NAS recommendations for a photographer

[TaylorHu]

Hello all,

I am looking to add a NAS to my current setup. I am a hobbyist photographer, but lately have been taking it a little more seriously and actually getting paying clients. I think my current solution.of just dumping all my raw files onto an internal drive, and then backing that drive up to the Cloud through Carbonite, isn't sufficient. I've never needed a NAS before, so it's not something I've researched before. My requirements are pretty straightforward.

• RAID 1 obviously.
• Ability to rebuild the array if one drive fails quickly.
• It'd be nice if I could take one of the drives out, swap it with an empty drive, and the NAS would automatically rebuild the array so that I could then store that extra drive offsite somewhere.
• Bonus points if I can access the files and also back up to the drive remotely.
• And are there any NAS solutions with like, an optional subscription Cloud backup capability? So the contents of the NAS are automatically backed up as well.

Also is there any other NAS functionality that I should be aware of/try and get? It seems like most of the added functionality is about using the NAS as a media server, which is something I don't really need. I've heard good things about the Synology drives, but I don't know if there are other brands I should look at as well.

Thanks in advance!
 

[Radium_Angel]

12 minutes ago, TaylorHu said:

Synology

They are good.

And you want RAID 5.

 

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, TaylorHu said:

I am looking to add a NAS to my current setup. I am a hobbyist photographer, but lately have been taking it a little more seriously and actually getting paying clients. I

Ive heard good things about Synology, I personally have a QNap NAS. Its nice, its has 4 bays and great features. 

 

I would suggest probably 4 bays minimum. I mean if you take @Radium_Angel advice, you need 3 for Raid 5. The 4th could be used as a Hot spare, if the NAS supports that, or maybe some kind of Cache SSD of some kinda.