Should I buy Synology or building from my old pc parts?

[ACEHACK]

if you want an easy solution to learn, and one that you can gradually add more hard drives of different sizes, i would go for Unraid OS. granted its paid but, the 60$ is well worth it in long run.

now there is also freenas, but you you have to add multiple drives of same size at the same time, so it becomes way more expensive, for general home use.

you can also do it manually, from debian, arch or whatever and make a raid array, but then you come back to the same problem as freenas.

 

https://www.unraid.net/

[paddy-stone]

The way I do it currently is say 3x4TB drives for data drives for NAS.... then I have 3 copies of the data, my backup server has 16TB storage, so once the main server is full, at least the backup server can hold it including snapshots and other stuff. Then 2x removable drives act as backups, only important data is backed up here (6TB and 8TB), 1 is attached to main PC for quicker data access than over the network.... the other is a GO drive, in case of emergency, and also comes with me when I leave the house.

Sounds paranoid perhaps, but I'd rather spend approx £250 for those removable drives than losing my data. I don't bother with parity drives currently, not with the amount of backups I have anyway.... the parity drives would have cost about the same as the removable drives I have, and of the 2 things I would rather have backups than parity.