Mapping a NAS network drive - Quick Questions

[Vectraat]

My understanding of networking is abysmal at best, so I apologize for the stupid questions in advance. 

This PC --> Map Network Drive --> Select Drive Letter --> Enter NAS IP Address --> Finish. 

1.) I assume this means I'm transferring files over my "LAN", which means this does not use my monthly ISP bandwidth allocation?

2.) When I'm transferring files like this, can my ISP see the names of documents/folders/files etc., that I'm transferring and is this method of transfer secure? Some of the stuff I'm transferring is financial information from my desktop/drives to my NAS that I need to be able to share with clients and obviously I care about security / prying eyes in this situation. 

3.) Would it be faster / more secure to just connect a USB 3.0 drive to my NAS and transfer that way? (If possible). 

[Oshino Shinobu]

1. Yes, it will only go over the local network.

 

2. That depends on the systems you're using. If you're using the built in file sharing capabilities of your ISP provided router, there's a chance they're being dodgy and farming data, but most likely not. 

 

If you're using a dedicated NAS (or basically not the router), and switches rather than using the inbuilt switch on the router, your ISP won't even see that any data is being moved. 

 

Whether it's secure or not really depends on how you have things set up from an encryption and permissions perspective, as well as the overall security of your network. 

 

Most NAS devices have some option to encrypt data, both when storing and transferring it, though this will introduce performance overheads. 

 

3. It may be faster to do that if you're moving very large files, but if not, it's going to be slower to plug in the drive, transfer the data, then move to the NAS and plug it in and transfer it again. Security again depends on how the drive is setup. If you're using a FAT file system on the drive, it's way less secure than your normal NTFS file system as it doesn't even support ACL permissions to control who can access the data. 

 

 

Overall, it's not insecure, but how secure it is really depends on how you set it up and some other parts to your network. If you give everyone full control permissions and then have a crap WiFi password, someone can connect to your network, scan for shares and then take the data. If you have decent network security (basically, a good password on WiFi) and assign permissions to allow access to only who needs it, it's secure. You can enable encryption services on the NAS and share to enhance it as well. 

[Vectraat]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

2. That depends on the systems you're using. If you're using the built in file sharing capabilities of your ISP provided router, there's a chance they're being dodgy and farming data, but most likely not. 

 

If you're using a dedicated NAS (or basically not the router), and switches rather than using the inbuilt switch on the router, your ISP won't even see that any data is being moved. 

 

Whether it's secure or not really depends on how you have things set up from an encryption and permissions perspective, as well as the overall security of your network. 

 

Most NAS devices have some option to encrypt data, both when storing and transferring it, though this will introduce performance overheads. 

 

3. It may be faster to do that if you're moving very large files, but if not, it's going to be slower to plug in the drive, transfer the data, then move to the NAS and plug it in and transfer it again. Security again depends on how the drive is setup. If you're using a FAT file system on the drive, it's way less secure than your normal NTFS file system as it doesn't even support ACL permissions to control who can access the data. 

-I'm not really sure what you mean by: "built in file sharing capabilities" -- I provided the exact steps of how I'm transferring my files to my Synology NAS over Windows 10 Pro in my OP. 

-I'm using a modem/router combo supplied to me via my ISP. I considered buying my own, but what they gave me is more than adequate. So yes, I am connected to a device they provided me, but I wouldn't think they could see what I'm transferring over LAN to my NAS, in fact, someone I know just told me it would be illegal for them to do that. Whether that's even true or not, I have no idea, hence I'm here asking these questions. 

-Encryption is slow. I am also transferring a lot of 4K movies I filmed for private events / weddings etc., so maybe I will try out the external drive connected to my NAS and compare the transfer speeds. 

[Master Disaster]

1) Correct, local transfers wouldn't use monthly bandwidth allowance.

 

2) Nope, they would not be able to see anything you do locally. A router creates 2 networks, an external network between itself and your ISPs DNS server (called the WAN) and an internal network between itself and all your devices (called the LAN). Your ISP can only see what's happening on the external network unless they're doing some really shady shit, anything that happens locally should be separated from them by your router.

 

3) Faster? Depends on 2 things, LAN speeds and USB drive speeds. In my experience of USB drives, even a fast USB 3 HDD wouldn't be as fast as a good LAN connection although to be honest the difference is minimal. USB 3 HDD ~80MB/S, a standard LAN connection ~100MB/S.

 

Secure? Not really, there wouldn't be any immediate security risk from doing a LAN transfer of the files over a USB. In fact it's arguable that the USB method is less secure as it would leave a copy of the files on the drive that, unless you secure erase the entire drive, could be recovered in the future should someone choose too. A LAN transfer wouldn't leave a copy anywhere other than the source and destination.

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Vectraat said:

-I'm not really sure what you mean by: "built in file sharing capabilities" -- I provided the exact steps of how I'm transferring my files to my Synology NAS over Windows 10 Pro in my OP. 

-I'm using a modem/router combo supplied to me via my ISP. I considered buying my own, but what they gave me is more than adequate. So yes, I am connected to a device they provided me, but I wouldn't think they could see what I'm transferring over LAN to my NAS, in fact, someone I know just told me it would be illegal for them to do that. Whether that's even true or not, I have no idea, hence I'm here asking these questions. 

-Encryption is slow. I am also transferring a lot of 4K movies I filmed for private events / weddings etc., so maybe I will try out the external drive connected to my NAS and compare the transfer speeds. 

1. Most Routers have a build in NAS functionality. You didn't mention what you were using as a NAS, so I mentioned it just in case 

 

2. They shouldn't be able to see what is being transferred, but if data is going through it, then can often see something as it will have some logging enabled. I know that on the router my ISP provided, they can see how many devices are connected to it, by what connection (wired/WiFi) and often the different hostnames and IPs of the devices on the local network. That's why I don't use mine. How much they see depends on the device and company. I wouldn't worry too much about it in terms of your ISP doing anything overly dodgy. 

 

3. Depends how you implement it. If you use encrypted containers or drive encryption, for example, it takes a long time to initially set up the encryption (it look around 8 hours for me to encrypt a whole 4TB a little while ago) but once it's done, it doesn't really impact overall performance much. I'd have a look through your NAS's setting and test to see how encryption effects the performance. From my experience, the performance loss from encryption isn't even noticeable when you're transferring over the network (couple of MB/s at most from what I saw).

 

For transferring videos, I'd imagine you'd be okay. I doubt you'll be needing to transfer the files in a hurry, so even if it does take longer, you can set up the transfer and just leave it running. I personally have about 10TB of data stored on a server, which is the bulk of my media storage for my desktop PC and the transfers for 4K moves really aren't too bad. 

 

I pretty much constantly max the 1Gbs link when moving large video files:

 

[Vectraat]

Ok, thanks for the responses guys. So LAN transfers to my NAS (from what everyone is saying) are safe from my ISP's prying eyes. Good to go then. 

Got a different question now.

My NAS has a 26.17 TB capacity. I do film a lot of 4K for work-related projects so at some point, I can see myself using that storage capacity. If hypothetically I filled up a single folder on the NAS with 4K content (26.17 TB) is accessing that folder going to be very slow on my NAS? Or will accessing the footage off that folder in other ways be slow? And should I leave about 5-10% overhead? 

Edit: Also, in terms of Windows File transfer, have you ever had a problem where a file didn't transfer properly/was corrupt as a result of the transfer, or Windows would tell you if something happened during the transfer?

[Oshino Shinobu]

5 minutes ago, Vectraat said:

Ok, thanks for the responses guys. So LAN transfers to my NAS (from what everyone is saying) are safe from my ISP's prying eyes. Good to go then. 

Got a different question now.

My NAS has a 26.17 TB capacity. I do film a lot of 4K for work-related projects so at some point, I can see myself using that storage capacity. If hypothetically I filled up a single folder on the NAS with 4K content (26.17 TB) is accessing that folder going to be very slow on my NAS? Or will accessing the footage off that folder in other ways be slow? And should I leave about 5-10% overhead? 

Generally, as you fill up drives, they will get slower. SSDs are really the only ones that drop in terms of sequential transfer speeds, but disk drive will get slower seek times because as you fill the drives up, files become more spread out (though defragmentation tasks should keep this in check) and of course, if you're searching the system for a file, the more files there are, the longer it will take. It's often overstated though. You don't need to worry about it too much. 

 

Do you know if the NAS is all HDD, all SSD or a mix of both? If it's a mix and the SSDs are being used for caching, you shouldn't need to worry about performance drops. Even with performance drops, typically the drives will still outperform the network for sequential transfers unless you're using over 1Gbps networking equipment. 

 

I'd recommend trying to keep that amount of data organised and prune out stuff you don't need to save space, but really, if you're going to use up the space, you're going to use it. You can try to leave overhead, but really when you're getting to 5% free space, you'd be wanting to look at archiving old data or expanding capacity anyway so you don't run out.

[Vectraat]

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

Generally, as you fill up drives, they will get slower. SSDs are really the only ones that drop in terms of sequential transfer speeds, but disk drive will get slower seek times because as you fill the drives up, files become more spread out (though defragmentation tasks should keep this in check). 

 

Do you know if the NAS is all HDD, all SSD or a mix of both? If it's a mix and the SSDs are being used for caching, you shouldn't need to worry about performance drops. 

 

I'd recommend trying to keep that amount of data organised and prune out stuff you don't need to save space, but really, if you're going to use up the space, you're going to use it. You can try to leave overhead, but really when you're getting to 5% free space, you'd be wanting to look at archiving old data or expanding capacity anyway so you don't run out.

The NAS has 4x 10 TB HDD's in it in a "storage pool" and I created a volume out of it, so I'm basically using the combined storage of all those drives which ='s about 26.17 TB. I do know from personal experience when I fill up an 8 TB external HDD near full, it does seem like the read/writes are a bit slower. But since this is my first time using a NAS, I wasn't sure if the same rule would apply. I just wouldn't want to dump all of my 4K footage into a single NAS folder if at some point it slows down the read/writes to the point where I need to move my footage around. 

My NAS (DS918+) can accept SSDs for caching, but I was on the fence about buying them as I wasn't sure if it was needed. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Vectraat said:

The NAS has 4x 10 TB HDD's in it in a "storage pool" and I created a volume out of it, so I'm basically using the combined storage of all those drives which ='s about 26.17 TB. I do know from personal experience when I fill up an 8 TB external HDD near full, it does seem like the read/writes are a bit slower. But since this is my first time using a NAS, I wasn't sure if the same rule would apply. I just wouldn't want to dump all of my 4K footage into a single NAS folder if at some point it slows down the read/writes to the point where I need to move my footage around. 

My NAS (DS918+) can accept SSDs for caching, but I was on the fence about buying them as I wasn't sure if it was needed. 

It's a property of the drives themselves rather than the format they're in. You shouldn't notice much of a performance decrease. 

 

I'd recommend looking into getting an SSD or two for caching. They only need to be big enough to take the most amount of data you're going to be transferring in one go really. If you use them, even if the drives do start to get slower, you won't notice the performance different, at least not for writes, as you'll be writing to the SSDs, which will then offload the data after you've written to them.