NAS Drive Adapter

[jantheman]

Hey guys. Just wondering if there is such a thing as a network adapter that I can use to plug in a 1Tb USB drive and then use it as a NAS drive. Seems simple enough but I haven't seen one.

[Stratmangler]

I think it's known as buying a network nas;)
USB requires a device to be the master, and the drive is a slave.

Sounds a bit like one of Marco's S&M parties (or so rumour has it) :eek:

[jantheman]

I think it's known as buying a network nas;)
USB requires a device to be the master, and the drive is a slave.

Sounds a bit like one of Marco's S&M parties (or so rumour has it) :eek:
I've heard rumours but not seen the photos...

[Ali Tait]

That's because you've never been behind the little door...

[jantheman]

I've answered my own question. Hours of searching and I've come up with this......
http://www.aimtec.co.uk/addonics-online/featured/nas-2-0-adapter.html

[Stratmangler]

That looks to be quite a handy network gizmo. Nice one:)

[synsei]

Sorry for being a bit thick, but can someone please explain what NAS is and what it does in laymans terms?

[Batty]

Network Accessible Storage, it means you can plug it into your router and can be accessed remotely even better if you have wireless network as you can then stream wirelessly throughout your network to things like sonos or squeezebox without having your PC switched on thus saving energy - which is nice.

My wife just bought me a Netgear ReadyNAS duo and 2 x 2Tb drives. She's a keeper that one.

[Mark Grant]

I've answered my own question. Hours of searching and I've come up with this......
http://www.aimtec.co.uk/addonics-online/featured/nas-2-0-adapter.html

Not bad but there are better devices available, some of these require the USB drive to be reformatted to work and also are very slow and only one PC can access the drive and software is required on the PC with some of them, I will find some links :)

[StanleyB]

My wife just bought me a Netgear ReadyNAS duo and 2 x 2Tb drives. She's a keeper that one.
Which one, the first or the 2nd :scratch:?

[Mark Grant]

A cheap option with a good following, discontinued but often found secondhand:

Linksys NSLU2 known as a 'slug', maybe its slow ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

http://www.itreviews.co.uk/hardware/h1195.htm

http://west-penwith.org.uk/blog/archives/57


More modern device such as Synolgy USB diskstation 2 to share USB drives

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/USBStation2/index.php

http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/news/2010/10/06/Synology-USB-Station-2-Turns-Hard-Disks-into-NAS/p1

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/247315

Although rather than spending £80 on that you might as well buy a 1 drive bay NAS such as Synology DS110j or similar

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS110j/index.php

about £120 but needs a hard drive to install inside it then you can also connect your USB drives to it and share them all on your network.

On the synology NAS drives the application ' surveillance Station' is great, it records IP cameras to its had drive, so you could install a cheap IP camera somewhere and record it easily, if that interests you.
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/features/live_view.php


Many options :)

I prefer a two drive NAS in raid 1 such as DS211j,
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS211j/index.php

they are the budget range but fast enough for most people, can easily stream two HD films at once.

[WAD62]

Yet another alternative...

I use a QNAP TS-119Turbo which is classed as a NAS, but has a 1.2ghz processor and 500Mb of RAM, so it's more of a mini server. But if you want to use it for anything other than a basic NAS file access you'll need the grunt!

It's silent, and you'll need another USB drive to do the RAID backup to, so you can use your current one for that.

[Stratmangler]

How does the QNAP cope with sox resampling of 24/192 files on the fly, Will ?

[WAD62]

How does the QNAP cope with sox resampling of 24/192 files on the fly, Will ?

I've not tried it Chris, but from my dabbling with it as a Winamp plugin (FFSoX) I'd say it could just about handle it for 1 client, it adds about 10% CPU to my desktop for 24/96, and about 15% for 24/192. But it would probably make things a little unstable/unresponsive.

What we need is a client that's capable of SoX upsampling, so one can have the benefits of lightweight FLAC streaming (otherwise it's back to ethernet, which is no good for a multi player environment), and client upsampling (in the same way as my winamp is). Otherwise you'd need an IBM blade to guarantee performance, particularly if one started to add multiple clients.

These new Android epads might make a perfect SB client with enough grunt to run plugins, and a USB out to a DAC ;)