It's time to stop buying those standard USB external hard drives. We've found a much better solution.
For the past few years, we have been traveling with a 2-bay Synology NAS (network attached storage) device. This NAS was fairly big, especially when it had to fit in my backpack for three months while we filmed with Elia, but it allowed Patrick and me to edit footage simultaneously, and it gave us peace of mind knowing that the footage was always on two separate drives. Soon after we wrote a post about how clever we thought our solution was, Synology contacted us and informed us that there is a much smaller option, the DS416slim.
The DS416slim is an incredibly small NAS device. It's almost half the size of our previous unit. It holds four laptop-sized hard drives (or SSD drives if your budget permits), and it allows you to use RAID to keep your data redundant and safe. My favorite feature of this little box is that it has two Ethernet ports on the back meaning that we no longer have to travel with a switch if there are only two of us. We simply plug two laptops directly into the DS416slim and we can download footage, or edit footage at the same time.
If we are going to be working on a project with a larger crew, I'll bring along the MikroTik hAP AC wireless router (I showed the wrong one in the video). This little box allows five computers to be connected to the NAS at once via Ethernet and even more users wirelessly.
The only downside to this current setup is that laptop hard drives are maxed out at 2 TB meaning that you can only get 4 TB of storage with redundant RAID 1. This may or may not be enough for you. However, if 4 TB is enough, I'm not sure there is a more convenient option currently on the market.
The only problem with the Nas is when you are working with a mac. On windows it is really fast but if you have a directory full of file (photographers usually have) the time needed for finder to show them is so annoying...this is a well known issue with mac os and SMB protocol that apple still don't want to fix. So for now my nas is only for backup as I cannot work on it at all on mac os (but I can on my surface pro)
bummer. Never heard of this.
Then don't use SMB on the Mac, use AFP or better still NFS.
Killer info. Thanks for the share!
Backblaze puts out har drive reliability reports. They use a lot different drives in their facilities and they monitor and report on them quarterly:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q3-2017/
As to a NAS, you want a system where you can have a two drive redundancy. Just remember that even on a one drive redundant system, if there are 3 or 4 other drives it can take days to rebuild the data when a replacement drive is put in.
If you are taking a RAID with you, go with an SSD solution. As careful as you may think you are, one drop is all it takes to lose everything.
Also, if you are travelling and have access to the internet, backup your files to the cloud or setup a server at home that you can connect to using something like RESILIO:
https://www.resilio.com/
That way, if something does happen to your road backup, you'll have a copy to fall back up.
I used to have a Synology unit but I found it too slow. They've released faster systems since then but I built my own NAS using FreeNas as the OS. While the instructions on the FreeNas site call for some strict hardware requirements, you can build a system that functions quite well without following all of the rules. I have one system at home and another at a relatives. My data is backed up on their system and their data on mine.
The biggest problem with dual disk redundancy is it is becoming obsolete due to the size of the drives.
A large RAID 6 array with 8 TB, 10 TB or worse 12 TB drives could take weeks to rebuild, not days and therefore the risk of another Unrecoverable Error (URE) puts all your data at risk.
For this reason, my new NAS is a QNAP with 8x 8 TB Helium drives in RAID 10.
Yes, I loose half the storage, but rebuild time is hours and the array is much faster due to not having to calculate parity.
32 TB + 512 GB of the fastest Samsung PCI SSD for OS and applications and backed up to a Backblaze B2 account makes this thing a beast.
It saturates my Gig E LAN on writes over NFS, so no problem with speed here.
I've built my own NAS boxes before, but got fed up with the size and noise of them and at the end of the day, it's only as fast as your LAN.
I really like the QNAP's, they are more expensive than Synology, but a lot faster and more solid in build.
Hey Lee Morris is it 10GbE or regular GbE ? Seems to be "only" regular GbE but would be nice to confirm. Thanks
Just 1 gbps
Hi Lee, just reading this very helpful article / watching your video! Can I ask you (and others in the comments) - you mention using 2.5" SATA hard drives, laptop size. Do you use dedicated NAS hard drives, which seem to cost more, or just regular laptop ones like the one you linked to? Just checking! I read that NAS ones are recommended as they have low vibration and operating temperatures designed specifically for bay systems like this, and that using standard ones can result in issues. What are your findings?
Much obliged and great to see practical articals like this here alongside the inspirational ones!