Is a NAS a good idea for my use?

[ScottBuckel]

I have a desktop computer that I use for essentially all of my archive, processing and is the central part of my entire workflow.  It is a Windows 7 machine (quad core with 6 gb of RAM).  It is attached via esata to a Granite digital JBOD that has four drive bays.  I have a Windows 7 laptop, that I many use for travel and I use it to archive images while traveling and a little light editing.  This has worked well for me for the past several years.  i currently have about 90,000 image archive which has started to grow very fast as I have started doing a large number of time lapses and currently the Granite Digital enclosure has 3 1tb drives and 1 2 tb drive.

This weekend my desktop failed to boot and I have taken the computer to the local computer guy for repair.  My problem is that I need to get to my images and I can not do it as the images are located on the Granite Digital JBOD that I can not access with my laptop.  Hopefully, my desktop will be back soon, but this situation has made me realize the hole in my system.  I was wondering if it would be a good idea to add a NAS to my network such that I can access the files.  Back in my lab days we used a NAS to backup data, and I remember it being rather slow.

I am thinking it would be nice to have a duplicate of the files from my laptop that could be accessed by my laptop whenever the desktop has problems.  I would not plan on using the NAS as my main workflow, but as a backup.  Does this seem to be a good approach?  Is there a better approach? 

Thanks,

Scott

[Fredrik_Norrsell]

Maybe, I don't fully understand your problem, but it seems like the easiest solution would to add eSATA capabilities to your laptop. Then you should be able to access your main archive (JBOD) from your laptop as well as easily upload images from the laptop to the JBOD after traveling.

Fredrik

[ScottBuckel]

Fredrik - I wrote the post while very frustrated not being able to put together a submission. 

I guess I was not thinking about eSATA for the lab top in that I have not seen a card that will allow me to connect 4 eSATA cables to my laptop.  It is a great idea and I think I will work with it. 

Scott