can take a few decent sized disks, that can be attached to a router, and if possible can be set to automatically backup stuff on my laptop? If it was expandable in the future if I need to add more storage, that would be nice too.
Cheers
Andy
The router I have is an EE Bright Box 2 router, it has a USB port on the back and you can plug in one of those inexpensive portable USB hard drives... I've currently got this plugged in to mine:
http://tinyurl.com/j9czjp7 (http://tinyurl.com/j9czjp7)
It shows up in My Computer as a network drive, in the router settings you can also password protect it.
If you don't have a router that supports this, how about something like this:
http://tinyurl.com/gou6v3v (http://tinyurl.com/gou6v3v)
It plugs into your router using a normal ethernet cable, the great bit is that you can actually access the contents from anywhere from your smartphone, or even your mate's house for example.
I have one of these bad boys http://www.alphr.com/synology/synology-diskstation-214play/32455/synology-diskstation-ds214play-review (http://www.alphr.com/synology/synology-diskstation-214play/32455/synology-diskstation-ds214play-review)
All my Blurays are ripped to it along with my music, videos, pictures etc. All the media can be accessed by my pc, laptop, mobile and playstation. Cant recommend it enough.
I've got a hp micro server, it's got 4 bays and I converted the cd drive to a 5th HDD for the OS.
Best bang for buck (but is DIY) is as Brucey says , A HP microserver and run Freenas or similar on it
If you want off the shelf with just a couple of drives then a synology nas
Livedrive works well. :)
Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk
i stuck a JBOD into a NAS server i bought for £20 off ebay .... loads of options out there for mass storage. It just gets cheaper..
I've used the Synology NAS units quite a bit and I like their simplicity and the performance is generally pretty decent. In terms of a small quiet unit which can sit on the shelf it's unbeatable.
The simple way of doing it is either as BlueFlyer said, or if someone in your house has a desktop, you can either put another drive in it, or plug in a USB external and set up sharing in Windows so other people on the network can get to it.
My dad bought a Seagate GoFlex equivalent of the second drive BlueFlyer linked (connects through Ethernet) and as the family Network Admin/tech guy, its the biggest pain in the neck there is, because it has to connect through its only silly software instead of just connecting normally through Windows, and refuses to reconnect if the power goes out.
As for back up, i use Acronis True Image, it does a full back up once a week, and every other day of the week it does an incremental one (backs up everything that's changed that day).
One thing to remember is file transfers over WiFi can be quite slow, (depending on Router, Traffic, WLAN card in your laptop E.C.T). Reading videos from the network drive will more than likely be fine (Edit: Just read your original post saying your videos are 4K, this makes it a bit more unlikely), but transferring "10's of GB of data" could take a while, as could back ups. It could be worth plugging in your laptop via Ethernet to the router while doing full backups or Video transfers, if your laptop doesn't have a Ethernet port (Like mine) you could try something like this:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-Gigabit-Ethernet-Adapter-Supporting/dp/B00NPJP33M/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1459051313&sr=8-3&keywords=usb+to+ethernet (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-Gigabit-Ethernet-Adapter-Supporting/dp/B00NPJP33M/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1459051313&sr=8-3&keywords=usb+to+ethernet)
TL;DR for lower example: My personal WiFi speed for file transfers is 1/10th the speed of my wired Ethernet connection. In a real life scenario that means 11.05GB of video takes 16 mins to transfer over WiFi, compared to 6 mins over ethernet.
For Example, i have 2 computers connected together through a 1 gigabit wired network connection (a gigabit Ethernet port on each machine and a gigabit switch in the middle for networky type people), and when doing a disk speed test (transfer speed of files between both computers, useing a 5gb load), i get 105MB/s write and 95.8 reads (theoretical max is 125, so not bad), if i then unplug the computer i'm running the test on and make it use WiFi (the computer that the drive is in is still connected with a wire to the Router), i get a speed of only 9.8MB/s write & 10.3 Read, which is a huuuuge difference, I use a BT HomeHub 5 for referance.