Recommended number of LAN ports and drives for NAS

[pldelisle]

Thank you for your info. Will keep that in mind. One main issue I use SSD is that I am very sensitive to noise. The NAS will be in my bedroom. If the NAS and internal drives are noisy even they are not in use, it will drive me crazy. Are QNAP and Synology NAS silent when they are idle?

I read some users mentioning that they have issue using TM backups on the Mac with Synology and QNAP. What is the problem? For Mac, I use both CCC and TM. For Windows, I use True Image. For Linux, I just drag and drop.

Mine is far from being silent! I have Western Digital SE drives (7200RPM) and heads are noisy.

 

[Boyd01]

An SSD for backup is a waste of money except for challenging environments. You are paying for speed that you don't need since backups run in the background.

I do time machine backups to a network hard disk, but also do bootable Carbon Copy Clones to a USB SSD. That way, if I have a failure of my primary computer, I can boot directly from the SSD and get right back to work, even with a different Mac.

 

[HDFan]

ne main issue I use SSD is that I am very sensitive to noise. The NAS will be in my bedroom. If the NAS and internal drives are noisy even they are not in use, it will drive me crazy. Are QNAP and Synology NAS silent when they are idle?

You are planning to put SSD's in the NAS? Assuming you want RAID that would be really expensive, but likely quiet. I notice a difference between my QNAP and Synology units. The QNAP even when idle has active disks, whereas my Synology does not. I don't hear any fan noise, but I do hear the disks. Not that sensitive to sound though.

but also do bootable Carbon Copy Clones to a USB SSD.

USB 3.2 gen 2? Admit that booting from a hard disk, CCC cloned, is slow, even with a Thunderbolt connection. Since I don't have to do this very often I don't dedicate an SSD for that task. Can't justify spending $1k for a 4 TB SSD that I would use only a few times a year.

 

[Boyd01]

I use a 2tb Samsung T7 to clone the 2tb internal SSD on my Mini. Don't remember the exact cost, but it was less than $300. But, yeah, it was still a lot of money. But I view backups like an insurance policy... I spend thousands on my auto and home policies and don't "use" them either.

 

[hajime]

I use a 2tb Samsung T7 to clone the 2tb internal SSD on my Mini. Don't remember the exact cost, but it was less than $300. But, yeah, it was still a lot of money. But I view backups like an insurance policy... I spend thousands on my auto and home policies and don't "use" them either.

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Is T7 noticeably faster than T5? Are 3TB and 4TB versions faster than the 2TB version?

 

[hajime]

If I recall correctly, when I had the Power Mac 7x00, we had to buy some kind of serial cable to connect two Mac together. The hard drive of one mac could be shared with another Mac using this method. We accessed the internet via phone line.

Given that we have relatively fast wifi connection at home now, what do people use these days to access the hard drive of another computer regardless of the OS? I am looking for something like a home version of dropbox without access to the cloud due to privacy.

 

[robbieduncan]

If I recall correctly, when I had the Power Mac 7x00, we had to buy some kind of serial cable to connect two Mac together. The hard drive of one mac could be shared with another Mac using this method. We accessed the internet via phone line.

Given that we have relatively fast wifi connection at home now, what do people use these days to access the hard drive of another computer regardless of the OS? I am looking for something like a home version of dropbox without access to the cloud due to privacy.

SMB sharing over a home network. Pretty much every OS supports SMB

 

[Boyd01]

Is T7 noticeably faster than T5? Are 3TB and 4TB versions faster than the 2TB version?

No experience with the T5, but I have two 500gb and one 1tb Samsung T3's, which are the previous generation. They are about half the speed of the T7. From what I've read, the T5 is only slightly faster. Here is my 1tb Samsung T3 on a 2012 quad i7 Mini. I used it as the boot drive on that computer for several years with no problems and although it was slower than the internal SSD, I never really noticed the difference. I used Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro pretty heavily on that machine for awhile.

AFAIK, 2tb is the largest T7 that Samsung makes, or at least that was the case last summer when I was shopping, would have liked more than 2tb. I got a 4tb Oyen Digital USB SSD from B&H Photo about a year ago for my iTunes library on my media server. It is about the same as the Samsung T3, this was a USB-A connection to a 2014 Mini. I think this is about as good as you can do over USB on the 2012 and 2014 Mini.

 

[hajime]

SMB sharing over a home network. Pretty much every OS supports SMB

Thanks. How is this method (connecting a large drive to one of the computer and make it accessible by other devices at home via SMB) compared with NAS?

 

[robbieduncan]

Thanks. How is this method (connecting a large drive to one of the computer and make it accessible by other devices at home via SMB) compared with NAS?

At a network level it’s the same. Unless you specially share from a NAS using a different protocol for a specific reason a NAS will share as SMB

However any decent NAS will have some form of RAID protecting against single disk failure. A NAS will probably use less power that leaving a computer on all the time. A NAS will not be sharing cup/memory and network bandwidth resources with the computer

For non-demanding use cars it’ll be fine.

 

[kart]

Do you get good wifi speeds when you map the nas? I am getting Horrendous speeds (2-4mbps) but then when I jump into Windows via Bootcamp I get 70mbps via wifi. Cannot work it out..?