Using home NAS as a substitute for local storage: Performance and application compatibility considerations

Question

I recently got a Mac laptop for the first time, and now have 4 computers in the house (2 Mac laptops, 2 Windows desktops). The idea of the laptop is so that I can have more computer time because I can use it in the living room while others watch TV - otherwise I was being extra anti-social I guess which wasn't appreciated :)

The problem is that I have everything on my desktop still, and I want to do some work that requires me to use those [documents, photos, notes, a little video, etc]. I don't want to just copy everything to my laptop since then I'd the headache of multiple versions. I'd like to be able to work from either computer. One of those desktops is used as an HTPC as well, but all that media will continue to be stored locally on it.

I feel like a home NAS would solve the problem, though I'd be using it as my primary storage which is probably unlike a lot of people. I'd move everything there that's on my data drive, so then I could work from either computer using the same data.

So my question is would accessing data on the NAS be fast enough to not be a nuisance? And how much would this vary between different NAS options? I can stand a little bit more sluggish data access, but not really slow. For example, if I was going through photos in a directory using Windows picture viewer, I'm sure flipping thru photos would be a bit slower - that's probably one of the tougher things. I think Windows picture viewer actually preloads the next image.

Would there be other pitfalls to using a NAS as primary data storage? Would applications mostly be able to access things the same? Would saving new items to the NAS from various applications work ok?

I'll say that I do keep a backup, and I would continue to do so if everything was moved to the NAS (using an external HDD).

My network is currently on a Netgear WNDR4000 N750 router (has gigabit, wireless-N, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, 300Mbps + 450Mbps theoretical). I did try out the USB connection on the router with an external drive (ReadyShare) and it worked but was painfully slow. Looking around I see lots of complaints about that and it appears to be just something related to the router.

I have been liking the looks and pricing of the QNAP devices, maybe a 4-bay one. I know they have different options for processors, but I'm not sure if the fast ones would be worth it for my purposes. Does that mainly help out IOPS or actual throughput?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Ok, I've been using my NAS as my main storage for my data for about 6 months now and overall I'm very happy with the results. It's a QNAP TS-231, the simpler of their 2-bay devices. In it I have 2 4TB drives in RAID 1. The speed is what I hoped for, just a small delay if anything, both on wired and wireless connections. I have plenty of room for storage, a RAID 1 for some up-time peace of mind, I can access it from any of my desktops or laptops and even remotely in a web browser using the myQNAPcloud feature which works well. I back it up periodically by connecting an external drive to the QNAP's front USB port, running a remote replication job from local folder (home) to external drive (QNAP's RRTR), and then storing that external off-site.

I've been able to use basically any program with its data stored on the NAS without trouble. I play music from it just fine, edit documents.

The first chance I got, I switched all my Windows 7 Library objects to corresponding folders in my home directory on the NAS. That way I can click all the same quick places that I am used to clicking to get to my stuff. Now in Windows 10, I put those same folders in the Quick Access sidebar on Explorer for the same effect. I still have to be careful that I'm saving to Documents on my NAS (where I want) or Documents on my local disk since occasionally something defaults to the local disk option.

I use Windows 10's Photos viewer to page through my photos and that seems to work great with no noticeable delay (I just upgraded to Win10 last week). Rotating probably takes a few more seconds but it's no big deal. I haven't used the additional features of Photos yet, but for photo viewing it gets the job done and it's fast. The one big complaint I have about it though is that I can't page through photos if the folder is sorted by the date the photo is taken - only when sorted by name. I prefer date taken because I put photos from both my camera and my phone from the same events in the same folder. Ordering by date taken allows me to see them in the correct order. So I'll have to try using the full app (which I hear does go by date taken) or use the original picture viewer which still exists in Windows 10 and allowed for paging through the photos in whatever order they are put in. It's good that's still an option.

On my Mac laptop, things aren't as simple. I am finding I may just not be a fan of OS X in the year I've used it. I'm not able to get things done nearly as well with it. The NAS shows up fine in the Finder on the left side and I use it pretty easily that way. I've been able to use my data, edit and save text files, but it's just not as easy. I have not seen a way to make Documents, etc. point to the directory on my NAS for example like I did with the Libraries in Windows. I can add them to Finder's sidebar to use it there. I'm not a big fan of the Mac adding a new hidden system file for every single file in a directory. Things end up looking very cluttered once I go back to my Windows machine to use the same directory because I see all those extra files.

My experience trying to find a good way to view and page through photos in OS X has been pretty bad. Quick look (highlighting a photo and using the spacebar) works ok. I page through photos using the arrow keys, but the problem there is it doesn't have a linear chronological progression, so I can't put things in order and page through properly, and I have to use up and down in addition to left and right when the folder is arranged in a 2D layout. Using Preview instead I thought would be better but didn't seem to work for me. I selected all the photos in a directory (1000 photos from a trip) with Ctrl-A and then did File > Preview, and it started to show the photos with photo tiles of presumably all the photos vertically on the left, and the first photo in the large area on the right, but it bogged down and basically froze on me. So my next try was using OS X's new Photos app. I found that you have to import photos to use it, and that normally makes a copy for the Photos app to use (this copy is on local disk and only meant for the Photos app). Of course I don't want an extra copy. The reason I have a NAS is so I have a centralized location for my data, I can edit in one place and see the changes in another, and my data doesn't take up all the space on my laptop. So I found thankfully there is a setting to disable that copy so I did. But then when I try to import all photos in my directory, it stalls out and I can't get anywhere that way either. I think I may need to participate in some discussion threads on Apple's site to see what I can do here.