NAS Queries RN214

You are thinking of a NAS like a multi-drive USB dock.  It's not at all like that.  A NAS is a computer running a Linux based operating system with hardware and software optimized for file sharing and RAID.  It's more like a server.

You can restrict users or groups of users to specific shares.  You can put separate volumes on separate drives and put those shares on specific volumes if you so choose, but it's not necessary for the kind of security you are looking for and is a lot more work than necessary.  Typically, you would have one RAID data volume and many shares.  The Admin user, of course, has full access to all data.

The user limit for Linux used to be 64K, but that has changed to something over 4 million.  But one of the Netgear employees will have to let you know if there is a secondary limit in the ReadyNAS OS linked to the GUI and/or ReadyCloud.  Of course, not all those could ever log on at once, but that's not what you are looking to do.  You should state how many users you expect to be using the NAS concurrently so you can get advise on whether the 200 series is enough NAS for you.

Since you are so interested in drives, I'm wondering if you are thinking you can remove the drive once a customer has left you.  If you have separate volumes on separate drives, you can.  But putting those volumes back in and accessing them is not supported.  If I'm reading too much into your plans, then just ignore this.

Hello Daniel1000,

Welcome to the community!

I will try to answer your questions for now. I strongly suggest to contact support team when installing your ReadyNAS the first time as they can walk you through setting it up and at the same time you can ask questions and recommendations for how you want it to be set up.

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Do I have to Raid the drives? Follow up; If 'no', then can I restrict access to each drive individually? i.e. User 1 can access Bay 1, User 2 - Bay 2, etc. Obviously taking into consideration the admin having control of all?

 

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RAID is for protection from data loss. RN214 is a 4-bday NAS and below are the RAID levels you can set with it.

• RAID 0. RAID 0 distributes data across multiple disks, resulting in improved disk performance compared to systems that do not use RAID formatting. The total capacity of your storage system equals the capacity of the smallest of your disk drives times the number of disks. RAID 0 is available on volumes consisting of two or more hard disks.

• RAID 1. This RAID level provides full redundancy of your data, because it duplicates data across multiple disks. Exactly the same data is stored on two disks at all times. RAID 1 protects your data from loss if one disk fails. The total capacity of our storage system equals the capacity of your smallest disk.
  
  
• RAID 5. This RAID level also provides data redundancy, but it requires at least three disks. RAID 5 uses the capacity of one disk to protect you from data loss if one disk fails. Your data is distributed across multiple disks to improve disk performance. The total capacity of your storage system equals the capacity of all your disks minus the capacity of one disk. It is supported on systems with at least four drive bays.
  
  
• RAID 6. This RAID level can recover from the loss of two disks. Your data is distributed across multiple disks to improve disk performance. The total capacity of your storage system equals the capacity of all your disks minus the capacity of two disks. It is supported on systems with at least four drive bays.

You could use RAID calculator for checking how much volume capacity you would get when combining same or different sizes of disks with different RAID levels. That might help decide which RAID level to use.

There is also another configuration that you can use with the NAS. This, however, does not offer protection.

• JBOD. This most basic RAID level does not protect your data from loss if one of your drives fails. JBOD is available only on volumes consisting of a single hard disk.

Using JBOD allows you to build one volume per disk.

Regarding permission, this is not something you can set on each volume or drive/disk. It is set on shares. After creating user accounts, you may set access rights on each share for the users you have created. Please see this FAQs for more information. As for limit on user accounts, I haven't heard there is. You may delete the user from the admin page of the NAS and permissions you have set on the shares will just automatically adjust to it.

Regards,