To NAS or not to NAS...

[eoren1]

I've been trying to figure out the benefits of a NAS system and whether it makes any sense to purchase one in the near future.

My current setup:
1 desktop PC running Vista and 1 macbook. All photo work done on the desktop.

My planned setup:
Media Center PC running Vista (about 500gigs storage) - will act as PVR, iTunes media center, DVD player. Would live in the living room attached to an LCD TV. It's in a nice Antec case that looks like a stereo component.
Mac mini in the home office with as big an internal drive as I can find (maybe 500 gigs) and an external firewire drive. Connected to my NEC 20inch monitor. Will do all photo work there. Not sure I can justify a Macpro for this though that would give me easier expandability and RAID if I wanted it...
Macbook for around the house work and to take on work trips. Would use the 'back to my mac' feature for accessing the mini while away.

I'm not sure where a NAS fits into this scheme. Anyone using a NAS in their photo workflow? The benefits I can see are:
Expandability. Though the firewire drive attached to the mini could serve that purpose for less money.
Ability to access the NAS from the home machines and while away. I could conceivably encode files to the NAS from the media center and play downloaded files from there as well.

As a lightroom user, I now only have CR2 files and upload processed JPGs directly to smugmug. I no longer have JPGs residing on my drive and therefore don't have those stored on smugmug. That move took away my off site backups. One of the plans for having a NAS was to partition space and allow a friend in Florida to back up over the net to me and I would do the same. That would allow for cheap easily expandable off site backups. Not sure if I could have the mac mini serve the same function.

So, am I missing some core functionality that the NAS offers? Would you change any of the above to accomodate a NAS? Would love to hear your thoughts.
E

[CatOne]

I have an Infrant ReadyNAS. 4x750 GB drives gives me about 2 TB of usable storage, connected via Gigabit Ethernet.

I use it to store backups of everything, and I put big files that I could get again (installers, etc.,) there for ease of keeping. It's not as fast as a local drive so I don't use it as a primary, but I can access anything there from every machine on my network, so it's convenient for that.

I don't use it as my primary as I don't back it up in its entirety... I'm very particular about backups so I would never have my only copy of precious stuff there... RAID is not truly a backup.

[mwgrice]

I use a NAS (couple of reasonably large disks [750 GB, I think] in a D-Link DNS-323). It's slow, but it does allow me to store a lot of data.

But I would go on step further on RAID. RAID isn't a backup at all. You delete a file, it's gone. I've seen enough weird RAID issues on higher-end gear to say that you still need to back it up.

[eoren1]

Hey guys,
Thanks for the posts. It concurs with what I know of the utility of NAS. It seems that if I have enough storage available for the media center and for the mac mini, the NAS may not have much use. After all, I can always access those files from within my home network on each machine for the rare times I need to.
As far as RAID, I completely agree. That's why my ultimate goal is offsite backup with a friend. Just trying to figure out the best way to set that up...
E

[ChrisJ]

I would say that a NAS is most useful in a larger (but not too large!) environment. With only 2 systems, it's not too hard to copy back and forth if you need to.

I have 2 desktops and 4 laptops, and I don't use a NAS. I just turn on my main desktop if I ever need to have access to the files there.

For backups... My main system has a 500 Gig data disk (separate from the OS). I back up *everything* on that disk to an external periodically. With Terabyte disks approaching (not quite there) $200 golden price, it's a pretty cheap solution. I also upload all of my processed images to Smugmug, of course. :D

[cmason]

Well I haven't yet purchased a NAS, and that is because I have a big USB attached drive, attached to my main PC. I use basic backup software to backup my files and photos nightly. For the two other PCs, I simply share this drive over the Windows network (behind my firewall naturally), and use basic backup software on each of these to backup to this shared drive. NAS without the NAS. Of course my main PC must be on, but it is on all the time anyway. Btw, I also share my printer this way, thus eliminating the need for a print server.