Storage Options

RDKirk wrote in post #18966855
You can never get the Wifi speed they advertise.

davesrose wrote in post #18966633
One should be aware that hard disk technology has improved exponentially. You previously provided anecdotal evidence about your hard drive failures. For quite some time, platter drives have relied on improved air bearings for floating heads and maintain accurate tracking. It's also an example of how parking heads instead of letting them float can cause wear. The main hard drive failure I saw in my lifetime was when I booted up my Dad's old AT IBM when he had already backed up any data on tape and transferred on other computers well after I tried demoing it 15 years after. Its "Winchester" drive did have a failure, so no boot. No loss for anyone except my curiosity about an original PC. The main hassles I've had with data loss is rebuilding boot sectors (way back when my first computers were DOS). There were great strides in miniaturization from the earliest large mainframe platter HDs to the first PCs to now smaller platters that are much higher density. Miniaturizing heads while also maintaining an envelope where they stay above the disk surface. I myself am amazed how many external drives I'm amassing. Some 5.25 with external bricks, some portable with just USB 3. I have had instances where a portable will accidentally drop from my armchair to floor, and no loss in data. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and also decided to get an external SSD USB-C for backup/travel drive. I like it for portability and 2x speed compared to my other platter drives...but don't view it as any more permanent than platter at this stage. It would be irresponsible to completely discourage redundant storage. I have been doing redundant storage, but have yet to need to restore (within 20 years).

J-Blake wrote in post #18966792
Is there a substantial loss of speed using NAS over an internal HD setup? Can anyone quantify this in relative (third grade) terms? I'm using a Google Wifi for a network router and mainly processing photo's though they can be quite large on rare occasion (4 GB and over). How about if I were processing video's? Is this a viable solution with regard to speed?

joeseph wrote in post #18967275
fixed that for you...

Wilt wrote in post #18967319
Yes, I have to admit that NAS access is indeed somewhat slower than a directly connected (either motherboard connected or USB connected), when the drive is accessed for the first time ...like it is waking up. I have never compared data transfer rates (after the wakeup lag) to quantify mb/sec rates across hardwired ethernet connections between PC and router and NAS.

edit: I just found Synology's spec for speed of their DS218, 113 MB/s reading. That is why I have any photo files from the current year on the local harddrive, while photos taken from last year (or earlier) are stored on the NAS,