NAS Storage

[#1]

Now that I am getting heavily back into photography (with some video editing) I want to get a NAS storage device that will serve me well now and for some time to come. With uncompressed raw files from a 61MP camera coming in at around 120MB each I'll need a fair bit of storage (maybe 12TB to start with). I need redundancy built in so that if a drive dies any missing files can be rebuilt.

Ideally I'd also like it to be able to connect to the internet so that I can edit on-the-go.

Does anyone have any advice or recommendations as I am totally new to this?

Ta.

[#2]

I use a Synology NAS with a pair of 2TB drives.

[#3]

It depends on your budget, but you won't go far wrong with Synology. Not the cheapest by any means, but after a disappointing experience with a Netgear NAS, I am now on my second Synology. device

A two bay device will give you a degree of backup of each disk, you can configure external secure access as well as many other things.

Every now and then, if you know the right people, there can be bargains, or at least ways of saving a few quid - such as buying the right desktop USB drives, and shuckeing them - rather than paying around 50% more for the equivalent drive!

HTH.

[#4]

Thanks for the replies.

Based on what you have said and what I have been reading I am thinking of the DS920+ that has four drive bays expandable to 9. I could possibly get 4 x 6TB drives for less than £500. If I'm correct then using RAID 1 would give me a starting capacity of 12TB?

[#5]

@Mav 

Been ages since I did this, I actually had my own server at home and used to remote desktop into it from work!

I am probably wrong, so I am sure someone will correct me. 🙂

RAID 1 just stores a copy across each disk.

RAID 5, (which is what I used) shares the parity information across all disks. So if you lose one disk it can be rebuilt. The downside is you lost the capacity size of one disk. So you'd only have 3 x your 6TB drives available to use whilst the rest of the each physical disk stores information about the others and it is split across them.

Something like that anyway. I only know the basic about servers so I am sure someone who knows more can correct me.

EDIT: I was talking rubbish about RAID 1 earlier, I was thinking of RAID 0. Still I would look into RAID 5.

[#6]

I’ve a DS918+ with 4 X 6TB drives. Using synology’s SHR (hybrid raid) gives 3 X 6 TB, but with system overheads that leaves about 16Tb usable. I wouldn’t plan for the expansion unit instead either consider buying a larger unit with more bays or look to replace the drives with larger ones later on.
Plenty of info here Synology community group 

[#7]

I doubt you could go wrong with Synology @Mav. I have an RS815+ rack mount server and it's companion RS418 expansion and they have served me well. However, considering what's available now my eight disks are quite small at 3TB but in their current configuration (SHR, btrfs) I have 15.7TB of usable, highly redundant storage space.

[#8]

I'm on a budget so I have a 2 bay Synology DS220j with a couple of 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in RAID 1. This NAS will take drives up to 16TB. The processor is a bit weedy but it does everythig that I need, mainly security camera storage and daily back ups.

[#9]

I seem to be the odd one out here insofar as I use Netgear NAS units as opposed to the probably more upmarket Synology.

I'll admit ICBW (and I welcome correction), but at the time several years ago when I made the Netgear choice it was because I concluded they were the first to have the ability to expand the array by adding disks without having to re-build from scratch, although they probably all have that feature now.

I've got two, one is a 6 bay unit populated with 3 x 10 TB Seagate Enterprise HDDs (so 3 bays free) configured in RAID 5, giving me 18.18 TB of usable space.

The other is a 2 bay with a single 10 TB drive as above, which is used to back up certain important stuff on an automated daily basis from the first, giving a third copy of that stuff, so redundancy not as important as it's unlikely, although not impossible, that both devices will fail together.

My thinking on using higher capacity drives and not populating all bays is because it gives more flexibility for future expansion, in fact I used to have 3 x 4 TBs in the 6 bay (and 1 x 4TB in the 2 bay), and rather than add more of the same size I replaced all the 4 TBs with 10TBs.

(The 4 x 4 TBs were then loaded into another 4 bay rack mount Netgear NAS which I moved on).

[#10]

Thanks for all the advice - very informative and given me much more understanding of what I am looking for.

[#11]

You've probably already realised @Mav , but it's advisable to get proper NAS HDDs and not take chances populating your NAS with desktop versions for various reasons, which if you need to know what those are Mr. Google will tell you.

[#12]

@RobPN 

Even taking that into account 6TB NAS drives range from around £150 to over £200.

[#13]

@Mav  You may want to factor in the cost of upgrading the memory. I went from 4 to 16 GB enabling 4 VMs running win 7, win 10, win 11 & ms 2008 server. 

[#14]

@Mav 

I've not checked prices for ages (only do so on 'need to know' basis), but within the budget of £500 you mentioned, with those prices you should be able, if you're happy with RAID 5, to start off by populating a 4 bay NAS with just 3 x 6 TB NAS HDDs which would give you the capacity of 2 x 6 TB disks (about 10.9 TB formatted), with redundancy.

If you later need more capacity, then provided your NAS allowed you to expand your RAID 5 array by just slotting another HDD in (as I mentioned in my earlier post), you could do that, and (with another 6 TB HDD) you'd increase your capacity by the full formatted size of that disk, making a total of about 16.35 TB (obviously still with redundancy).

Edit:  Swapped GB for TB  

[#15]

@RobPN 

The budget of £500 is for the NAS unit ex HDDs

@Champnet Are you talking PC memory of which I already have 32GB?