Last week I decided to buy a NAS. Every time I buy some new geek stuff, I spend many hours on research to select the optimal model. I usually start out with a price comparison site like pricerunner or prisjakt (in Swedish only). Of course I set up some requirements as well. My initial requirements was:

1. Support for Windows & Mac OS (Samba or an equivalent solution)
   
2. Secure FTP server
3. Reasonable amount of harddisk space

Nothing special, but at least I need to know what I am looking for. After a couple of hours of hard research I had these alternatives left:

1. Netgear Stora Home Network Storage MS2110
2. D-Link DNS-313 or D-Link DNS-323
3. Synology Diskstation DS110J or DS210J NAS server

Of course there are a lot of other brands, but these are the ones that I feelt was right for me. Both Netgear and D-Link are brands that I knew before, but I have never heard of Synology. The Netgear model is the most affordable. It comes with a pre-installed harddisk which is 1 TB big. It also has the option of adding an additional harddisk. The D-Link and Synology NAS servers requires you to install one or two harddisks yourself. I prefer to select the harddisk myself. The Netgear looks a little bit bulky.  The D-Link and both have support for Samba and FTP.  The feature that sticks out on the Synology NAS is the Amazon S3 support. Today I make backup using an S3 account. It would be even more convenient if the NAS could do that for me. Then I could schedule backups when I am not at home and have my computer with me. Last but not least, Synology have forums with many active users.

When I receive the NAS I want to change the network a little bit as well. This is how it looks today:

Our family photos are saved on either of the external harddisks. I sync these harddisks with the excellent Beyond Compare tool. When in sync, I use Jungle Disk to do the backup. Even though Beyond Compare is my favorite tool, I find it a little bit boring to synchronize these harddisks.  This is where the new solution should be a little bit smoother.

This is how it should look like after the upgrade.


Now we could store all of our photos on the Synology NAS server. The NAS server do backup at scheduled times. No need to synchronize the harddisk anymore. Each the computers should backup other valuable content as well, to the NAS. There is still room for improvement. For example, I plan to have wired connections to all computers in the household. The "old" switch that is used for the home entertainment should be replaced by a faster one.

But what model did I choose? You might have guessed it; I ordered the Synology DS110J together with a Western Digital Green 640 GB harddisk. This way I have an environmental friendly solution. All Synology products are designed to be environmental friendly. Notice that I use a D-Link Green DGS-1005D switch in the new network solution. 

That is all for now. I am really eager to get started with my new NAS. The original ETA was tomorrow, but the time seems to have slipped. I hope that it will arrive before the weekend.