Some advice on NAS storage solutions

[Pyrii]

So right now I have a single server, Yggdrasil that does sort of everything, it uses several varying drives and partitions to hold my data and share over samba. It also has CPU power for now running PLEX and various gameservers (Minecraft, starbound etc). I also want to be able to start archiving my twitch streams for later editing etc.

 

The drives in the server are starting to die out and I really need to do a better solution, I've found that it's much easier and preferable to keep everything on the server, I don't archive much to optical media anymore, so lots of easily accessable storage for my anime/films/TV would be great, but I also need to add in some redundancy while saving some power (Having all those drives spun up the whole time in a single chassis probably eats power and the heat kills the drives faster)

 

So I was looking at 4-bay NASes to look out for during black friday, but I'm just confused by all the offerings. I don't need fancy because my existing server can do PLEX transcoding/serving centrally as long as it can access the files. Essentially my requirements are

• RAID 5 (Or similar) (The ability to swap in a drive when 1 fails and not lose data would be great, especially at the amount/size of data we can fit on drives now, losing 2Tb of Anime recently was scary)
• Samba support (I think most if not all NAS solutions support this now, but still)
• USB3 connection would be nice so I can hook them up directly to my server to access files instead of eating network bandwidth pulling files for PLEX just to send it out again.
• Configurable drive timeout for power saving with caching. (Again, nice to have but sometimes these shares might not be accessed for days (Though I think PLEX runs daily checks for updates etc)

I'm not sure if several 4-bay solutions would be good or maybe look at bigger enclosures, but they tend to go up pretty exponentially in cost. Going for 4>8 bay costs over 3 times as much as far as I can see. So just stacking a bunch for 4 bay NASes on a shelf to add to as I need it would be a great solution.

 

I'm just so lost in a sea of options and don't want to be burnt by picking something that ends up being unsuitable. So I'm calling on your expertise ^^

[Electronics Wizardy]

How about something like this https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS416

 

You can go cheaper if you want, but thats a pretty good bet. 

[Pyrii]

Yeah my dilemma is just how cheap to go. The DS416 is £330 on Amazon UK so that's pretty high.

 

I did have a look at some 8+bay solutions, but they'd have to be powerful enough to command that extra price overhead compared to 2+ small 4-bay NAS units. Say if they were capable of doing transcoding for PLEX etc. But most of them seem mediocre for how expensive they are. I could build a cheaper yet more powerful machine (Barring finding a case with 6-9x 5" bays)

[Mikensan]

There are solutions from WD similar to Synology and QNAP. Also they are pretty resilient so don't be afraid to pick up a used one if the price is right.