NAS Storage VS Desktop Drives For Photographers

Affordable Backup Storage Solutions for Photographers

Many of you will have heard about NAS (Networked Attached Storage) drives but It’s less common that a drive would be called a DAS (Direct Attached Storage). in this video we are comparing a Two-Bay Synology NAS drive and a Desktop (DAS) Hard Drive from Seagate.

Price Per Terabyte

At the time of this video the Synology enclosure with 12 terabytes of storage costs around about £750 the desktop attached storage drive from Seagate with 16 terabytes of storage was £350. So for the price of one Synology Enclosure with two 6 TB drives inside, you can have two of the Seagate 16 terabyte drives. Clearly the price of the Network Attached Storage (NAS) is significantly higher than a more traditional desktop drive.

NAS VS DAS

We're going to start by looking at this option from Synology. The enclosure is designed to allow you to put two hard drives inside, connect this to your router and this drive will allow you access to your files anywhere in your local network (hence the name Network Attached Storage). The connection speed that you've got to your router over your wireless network is much much slower than a fast wired connection you would get by plugging directly into a desktop drive. So if you’re looking for a faster More stable connection drive directly attached to your computer will be the better choice.

Storage Recommendation for Photographers

We're going to talk in a separate video about why you might want to choose NAS over a Desktop Attached Storage (DAS) solution it but for the majority photographers if you're looking for a quick solution look for desktop drives forget about the NAS, It's more expensive and if you don't know why you need it, you probably don't need it.

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