How to Buy a NAS short version

[thiggins]

Originally Posted by Marshall

We are looking for a new NAS at the moment to upgrade from our old Maxtor Shared Storage. Do you recommend purchasing a 4 bay NAS so the storage can be upgraded by installing another drive when needed, since a 1TB dive is only about $55 compared to buying another single or double bay NAS.

On the other hand, if you won't need the additional storage for awhile, you could always buy an older-generation NAS later for less money. Plus you'll have the added benefit of a physically separate unit with newer power supply and fan.

If you're not going to run RAID be sure you get a NAS that supports drive per volume configuration (sometimes called "basic" mode). Synology and QNAP NASes support this mode.

You wrote:

"Diskful NASes are generally cheaper than BYOD."

Actually, in some countries (France...), NASes and external HDDs are taxed a lot more (20 euros/1 TB) than internal HDDs. Which makes diskful NASes a lot more expensive than BYOD.

[me3]

The missing feature I see (in the units I know of), NAS and Windows Home Server - is good backup of the data on the NAS itself.

I work in enterprise IT and am familiar with a wide range of solutions.

I don't run RAID, but like to backup to another internal disk nightly. I then do an offsite copy every 3-6 mths to a USB drive and leave it at a mates house.
The offsite can be a replica, as it's only to protect against catastrophic failure.
The onsite however should have a history associated, this way, data accidentally damaged or deleted can be recovered after some time.

The features I value for my home are:
a) Simple nightly backup to a second internal disk

b) A rotation that keeps a history of changes over time - NTFS hard links can help here for single instance storage. This gives me the last 3 months or so without chewing heaps of space.

c) Auto reclamation of space - set a limit, oldest backups deleted first.

My new QNAP doesn't do this.
Windows Home server (latest version) isn't much better. V1 did all except (c).

I would be interested if any other product had good "backup" functions for the data on the NAS, not simply "replication".

Thanks
Paul

Tim, you wrote:

"My strong advice [is] to not use RAID if your storage needs are below 3 TB; stay with single-drive products."

Why do you say this? I ask because I'm in the market for a NAS and my storage needs are probably 1.5 to 2TB max.

[thiggins]

Originally Posted by TD99

Tim, you wrote:

"My strong advice [is] to not use RAID if your storage needs are below 3 TB; stay with single-drive products."

Why do you say this? I ask because I'm in the market for a NAS and my storage needs are probably 1.5 to 2TB max.

More drives = more power, noise, heat and people do lose RAID arrays.

KISS is always best.

Originally Posted by thiggins

More drives = more power, noise, heat and people do lose RAID arrays.

KISS is always best.

OK, but I am leaning towards a dual-drive RAID1 solution for redundancy's sake. But again, I have maybe 1TB at most to store. Was hoping to store my Acronis backups to the NAS thereby safely storing all my previous digital photos.