swapping company dedicated disks?

[thintz]

I do a lot of video and photo work for companies which often generates huge amounts of data on the hard drive. Would it be possible to set up NAS so that I can give say a 2TB disk a volume name so I could dedicate that disk to one companies material? I would like to be able to simply swap out hard drives (all identical size if need be) so I can keep the companies info separate and not run out of storage space so quickly.
I hope I am explaining this right and am in the right forum for this!

[mdgm]

No, don't do this.

SATA connectors are designed for a limited number of pulls. Also handling disks bare there is a much greater risk you will damage them.

The backup functionality is in Frontview for a reason.

[sphardy]

Can you not just setup a separate share for each client? Why do you need physical separation of the data?

If you need to use separate disks, and all the data would fit on a single disk, irrespective of the ReadyNAS SATA connector reliability you would be far better off sticking to Direct Attached Storage (USB/Firewire/eSATA)

- Plug & play is then a non-issue,
- The disks are physically protected in the case
- You have unlimited options as to how you format the disks
- You could still invest in a RAID setup for protection, something you lose with your proposal

[thintz]

Can you not just setup a separate share for each client? Why do you need physical separation of the data?

If you need to use separate disks, and all the data would fit on a single disk, irrespective of the ReadyNAS SATA connector reliability you would be far better off sticking to Direct Attached Storage (USB/Firewire/eSATA)

- Plug & play is then a non-issue,
- The disks are physically protected in the case
- You have unlimited options as to how you format the disks
- You could still invest in a RAID setup for protection, something you lose with your proposal

Perhaps a separate storage system as you mention would be a better plan. i like the NAS and will certainly need the storage it offers for my files before too long. I thought of the separate shares idea but with only 8TB of total space and dozens of clients that could get used up very fast. does NetGear make such a device? I like their stuff so far and would like to stick with them when I can.

Thanks!

[sphardy]

I thought of the separate shares idea but with only 8TB of total space and dozens of clients that could get used up very fast.

Maybe consider a new NAS? 6 bays with 3TB drives would give you up to 15TB of protected storage and will be expandable. Implement the same with multiple separate external devices and you're not going to save anything financially and potentially make life more complicated.

Are you factoring in backup of your data into all this?

[thintz]

I have separate computes for everything else, just do the video work on the one that needs all of the space. i might piggyback another NAS eventually but have been talking to another guy in the same business and he is using standalone USB devices, one per customer and that is working well for him.I just looked at a couple of my more serious accounts and they are easily beyond 2TB each in the last year alone. I am offloading everything 6-months an older to hard drives using an old tower computer as the mother ship as while that works it could be cleaner. I got a list of stand alone boxes to look at. the attractive thing about the standalone deals is that I can label them for the customer and it simplifies the whole file system a bunch for me.
I got the NAS working fine now, backing up on its own using the shadow program. I still can;t get it to find thefolderss on the other computers on its own. as long as theShadoww program works, that's fine.