Do you have too many external hard drives? QNAP TR-004 DAS!

hey everyone Forrest here with Rocky Mountain School of Photography and if you're tired of carrying around 15 external hard drives everywhere you go and labeling them and having them strewn across shelves all throughout your house I might have a solution for you this very affordable box from qnap is a direct attached storage device and what it can do is give you a ton of redundant fast storage for your photos and videos let's talk about it [Music] so before we get too far into this I want to start by saying that this is a sponsored video qnap did provide this for the purposes of this video and for that reason I'm actually going to call this a product feature not necessarily a review now I'm still going to tell you the negatives but I just feel weird with reviews and being sponsored things like that I will say though very straight up that qnap has no control over what I'm going to say in this video I also want to shout out Seagate Seagate are the hard drives that we use in our Nas here at school for all of our networked storage and also Seagate has provided the hard drives inside of this enclosure again for the purposes of this review so special thanks to qnap and Seagate for sponsoring this video so I want to start off by talking about what a Das is so like I said it stands for direct attached storage and basically it's a big box that plugs into your computer and to your computer it appears as a single heart hard drive now what's neat about this is it actually has four hard drive Bays so there's some fancy Hardware inside of this enclosure that decides how those four hard drives interface with your computer so before we get too far down that road I want to jump back and just say what does this come with so you can buy this a variety of different ways b h sells it unfilled where all of the drive bays are empty they also sell filled versions where there's drives already pre-installed but basically very easy you can take it out of the box install the different drives and get it up and running any way you want to and what's cool is you have control over how big of hard drives to put inside of this enclosure so as a quick example if I pop one of these out here is one of the drives in this case Seagate gave us four four terabyte hard drives for this enclosure making the total enclosure capacity 16 terabytes now depending on how you configure this device you might not get 16 terabytes of use able storage but that's how much physical storage exists inside of this device and that's one really cool thing about this you can customize and tailor the amount of total storage to your needs as a photographer or videographer the device was very nicely packaged and includes the power supply as well as a USB type A to USB type-c cable I do wish there was a type c to type c cable as well but you know it it is what it is in this world today but overall really nice packaging fit and finish instructions setup guide very clear to get this configured the way that you want to and I was really pleased with the whole unboxing experience of getting this thing up and running so now let's get into the setup those of you who have watched my previous Nas videos know that setting up a Nas is a little bit of an involved process generally I like to tell people take about an hour to get your Nas configured from plugging it into your router connecting your computer the network creating a volume all that kind of stuff it just takes time well a Das is totally different the setup process on this is very very quick in in the back of the device or on the back of the device there are three little dip switches one two and three and depending on how you switch your dip switches before you turn on the device for the first time it can configure it in a variety of different modes now you're not set in stone Once you turn it on and it's configured in that certain mode you can always reconfigure however switching between modes of operation with this device does Wipe the data off the drives so do be aware you probably want to get this set up correctly the first time once you get those dip switches set on the mode of operation that you like you plug this into the computer you may have to format it using Disk Utility or in Windows just right clicking and going to format but either way as soon as that's done this drive is ready for operation I would estimate the total setup time to be about 5 minutes which is really awesome and anybody with really any computer skill level is going to be able to get one of these running right out of the gate so let's talk about those little dip switches and how they work this drive and really all dashes and nases have the ability to operate in different raid modes raid is probably something you've seen if you've done any research on this type of device raid stands for redundant array of independent discs and basically what it means is the four drives in this case work together to present themselves to the computer as a single storage device now before we get too far down into the raid discussion I do also want to say that this can be configured as four independent disks as well so if you wanted to plug this into your computer in four little hard drives popped up that is totally possible you can also configure this in jbod mode which is just a bunch of disks that's actually what that stands for where it will appear to the computer as one hard drive and you'll basically it'll fill each one up sequentially when you put files onto it I don't really recommend either of those modes I think really the user friendliness of this comes out when we start discussing raid there's three different raid modes of operation that we can use Raid 0 RAID 10 or one plus zero or Raid 5. RAID 0 is the one that I'm gonna strongly not recommend Raid 0 basically means that when you put a file onto this device it splits that file in fourths and it puts a fourth of the file on each of the four hard drives that all sounds well and good and it's a very fast mode of operation however if one of those four hard drives fails you lose everything RAID 10 is a combination of raid 1 and raid 0. basically the drives are paired up and you're left with that yes splitting of a file into halves on each drive but also it is a mirrored copy of the other one so basically if you think about two drives working in tandem as a RAID 0 pair another set of drives working as a RAID 0 pair and then those are raid 1 or mirrored to one another when using the disk however on most devices the advantages of RAID 10 are that it's faster you get a performance increase over raid 5. however you lose again another 25 percent of your storage so if you were to configure this 16 terabyte storage device in RAID 10 you're only going to get eight terabytes of usable storage space however like I said you will also get that redundancy of if a drive fails you're still safe one advantage of Raid 0 is that you do get the full capacity of the device so if you put 16 terabytes worth of hard drives into this you'll get 16 usable terabytes of storage and that's not the case with raid 5 or Raid 10. now raid 5 is basically allowing OneDrive failure and it uses some really advanced math I'm not going to get too much into how raid 5 works just know that basically if you configure your device in raid 5 you're gonna get 75 of your total storage so in my case with 16 terabytes of total storage in raid 5 I have 12 usable terabytes basically one of the drives is used as a parity drive so you're down 75 percent with a four bay Das on your storage so how do we break this down I know I just said a lot of stuff and those of you not familiar with raid this is like totally new to you well basically the takeaway is this Raid 0 is scary I wouldn't recommend it unless speed is super important more on that in a second RAID 10 is awesome it's faster than raid 5 but you only get 50 of your usable storage space finally raid 5 gives us one disc that can fail any one of the four can fail will be fine however we still retain 75 of our overall storage space in the device now I mentioned speed a few times and I think our speed discussion needs to happen now that we've talked about raid on most devices like this when you start configuring different raid modes the speed is vastly different and I actually tested on this device and in every RAID Mode including jbod the speed was pretty much the same and the reason I think is because of the chord and the connectivity type of this device so this Das connects with USB 3.2 gen 1. now I know I'm getting nerdy here and I I apologize to those of you who are not up on your USB standards but USB 3.2 gen 1 is really another name for original USB 3 from back in I think 2008. it caps out at five gigabits per second now that's not gigabytes that's gigabits and if we convert that down it's round about 600 megabytes per second now that's the theoretical speed in real world terms we're usually capping out at USB 3.2 gen 1 around 400 megabytes per second and I basically ran this through tests speed tests with all of the different raid modes and jbod and I can safely say that with these four terabyte hard drives again four of them working together in all of our raid modes including jbod I was getting about 200 megabytes per second read and 200 megabytes per second right now raid 5 was a little faster here or a little slower there but round about 200 megabytes per second is what you can expect from this drive the way I tested that was with the utility as well as just copying a 20 gigabyte video file from my internal hard drive which is a very fast SSD onto this external device so what that leads me to say is generally raid 5 is one of our slower raid modes because it's gonna have it has to do a lot of math when it's operating however with this device because I think we're bottlenecked by the connection speed I actually recommend for 99 of you out there if you buy this device configure it in raid 5. you're going to get that redundancy and you're also going to get 75 percent of your total storage to work with so you buy the Box you take it out of the packaging you flip the dip switches over to raid 5 mode you give it a couple minutes to do its thing plug it into your computer and all of a sudden you have 12 or 16 or however many terabytes of usable storage from there you can use this in your workflow however you want to a couple quick things I would think of is because this isn't a Nas and it's a Dazz you can store Lightroom catalogs directly on this device you don't need to have them on your internal and then store the photos on an external like you would with a Nas another cool thing that a Das gives you is the ability to back up to utilities like backblaze backblaze is a super great Cloud backup utility however it will not back up a Nas it will only back up direct attached storage devices so if you wanted to utilize something like backblaze on your computer it would totally be able to back up the internal hard drive on your computer as well as this plugged in Das for the same really cool price I don't remember how expensive they are but backblaze is pretty affordable when it comes down to that so if you're a photographer I think this is a fantastic way to get your main photo drive so to speak a lot more storage if you're somebody who likes to sit at your desk when you do your editing this is a way to take all those external hard drive drives that you've had for years and years and years and pack them into one box one hard drive on your computer and it will give you that redundancy and if you use backblaze it'll give you that cloud backup as well by the way backblaze is not a sponsor I just really like their services so they're pretty cool backblaze if you're watching and you want to sponsor I'll talk about you in more videos that would be cool I really really like your products finally those of you who are video Shooters I do think that that 200 megabyte per second cap that I'm seeing regardless of what raid type we are set to is a little bit of a bottleneck Factor when you're going to be editing video directly off of this hard drive if you're looking for a larger storage system for editing say 4K video directly off of you might look at a faster Nas or a faster Das option this thing is very affordable at only about 250 dollars for the enclosure and with that there comes some downsides when it comes to speed however those of you who shoot video who use an SSD as your primary storage device this could be a fantastic way to increase that backup storage and get all of your backups in one location alright everybody that is my overview of this qnap Das honestly I am very impressed I think this is a fantastic device for people who don't want to bother with networking things and setting up a bunch of stuff and at the price point of again 250 dollars for the enclosure it's really hard to beat I will also mention qnap does have a two Bay variety of this drive if you are going to get that I would recommend setting it up in raid 1 which is where it's redundant between the two Drive Bays inside of the device however that could be a great option as well and it's more affordable because you only have to fill it with two hard drives instead of four if you like this video I would really appreciate you hitting that like button drop a comment down below if you have any questions and lastly hit subscribe to stay up to date with future videos we put videos out every single week on photography videography all kinds of different stuff so follow along and we'd love to have you in a future video

Channel: Rocky Mountain School of Photography

Views: 39,872

Keywords: photography tutorial, tutorials, how to, photos, learn photography, tutorial, photography tips and tricks, Rocky Mountain School of Photography, qnap, seagate, qnap das, qnap nas, das, direct attached storage, direct attach storage, what is a das, qnap TR-004 review, qnap TR-004 for photographers, qnap tr-004 for videographers, best raid for photographers, best raid for videographers, best raid setup for photos, best das for photographers, my hard drives are full, what is a nas

Id: l5HnU_pS_ns

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2023