THE Complete Beginner NAS Guide

all right how's it going y'all so today we're going to be going over what is a Nas so a Nas is this thing that is kind of hard to actually Define and it's really going to be set up for people who are complete beginners and really are just looking at getting their first Nas and understanding what the heck the thing is compared to something much simpler to understand which is just like an external hard drive because while they are very similar they are are also fundamentally completely different and this is going to be set up for pretty much anybody regardless of computer understandings and so it's probably not the best for more advanced users who already really know what is going on so what I have to my left of me right here is a sonology Nas and quite simply a Nas is storage that is available over the network Nas stands for network attached storage so that is basically just storage just like an external hard drive that is available not over like a USB protocol where you actually just plug it into your computer or similar thing with like an internal hard drive of your computer a Nas is actually something that you can access over the network so Wi-Fi or wired ethernet are the two different options you've got but in reality any Nas you buy is going to be able to do so much more than that and they are incredibly powerful tools but have their own individual learning curves because a Nas is not just like an external hard drive because a Nas is actually its own server any Nas you buy is actually a true server there is a computer within this box right here that actually manages the storage itself and your computer and the computer in the nas talk to each other whenever they're exchanging files and so that computer in there can do so much more it allows you to start basically recreating your own Google Drive recreating your own Apple iCloud recreating your own photo library there are so many powerful tools that a Nas can do but at its simplest it's just storage that you or other people who are on the network can all access at the exact same time so the closest thing that most home users have gotten to a Nas is probably your standard office file server if you've ever worked at an office and everybody mounts the same Drive letter so may it's an S drive and you're able to read and write files on there and if somebody else saves a file on there you can see it as well that is actually a Nas that is actually the most basic form of a Nas and it's something that's been around since the 9s that protocol is called SMB you're going to see that thrown around a lot and SMB is the most basic way of accessing files on anas if we look on my computer right here on the far right hand corner we can see that there are three different shares that are all mounted and in Mac OS they kind of show up with this icon in Windows they will show up as a drive letter or as folders as well it's just kind of the interface that's shown and these are all different folders that I have mounted via SMB so if I double click on one of these we will see right here that these are files that are not stored on my computer nor are they stored on any intern internal drive or external drive that's hooked up to it they're actually stored on a Nas actually upstairs that whenever my computer asks for the files we'll send them over to them over the network or in this case over wired ethernet so I can edit this on my computer right here and I can also edit it on my computer right here and Katie my wife who edits these videos can actually edit them right upstairs as well so that is actually where Nas originally came from it was essentially a hard drive that everybody could edit at the exact same time all over the network which is great so if you want to be able to save a Word document and have your coworker be able to read it without sending them an email it's awesome it also means that you can start having family photo albums where everybody can just dump their images and anybody can read them and so right here this is the most basic form of a Nas Where it still feels and looks a lot like a hard drive it's just hooked up over the network rather than hooked up over USB there are a couple key differences a Nas is really a different protocol than a hard drive so if you ever plugged in an external hard drive you can format it you can do all that kind of stuff but with a Nas your computer is really not in control of it instead everything it's doing it's talking to the nas to do instead of your computer itself doing it and so there are certain applications like Lightroom Lightroom will not let you store your LR catalog that Lightroom catalog can't be stored on a Nas your raw files can be but the actual catalog cannot be because Adobe will not let you and there's a few other programs like that that do that but 99.9% of programs work totally fine on a Nas and so that is the super basics of where a Nas came from now let's take a quick look at a pretty somewhat standard Nas and a Nas has a few different key components to it that make it different from a regular hard drive the first thing you'll notice is this does not just have one Bay there actually in this case I think five Bays up front yeah this is the 1522 yeah so this Nas has five hard drive Bays up front and most nasas you will buy will have the Big 3 and 1 half inch hard drives so this guy right here you can store up to five of them in this unit and every Nas will have a different number of hard drives you can you can put in there and that tends to be how they're tiered so you can buy a 4 Bay a 2 Bay a one Bay a 8 bay a 12 Bay there are so many different options every Nas that is one of the key components to it is how many hard drives it can fit and so if I open up one of these slots maybe one with a hard drive in it you can see that it's just a hard drive that you can buy right off the store and plug it directly in one difference is if you were to plug five hard drives into your computer you would see them as five Drive letters most likely so you'd have five different hard drives that you could all dump data to one thing that is not technically unique to a Nas but is very linked to it is called raid so essentially every single Nas you'll purchase has an option for what's called raid and is actually what you're going to most likely use so raid essentially allows you to combine multiple hard drives into one single storage thing that kind of looks like one hard drive so there are multiple different types and I'm just going to go over the really Basics here for which options you've got so there are multiple different types of raid there are normally raid and then a number following it the most common types of raid you will see are raid 1 0 10 5 and six those are the most common ones that you will see I will leave a link down the description below that I go over all the different raid types but I'm going to talk about the most basic ones that I would recommend for people if you have two hard drives you're most likely going to want to set up what's called raid one raid one essentially takes the two hard drives that you've got and mirrors them so anytime something's written to one of the drives it's written to the exact same one now what that does do is it cuts your storage space to the size of a single hard drive and when whenever we talk about raid unless you go into custom raids like Synology shr whenever we talk about raid raid will pretend like the smallest hard drive in the group is the size of all the hard drives in the group so if you have four 16 tab drives and one four terab drive all the 16 tab drives are going to pretend like they're 4 tab drives and so that is one thing to know generally you want to match the same size for all your hard drives in raid but for raid one it is very simple all the data is on all the drives and the real advantage of this is it is so easy so say this drive fails nothing bad happens because all of our data is right here this is not really a backup we're going to talk about that later you still need to back up your day but it means that if one of your drives fails you don't lose anything you can keep working and just simply plug in a brand new drive hit rebuild and now boom it's back up and running the next one that you'll see is if you've got three or more drives you can do what's called raid five raid five is very complicated to understand from a actual how it works perspective but I do go over in that video and actually show the math of it but in its simplest term raid five allows you to lose any one hard drive and keep all of your data and what it costs you from a storage perspective is one hard drive so if you have four drives you can lose any one of them if you in a raid five configuration and still keep all of your data but you will only have the storage capacity of three hard drives so if you had four 4 tab drives you would have the storage capacity of three4 terab drives which would be 12 terabytes that fourth drive that space of the fourth drive is used to make sure that it can rebuild any single fail drive and so any one of those drives can can fail and you just pull it out plug in a new Drive rebuild it and nothing happens it actually works great where your Nas doesn't even have to shut down or even stop working so it's great for offices where you don't want a hard drive to take out your entire file server for a day so if you've got raid and a hard drive fails nobody even notices except the IT guy who hopefully gets an email everybody else just keeps on working and once you finish repairing it everything just continues on you can actually keep working on a raid that is degraded degraded means that one of the drives has failed the next one I'm going to talk about is raid six raid six is basically raid five but with two drives so you can lose any two drives in a raid six array and you will still have all of your data and you lose two drives worth of space I'm not going to go into too much more here that's the gist of it they also do have some performance improvements so if you know a hard drive can be kind of slow but if you get eight hard drives in a raid five array they can actually be quite quick because you're not just reading to one hard drive you're reading from the seven hard drives in that last one's used for parody and so it really increases your overall sequential throughput and so that is a really key component about a Nas is raid you don't technically have to use it but I really recommend it for pretty much anybody who's getting their first Nas that's actually one reason why I recommend if you're going to buy a Nas try to buy a 4bay Nas instead of a 2bay Nas for your starter and just put two hard drives in there because what pretty much all Nas manufacturers will allow you to do is actually expand the space later on by adding additional drives and so a 2bay Nas has to use Raid one if you want redundancy which takes out half of your overall storage but a four bay n can use Raid five which only takes 25% of your storage for redundancy and so it can be very valuable to have that all right but that's going to be it for raid so essentially what a Nas is is a little box that you talk to over the network that can combine multiple hard drives into essentially one hard drive and I'm saying hard drives here but most NASA also will support ssds as well and so that's one key component of a Nas is it's basically the ability to take a bunch of drives worth of space and put it into one single place where you can add your files to them the next most important part about a Nas especially for beginner users is the brand of Nas you go with so there are a few different Nas manufactures who all have their own operating system so not to go into Super in-depth comparing the different companies here I personally like syge I do a lot to work with those systems and I like them a lot but the three best starter nases for people who are just getting started are going to be sonology qap and Aus store those are the three probably most popular Nas Brands out there for beginners who are not too complex to use and really set up and all three of them are going to offer more or less the same features some are going to be more polished than others and some of them are going to have a little bit different features but they're all going to be able to do the just a bit and you can think of them as the difference between Mac and windows they all have their own operating system that runs the nas that all can let you do different things a lot of them have their own mobile apps that actually allow you to interface with your NAS from wherever you are in the world and so that is one really key component is figuring out which brand is right for you and kind of which interface makes sense for you there's a bunch of tutorials for all these different brands online you can search them out and kind of get a beginner guide and kind of see how it all works and see what's going to have the features that are right for you for you so now I talked about that operating system and now I want to show you it so as I said earlier the Nas is a server it is its own computer that is control of its data and can do all these different things and all the major brands of Nas have the ability to manage it over the network all over a web page just like you would log into your bank you can log into your Nas so I'm going to show you sonies right here just as a demonstration so we go ahead and we log in and we put in our username and password all nases will have you log in with a username and password so now this is the entire interface where we can control the settings as well as add additional apps and features to the nas so this is its own server so we can control all of its pieces we can add new folders we can change that networking protocol options we can go ahead and actually set up some security settings we can open it up to the Internet so anybody in the world can connect to it assuming they have the login credentials you can also go into the package Center and there are going to be other apps that can expand the functionality Beyond just the basic stuff so as you can see we are kind of controlling this all from our computer talking to the nas so our computer is saying hey change this setting right here so it's all stored on on that Nas and the Nas is what's actually creating this web page and so this is where we can also if we wanted to we can see our files and even download them in some cases depending on what you're doing so that is a huge difference between a external hard drive and an ass even for users of drobo this is a very different interface because drobo you would download an app to your computer but whenever you're managing a Nas you're not actually downloading app to your computer you actually going over a web page and setting up from a website that the Nas is creating on your local network so that's how you actually manage a Nas we can also go in and see that storage it and this is where we can see the different raids that are set up so as I talked about raid five right there and you can see all the drives so a Nas is basically this box that allows you to see all the hard drives in it combine their space and control all these different settings and so as you can see it is a lot more complex and it can do so much more than a standard external hard drive so part of them having this complexity is it means you can also do a lot of great things one of the best things that all three of those Brands I mentioned earlier have is something called snapshots snapshots are kind of like an undo button for your entire Nas say you overwrite a image so say you were saving an image and you accidentally overwrote another image or you made an edit to a word document and you wanted to see how it was 3 hours ago with snapshots you can actually browse your files exactly how they were in the past and every Nas will have a bit of a different way of doing it but if we come in we can see this is a snapshot folder house analogy does it we double click on it we can see all these different Tim stamps and just look at how the files were when that snapshot was all three of those Nas brands that I mentioned earlier as long as long as you're using btrfs or ZFS for the specific Nas will offer this exact functionality and it's not taking up a bunch of copies of your data so you can take a snapshot of 100 terte file server every 5 minutes and it's not going to take up 100 terabytes every single time it's not even going to take up a one terabyte every single time a snapshot uses as little space as possible a snapshot essenti will only take up space when you delete a file or modify a file so if I take a snapshot and then I delete a file but I still have that old snapshot I'm not going to get my space back from deleting this file until that old snapshot is removed and that's the only space that snapshots take up the easiest way to think about it is a recycling bin a recycling bin does not take up space unless you delete a file and it goes to the recycling bin you can think of snapshots as very very very complex recycling bins that can let you do so much that is one of the great features that Nas has to offer once again technically computers can do it as well but it's much easier to set up generally on a Nas the next thing I'm going to talk about really quickly is backups one of the best features of Nas is is their ability to back themselves up automatically into so many different devices and that that is something to really look at is it's like a hard drive that backs itself up and will email you if the backup fails and so there's so many powerful tools you can do there because a Nas is a server it is actually unlocking all this additional functionality that allows you to do so many different things I know I'm blowing over a lot of this because I'm trying to just get the key points out for this kind of stuff all right so now I'm to my last two key points about a Nas the second last one is going to be external access when I say external access I mean access to the files on the nas when you're not home so if you are in another country or if you're at a coffee shop that is all external access because you're not on your local Wi-Fi network or plugged into your Wi-Fi router all nases that I mentioned earlier have the ability to have external access and they can all basically give you the ability to very easily access files wherever you are in the world the one thing is whenever you do that there is a security implication to that and that's one thing that's really important to do is research the brand you're going with and make sure it's going to be secure if you do want to open it up to the Internet and have that external access so that's just one thing to look at they have all gotten a lot better but even in recent years there have been a couple of packs during 2020 and 2021 that did cause people's NASA to get hacked because there were some security flaws in the setup as well as some things that users did it was not all the NASA's fault but that is one thing to make sure to look at before you open the assas up to the Internet is make sure you understand the security implications of it and finally the last and probably one of the most important components to it is accessing the files and how you do that so at the start of this video I talked about the fact that a Nas is Like an external hard drive that you access over the network so either wired ethernet or over Wi-Fi and that is critical because that is going to be the limiting factor for how fast your Nas is 9 times out of 10 and it works just the same way with an external drive except it's a little bit more complex so with an external drive a lot of time if it's fast enough it's going to be Capp to whatever throughput it is able to do so this external drive is USB 3 and so it's going to have USB 3 speeds and so this cable is going to be the limiting factor compared to the very fast SSD that's in there and so whatever connection I've got is going to generally actually be what limits the overall throughput for Nas it's most likely going to be Wi-Fi or wired ethernet so if you have a poor Wi-Fi connection copying large files to and from the nas will take a while but if you have wired ethernet it's going to be a lot better there's really three different standards for wired ethernet 1 gbit which can do about 120 megabytes per second 2.5 gbit which can do about 300 megabytes per second and 10 gbit which can do about 1 Gigabyte per second these are generally the biggest upgrades you can make to your Nas If you're looking to speed things up so if you want to copy massive files like videos to the NAS from your computer as fast as possible probably the biggest upgrade you can make is for wired ethernet and then doing those faster ethernet standards your internet speed so the speed that comes out of your provider like Charter or whoever you've got does not matter in this case as long as you're home because the Nas is going to be talking over the local network directly to your computer so what matters is essentially every single switch between your computer and the nas what speed they can do so the nas will have different ports on the back and some of them are also upgradeable and then it needs to be plugged into a switch a network switch that can also do those speeds so if you upgrade to a 10 gbit card on an ass and plug it into a 1 gbit switch then it's effectively just going to be a 1 gbit connection same thing on your computer side and it's essentially going to be as slow as the slowest Connection in between so if you have two 10 GB switches hooked up via 1 gbit it will go over one gigabit between the two of them and that's the last piece I want to mention there but overall those are the basics before you really look into getting a Nas it is essentially a computer that has storage that you can access anywhere in the world depending on your configuration and it is shared so multiple people can access them at the same time there are also so many additional features that nases can do and you can customize and configure them to your heart's content I make a ton of YouTube tutorials on this so go check out some other ones I'll leave a link to a few beginners guides down the description below and if you have any other comments you can put those down in the comments below all right have a good one [Music] bye

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 11,732

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Id: Rp8_HFoIHpY

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023