I’ve been using NASs for years on my home network and they absolutely rock.
Permissions are easy to setup for the 3 NASs I have used and they support way more than 2 users. I think some of them may have limits but it’s probably in the 255+ range if there are any so way more than you would ever need for a home or even a small office.
As far as speed goes it all depends on the NAS and raid configurations you get. I’m sure if you cheap out on the NAS you’ll end up with a slower system but even then you should be able to get decent speed out of it if that’s your goal.
Benefits of using a NAS:
- You can keep all of your data on it and allow every one and the computers to access it.
- You don’t need to build/biuy a whole computer system to use it (though they really are specialized computer systems)
- They are usually much smaller and lower power usage than a sever would be
- They tend to be easy to setup and maintain
If you really want or need a server for your home network a NAS is not the way to go but I don’t think most homes or even small businesses really need a dedicated server let alone a server running 24/7.
I have about 8 windows systems of various flavors (mostly my old desktops and laptops used as render nodes) plus, NAS(s), xbox360, PS3, HDTV, Wii, some Nintendo DSs, a few smartphones, a few wifi web cams and probably some other stuff on my home network and I have never run any any dedicated servers. I have a router with wifi and firewall. Also a switch for a few extra wired connections. I have my NAS and we keep ALL of our data (work, pictures, music, video, etc) on the NAS. Everyone has access to the data from any system. The NAS has media streaming as well as fun stuff like FTP, web streaming and so on. I share data over the web when needed though I tend to leave the web and ftp stuff off most of the time as an extra security measure. This is the one area where a dedicated server might come in handy but you would also need to have a good idea of what you were doing and want to maintain the server which I don’t. I tend to run Vray render slaves and DR nodes on 5+ systems at the same time at home. All scene data is always on the NAS and everything has worked really well for the past 6 years of doing this. Again all NAS no server involved.
Recently I have been dealing with larger files and the write speed of my RAID 5 NAS has been a bottle neck so (I also ran out of storage space) so I upgraded and switched to RAID 10. Now I cap out my Gigabit Ethernet speeds and the bottle neck is now Gigabit Ethernet. In the cases where I want/need a huge amount of speed I copy temp files to my workstation but this tends to only be when editing HD and HD stereo 3d video in AFX. I don’t network render AFX (tough I guess I could) so it’s not much of an issue. And even in these cases most of the time the RAID 5 was fast enough and only in the most heavy layers and uncompressed video situations did I need to localize for editing when using RAID 5. Since my RAID 10 is a very recent addition I’m not sure how the heavy video editing will be. I have noticed uncompressed HD video is playing smoothly from the NAS now but before it would stutter. That is a good sign that I will probably have to do less localization in these extreme situations. The big win is I keep all of my data on the NAS and only have to back that up and don’t worry about my work stations and the temp data on them. Though I do image my workstations to the NAS on a regular basis in case one dies so I can quickly get it back up and running.
What I’m getting at is that going with a good NAS can work out great and if speed is something you are worried about just make sure you go with a the RAID that makes the most sense for you. Of course setting up a good fast NAS with a lot of storage isn’t cheap but I find it’s well worth it and much easier to deal with than trying to maintain a network server of some kind.
On a side note while I have my NASs in redundant raid setups I also have them scheduled to backup regularly to an attached USB drive (a smaller USB raid in my case) and I also always have an off site copy. I have two USB backup drives, one attached to the raid that picks up the weekly scheduled backups and I swap it with a duplicate USB backup drive off site regularly. Always taking the onsite drive to the off site drive (so I never have all of my data and backups in one place) then bringing the off site drive back home, rinse and repeat. This way if I’m robbed, or the house burns down I still have a fairly fresh off site copy of all of my data. You could also do this with a internet/“cloud” based backup service as well. My new NAS supports web/cloud backups out of the box. I just find I don’t want to pay a monthly fee forever and don’t mind swapping my backup drives to my off site storage location. I also have a lot of data and if I had to recover it from the web it would take much longer than getting my off site backup. I still might do some limited cloud storage at some point though as internet speeds are getting faster every day. It’s not cheap but it does make me less worried about losing any of my files.
So my advice is clearly go with the NAS, backup regularly and keep an off site or cloud backup. Servers while possibly more flexible and maybe a bit faster are more than you need just for storage or even things like FTP, web access and the likes. Oh, if you don’t already have a router that has a firewall (which most do these days) you should get one of those as well.
