The link in the chain that causes a slowdown is known as a 'bottleneck'. To learn more about performance, start by monitoring data transfer speeds on your NAS server and testing video playback. In general, your performance speeds are only as fast as the slowest equipment in the chain of delivery. You will want to know what hardware or equipment is used at every connection point, such as switches, routers, and cables. To avoid these hangups, you'll want to learn as much as possible about your computing and networking environment.

If your computing environment is non-optimal (and most are), users may experience slowdowns in performance when accessing data on your NAS, such as laggy video playback, skipped frames, or long data transfer times. Users will load and use data as quickly as if they were using the NAS server itself. In an ideal computing environment, data from your NAS server host will be delivered to the client's computer quickly and without any degradation in performance.

For the time being, just keep in mind that in order to be useful, data must be both discoverable and portable, and that consistent naming and arrangement standards must be implemented to achieve this. Naming and arrangement standards are especially helpful for collections that are still growing and evolving, a topic that will be addressed in a future post. You may want to catalog and describe your data, manage it manually or within a Digital Asset Management System, move collections or exchange data with others. To RAID or Not to RAID: How will data on your external storage device will be configured?Īlso, consider using naming and arrangement standards to organize your data so that it can be easily controlled.

Storage Media: What type of hard drives will you use to store data? When making your choice, consider the following three factors:Ĭables and connectors: What connection interface will you will use to connect your storage to your Mac Mini NAS server?

There are many options for expanding storage, such as simply connecting external hard drives to your NAS, attaching a storage device like a DROBO, mounting hard drives with the help of a “drive dock” or “sled”, or hooking up a hard drive array enclosure that holds a set of internal hard drives. The option to attach drives and devices and share them over a network makes your NAS scalable, allowing your storage to increase without incurring huge costs. This is extremely useful for archives or small production environments with collections that take up a lot of space, such as video or other data with large file sizes. Once your NAS storage server is set up and File Sharing is turned on, you can share data from any connected storage device, such as external hard drives or enclosures.

Mac mini external storage