How to choose NAS for Small business or SOHO users

Today's large production of small businesses and SOHO users has created a new demand for the storage market. These users ' relatively large amounts of data make it possible that only a large, fast internal hard drive may not be enough, prompting them to add an external hard drive to get more storage capacity or to back up their internal hard drives. Also, if you want to centrally store, you can consider purchasing a network attached storage (NAS) device.

Big background

Although an external, directly attached drive uses the same basic mechanism, it is located inside a disk cabinet and is connected to your computer via a USB 2.0, FireWire, or eSATA bus. Another option is an external NAS device that connects to your router via Ethernet. NAS devices are constantly improving, allowing you to easily add storage to your computer so that computers on all your small or home networks can share the storage.

Removable external hard drives are more flexible than internal drives: External hard drives allow you to continue to increase storage capacity on your PC when internal drive brackets or connection resources are exhausted on your PC. Also, you can share an external hard disk between multiple PCs and store it in a secure place as a backup medium.

2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drive: The latest plug-and-play portable hard drives are mostly based on 2.5-inch hard drives and provide enough capacity to accommodate a certain size digital library. However, if you want to get an oversized drive, you need to use a 3.5-inch hard drive. For most people, the 2.5-inch hard disk capacity is large enough to hold the data that needs to be stored, and the 2.5-inch external drive is small enough to fit in a pocket, while a 3.5-inch external hard drive can only be considered portable if it is portable.

NAS: This allows you to simply access any PC connected to the network, and you can place it in a relatively secure location. Some with multiple hard drives, high-capacity NAS devices provide additional functionality such as printers and Internet file access, allowing you to share printers on the network, or to access all files from the Web. The biggest drawback of NAS is that you need to transfer data over Ethernet, making it the slowest choice.

Flash-based hard drive: solid-state hard drive (SSD) based on flash memory is the best choice from a portable perspective. They are connected to your computer via USB 2.0, and most settings do not require an additional power adapter. They are not as prone to heat as rotating drives and are more stable. On the other hand, the transmission speed is slower than the 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drive. Finally, the hard drive either focuses on capacity or focuses on speed, depending on your needs. Our tests show that all today's hard drives are sufficient to run regular home and business programs. However, high-capacity, fast hard drives are good for people who need to deal with large files, images, and digital video.

Indicator description

The following are some of the important and unimportant but relevant indicators of the Insider:

Important indicator: capacity. For a single drive model, the external direct attached hard drive has a maximum capacity of up to 1TB. Some vendors can get 1TB capacity in the form of RAID 0 or disk panning configurations by weaving two 500GB drives or 4 250GB hard drives together. The portable external drive uses a 2.5-inch hard drive with a notebook size, and its current maximum capacity reaches 500GB. It's wise to try your best to get as much capacity as possible, especially NAS devices. Because multiple users may soon be able to consume this capacity, which can put you in a difficult position of insufficient capacity.

Important index: rotational speed. The speed of a portable external drive is the widest range, and the faster the speed, the faster the drive is. The currently available speed models are 4200, 5400, and 7200 rpm. Of these 3 speed specifications, the most commonly used is 5400 RPM. If you want to copy a lot of data, you will feel the speed of different speeds of different transmission. For example, if you want to copy a large number of photos from a full 2GB memory card to your hard drive, you should keep an eye on these metrics and beware of vendors who are unsure of their drive speed.

Important Indicator: interface. The interface to the drive must be very cautious, as it is a major factor in determining how fast you will eventually get the data. Most external drives have either a USB 2.0 interface or a dual Usb/firewire interface. Other interface configurations include dual USB 2.0/firewire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. For high-performance external drives, you can select eSATA to attach the drive directly. These drives are becoming more common. Although they do not provide universal USB 2.0 connections, they are as fast as internal drives.

To install a eSATA drive, you need to have an open external port. Although the eSATA drive is equipped with a power connector to provide an external port, you still need an open internal SATA port to attach the connector. If not, an inexpensive PCI add-in card can also provide external SATA, USB 2.0, or FireWire ports for those systems that lack a connector. Consumer-class NAS devices typically use the TCP/IP protocol and 10/100 BASE-T or Gigabit Ethernet to connect to your network. Look for NAS devices that can provide USB 2.0 ports to accommodate additional hard drives, allowing you to expand capacity or share printers on your network.

Other indicators: Seek speed. The average seek speed, measured in milliseconds, refers to how quickly a hard disk can find a particular piece of data. This is a secondary consideration: For most people, the impact of this difference can be negligible in everyday use. The only exception is the fact that a drive requires a large number of small pieces of data that are scattered across different regions of the hard disk, such as a larger folder that is filled with many small files. Jumbo drives often have long seek times.

Other indicator: buffer. When a system makes a data request, the hard disk acquires the data it requests, and then loads additional information in its buffer memory so that the processor can do further processing. In theory at least, the larger the buffer, the better the data flow, especially for disk-intensive tasks such as file searching. The size of the buffer varies from 8MB to 32MB.

Other metrics: RAID settings. RAID 0 is the most common setting, and RAID 0 provides faster performance by segmenting data across multiple drives. The drawback is that if a drive fails, the data on all drives is lost, so you need to do a backup in real time. RAID 1 is a more popular option for systems that need to minimize downtime because, with RAID 1, data can be redundant or mirrored on multiple drives. This way, if one of the drives fails, the system can continue to run on another normally running drive until you install a new drive.