Need NAS / External Storage recommendations

[Jack0f5pades]

So a family member has an old external hard drive connected to their computer with a bunch of stuff on it, and it's starting to make a funny noise. She wants to replace it before it croaks, and she wants a NAS that can hold at least 12tb of hard drives in, she wants to have some sort of parity to protect against data loss, and she has to be able to access it remotely. Are there any consumer products that even come close to matching that description?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Synology and Qnap are the best for this. Good user interface, support, easy to use. Good remote access programs. 

[Jack0f5pades]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Synology and Qnap are the best for this. Good user interface, support, easy to use. Good remote access programs. 

The one we're looking at is the Synology DS220+ with two 6tb hard drives. Would that check all the boxes for the requirements she has? 

[Delnith]

With two 6 TB hard drives, if you want any parity you're going to use Raid 1, which as you may know, mirrors the drive 1:1. That being said you would be limited to 6TB of space overall. If you chose to get bigger drives than you would end at the 12+TB that you initially mentioned. The four bay synology machines may be better if you want to start with two 6TB drives and potentially expand in the future or utilize a different Raid configuration.

 

To my knowledge, many of the synology machines now can be remotely accessed. They also can support cloud backups elsewhere if you want to setup an off-site backup as well.

[Electronics Wizardy]

33 minutes ago, Jack0f5pades said:

The one we're looking at is the Synology DS220+ with two 6tb hard drives. Would that check all the boxes for the requirements she has? 

Yea those will work well. I have one of those(or the 218+ I think) for off site backups and its been working well without issues.

 

Id get bigger hdds as you probably want the hdds to be in a mirror here, so 2x12tb hdds, or 16tb for growing space.

[Jack0f5pades]

17 minutes ago, Delnith said:

With two 6 TB hard drives, if you want any parity you're going to use Raid 1, which as you may know, mirrors the drive 1:1. That being said you would be limited to 6TB of space overall. If you chose to get bigger drives than you would end at the 12+TB that you initially mentioned. The four bay synology machines may be better if you want to start with two 6TB drives and potentially expand in the future or utilize a different Raid configuration.

 

To my knowledge, many of the synology machines now can be remotely accessed. They also can support cloud backups elsewhere if you want to setup an off-site backup as well.

It turns out that there are some 8tb drives cheaper than the 6tb ones we were looking at. So we'd end up with 16 to start out with, and if we get a 4 bay instead of a 2 bay, we'd have a more flexible setup to add on to in the future, so I think we'll do that

[Delnith]

27 minutes ago, Jack0f5pades said:

It turns out that there are some 8tb drives cheaper than the 6tb ones we were looking at. So we'd end up with 16 to start out with, and if we get a 4 bay instead of a 2 bay, we'd have a more flexible setup to add on to in the future, so I think we'll do that

Look through the software that each synology machine is able to run, and determine what software you would like to have. Some machines are better equipped depending on the CPU/RAM.

[Blue4130]

9 hours ago, Jack0f5pades said:

, she wants to have some sort of parity to protect against data loss,

Remind her that parity does not equal backup. Data loss is still very possible unless a proper backup is made.