Network Attached Storage (NAS) / Storage Area Network (SAN)

What is the Difference

A NAS is a storage device operating on data files, while a SAN is a network of devices operating on disk blocks. Usually, a SAN uses Fiber Channel interconnects, while a NAS connects through Ethernet TCP/IP. When installing more than a few NAS devices becomes impractical, larger structural organizations will use SAN for improved scalability and performance.

Users can now find affordable controllers for IDE/ATA/SATA drives, which provide increased security and performance. Many of the high performance external drives that are available on the market are self-contained RAID 0 systems. They are preconfigured for performance rather than data security. Good examples of that are Buffalo Tera Station, Maxtor Shared Storage, Netgear, Lacie, and Quantum Snap Servers.

The complexity of recovering NAS / SAS devices does not lie in the way the raid is configured, which is generally standard, or in the number of drives involved. The complexity arises from the proprietary Linux-based file systems which are used by these devices.