Recommended NAS and RAID type for 4x 8 TB drives and for use in an Apple ecosystem?

[Piipperi]

Hello,

I have done some research to NASes, but I'm still sort of puzzled by all the choices and their limitations. My budget isn't high neither, and I'm not looking for a NAS with Thunderbolt and such.

 

What I need is a NAS with 4 drive bays (as per my 4x 8 TB drives I plan to get), but it has to be very reliable and also, have good Apple device support. Eg, AFP, Spotlight and Time Machine support, with SMB to work on iOS/Windows devices. It should also have some kind of system to notify me when a drive is failing the moment there's a failure.

 

As for the drive losses, which RAID type should I use? Looking at RAID 6 since from what I've read, if I lose a drive I won't lose any data (right?). It also gives me 60% of the drives capacity so I can get ~20 TB of my 32 TB I'd have in total.

 

And for ways to remote access the NAS, I've been wondering how should it be done properly? At the moment with my current DIY NAS I just have an SMB port open in my router, but the problem is that, it just isn't very secure. I was thinking of making a VPN, but I have no hardware to make one (all my stuff runs macOS and I have found no tutorials on how to make a home VPN using macOS).

 

Also, a bonus question: Western Digital vs. Seagate for reliability? Google is telling me WD is the way to go, is this still true? This is compared to each of their NAS drives, where WD is also cheaper.

 

Looking forward to hear your opinions and recommendations. Cheers

[Electronics Wizardy]

I'd probably go with a synology setup here. Has the time machine setup(afp is dead), and they work pretty well overall.

 

Id go raid 5 with that drive setup. Dual drive failures are pretty rare, and if they happen, Id just restore backups(make sure to have bckups on a different system).

 

18 minutes ago, Piipperi said:

Also, a bonus question: Western Digital vs. Seagate for reliability? Google is telling me WD is the way to go, is this still true? This is compared to each of their NAS drives, where WD is also cheaper.

 

There about the same. Get whats cheaper. Failure rate is simmilar, and really hard to predict the exact failure rates.

 

What is your budget here?

[Lightwreather]

38 minutes ago, Piipperi said:

all my stuff runs macOS and I have found no tutorials on how to make a home VPN using macOS

If you mean, macOS as the HOst for the VPN server, then it really isn't possible. However, there are multiple ways to do it using mac hardware, One would be to install Linux on one of them to use as a server, Two, would be to install Linux in a VM (For VM's I'd generally suggest Alpine linux for it's lightweightness, but it is CLi only. You can use any linux distro however).

[Piipperi]

39 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I'd probably go with a synology setup here. Has the time machine setup(afp is dead), and they work pretty well overall.

 

Id go raid 5 with that drive setup. Dual drive failures are pretty rare, and if they happen, Id just restore backups(make sure to have bckups on a different system).

 

There about the same. Get whats cheaper. Failure rate is simmilar, and really hard to predict the exact failure rates.

 

What is your budget here?

My budget would be around 300 - 400$.

 

Also, is AFP really dead? Is SMB just the replacement for it or something else? I'm gonna miss my Spotlight if that's the case

[Piipperi]

18 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

If you mean, macOS as the HOst for the VPN server, then it really isn't possible. However, there are multiple ways to do it using mac hardware, One would be to install Linux on one of them to use as a server, Two, would be to install Linux in a VM (For VM's I'd generally suggest Alpine linux for it's lightweightness, but it is CLi only. You can use any linux distro however).

Yeah I don't have the hardware to run a spare VM unfortunately.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, Piipperi said:

My budget would be around 300 - 400$.

 

Also, is AFP really dead? Is SMB just the replacement for it or something else? I'm gonna miss my Spotlight if that's the case

Yea afp is dead, apple is using smb for most things now

 

Does tht budget include drives? Your not getting thoase drives with a nas in that budget.

 

Id probably just get. synology ds420j 

[Piipperi]

8 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea afp is dead, apple is using smb for most things now

 

Does tht budget include drives? Your not getting thoase drives with a nas in that budget.

 

Id probably just get. synology ds420j 

Don't worry, my total budget is around 1400$ haha, drives already cost that 1000$ tho