Very New to all of this. Please Help

Matthew Thompson

Hi all.

I run a photography business and currently have a LaCie 2 Big with 2x3TB drives fitted conected to my Mac via Thunderbolt 2. I am in the market for a new item and have been looking at the Synology D718  or the D918 . All I want to use the drive for is RAID storage of mt images alongside working on them from the drive. As the 2 drives I have been looking at do not support Thunderbolt 2 I was thinking of connecting them to my Mac via a network cable and transfering the data that way. Would this work and could any of you please give me a bit of advice on how I should proceed? Thanks in advance.

bubblegum57

terramaster have a thunderbolt nas. google for it

Sloppy Bob

I'd also add as you're new to NAS systems the AVF NAS buyers mantra.

RAID isn't backup, it's redundancy.
RAID isn't backup, it's redundancy.
RAID isn't backup, it's redundancy.

Repeat ad infinitum.

If you use your NAS for RAID and don't have a separate backup then if you lose your NAS, then you've lost everything. If you're mirroring your drives and delete a copy by mistake, the "backup" is gone as well.

mickevh

Perhaps you could expand on what you mean by "connect by network cable" - if you mean a direct connect between Mac and NAS, it is unusual, but possible with the right kit, but if not...

There's no problem networking both a NAS and a Mac. For optimum performance you'd want both and the infrastructure devices to be Gigabit ethernet capable. A NAS almost certainly will be (but check) and your Mac probably is also (but again, check) unless it is ancient. If either are "only" 100mbps (AKA "fast") ethernet capable, it will still work, but transfers will be roughly 1/10th the speed.

Connect both NAS and Mac to your network with network cables (so check your router has enough free ethernet ports) give them IP addresses (which your router will almost certainly do automatically using a mechanism called DHCP) publish some "shares" on the NAS, "mount" them on the Mac and off you go. It would be worthwhile "fixing" the IP address the NAS uses so it never changes (unlikely as that is but it is possible using DHCP.)

It would be worth checking if your router is Gigabit ethernet capable, if not it will almost certainly be 100mbps capable -  again with performance hit. If your router is "only" 100mbps and/or does not have enough free ethernet ports, then it would be worth buying a Gigabit capable "ethernet switch," connect that to your router, then connect NAS/Mac to said switch. Little 5-8 port "desktop" ethernet switches are only a few tens of pounds these days.

There's a FAQ about NAS's pinned in this forums, you might care to have a read through it and of course you can always post back any specific questions.

An additional advantage of NAS over direct connect  is that you also make the NAS shares available to everything else on your network.

Incidentally, if you are running a business and might need "point in time" copies of the data, you might have a look and see if your NAS offers the ability to take "snapshots" (in the data husbandry rather than the photography sense.) Such snapshots are not quite the same as "proper" backups, but can be useful if you ever have need to roll back to the data to a point in time, access previous versions, etc.