I’m not a professional tester of IT equipment. And this blog is primarily about film photography. But I can’t avoid addressing the issue of digital image storage: unless you develop your film in a dark room, use an enlarger and get large prints the good old way, the images on your film will be digitized at some point, will be consumed digitally, and will have to be stored and archived on digital media. Because Adobe Lightroom is more flexible than the proverbial cardboard shoebox.

Over the years, I’ve been using consumer grade storage systems from brands like Buffalo and LaCie, until I settled on a Network Attached Storage system (a NAS) from Netgear. The RN104, that I purchased in 2014, fulfilled his duties honorably until last year, when it started to misbehave: the disks got corrupted  (probably because of an unstable supply of power) and I had to restore the data from a backup on Amazon Glacier. More recently a power spike (probably due to a bad connection between the external power brick and the NAS enclosure itself) fried the motherboard and gave me an opportunity to reconsider my allegiance to Netgear, and to consumer grade NAS in general.

What I’m asking is pretty simple: I don’t want to store Terabytes of images on a single laptop equipped with a single drive – I want to store my pictures (RAW and jPEG) on a device accessible by the computers (PC, Mac, iPad) connected to my wireless LAN. That device has to be local – I’m using Lightroom to catalog, upload, edit and print my images, and a broadband connection would be far too slow if I used some form of cloud storage as the primary location of my pictures. That perfect device should also act as a Time Machine target for the backup of my Macs. And of course, because hard drives are inherently fragile, I want the device to offer some form of disk redundancy – ideally, it should be also be able to backup its data on a low cost, on-line archival service.

Most of the recent NAS devices (from Netgear and from competitors) meet those basic requirements. They can also stream video (they take care of decoding) and, because their OS is generally based on some Linux distribution, they can be used as multi-purpose servers (not only as file servers, but also as application servers to run Drupal, Joomla, php, or Python applications, for instance). I have no use for those features and they’ve not been part of my evaluation criteria.

• So, what I’m looking for?
  • a NAS,
  • solidly built (case, power supply, connector)
  • with removable drives – that can be moved to a SAN enclosure of the same family, without losing configuration or data (in case the original enclosure dies, or a capacity upgrade is necessary)
  • with good data protection (RAID 5 or better)

The Netgear RN104 met the requirements for the most part:

• most of the issues I have encountered with my old RN104 have been power supply and power supply connector related – with dreadful consequences for the data on the disks and ultimately for the chassis itself.
• until the big crash last year, the NAS was configured with RAID-X, the proprietary implementation of RAID in Netgear’s devices. With RAID-X one disk is reserved for parity, the other disks store data (it’s more or less equivalent to RAID 4). With Raid-X, volumes are easy to expand, but if you lose more than one disk, you’re dead in the water.
• the Western Digital RED 1TB disks  that I bought separately for it (the Netgear chassis can be purchased diskless) proved flawless

When the RN104 chassis finally died, I considered buying a Sinology or Qnap enclosure, but I would have had to reformat the drives and restore everything from the Amazon Glacier backup, again. Sinology and Qnap are well considered on the marketplace, but seem to use the same type of external power supply brick as the Netgear, and maybe even the same dreaded power connector. Unfortunately, chassis with a built in power supply are much more expensive. 

Ultimately, buying a new Netgear NAS device appeared to be the lesser evil. The RN214 unit I bought accepted my old Western Digital drives and recovered its configuration automatically from them. It was on line in less than 15 min after I had received it. Performance seems to have massively improved during the last 5 years. The new units  have a quad core ARM processor at 1.4 GHZ and 2GB  RAM, as opposed to a single core processor at 1.2 GHz and 512 MB RAM for old  model. The power brick and the connector are the same, but being new, everything clicks reassuringly and I hope they will age better than their predecessor.

The operating system is the same  as before (Netgear 6.10), the unit accepts the same additional applications (plus a video streaming app that could not have worked on the old unit). As before, the unit can connect to a few external cloud storage services to backup its data (but not to Amazon Glacier, unfortunately) and the Web user interface is reasonably pleasant to use. I did not have to configure this unit (the config information is stored on the disks and moves to a new enclosure when you swap the drives) but my recommendation would be to read the manual carefully if you want to configure a unit from scratch (the factory defaults are not always the best, in my opinion).

I paid $250.00 for the diskless unit (it’s discounted at the moment). Netgear also offers models pre-populated with disks. There is a good warranty on the hardware, but tech support is only available as an extra-cost subscription (storage issues can be vexing,  hard to diagnose and time consuming to fix, and I understand Netgear can’t offer free support on a device  sold for a few hundred dollars). But Tech Support won’t get your data back if your disks are too badly corrupted, so a good backup is your best friend.

Back to photography, now…

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