Good starter NAS

[DoovidToonet]

I have been looking into getting a NAS to store an archive of my old footage (currently only at ~250GB of video, but I am only recording in 1080p for now), but I am not sure what to go for. My friends have recommended this one, which seems nice, though I have been tempted to buy an old server rack off Craigslist and start a small tower to hold all sorts of data since I tend towards being a data hoarder. Just for clarification, I have no formal server managing experience, I have just tooled around with Linux a bit and know how to read StackOverflow articles pretty well.

[Devryd]

I have recently got a synology ds218j and I am pretty happy with it. especially for a beginner, the one you linked is quite expensive

[SupaKomputa]

Don't play around with server rack, they are loud and power hungry. Not worth it for personal use.

A consumer nas is the way to go.

[SamucaFO]

Search about DiskStation DS1621+, I have the model DS1821+ and I love it.But the 920+ isn't bad either ,with the right price, to be the first NAS.

[cmndr]

What are your goals for this? How much do you want to learn? how much do you value "it just works?"

Synology and QNAP systems make good starter systems, especially if all you care about is having a backup.

 

At the same time there ARE other options that are more powerful at similar prices.
https://www.amazon.com/P04923-S01-HPE-MICROSERVER-EN10-X3421/dp/B07QB4Q2YR

 

You can slap TRUENAS Scale (not core without some hackery) on that and run ZFS if you want something with a bit of gusto to it. You give up some convenience (Synology and QNAP are easier to get started and much more polished) but you basically get all the software options you could want AND you're able to slap in a few add in cards (2.5/5/10Gbe networking, add-in card for an extra m.2 nvme drive) in PCIe 3.0 x8 and x1 slots along with either a CD drive (lol) or a fifth SATA drive (2.5" only SATA drive). There is no official hot swap support unfortunately.

NAS prices are stupid right now unfortunately. I bought something very similar (maybe identical) for almost half the price 2 years ago.

I currently have 32GB of spare RAM in mine and a 118GB optane 800p drive and a 10Gbe SFP+ networking card with 4x4TB HDDs. If I purchased things over again I'd probably stick to only a 32GB optane drive for cache given that I had 32GB RAM. If I only had 8GB RAM I would wafer between 32GB and 58/118GB optane cache.

The reason why RAM is nice if you're using ZFS is that blocks on the drives get cached. Things like metadata (where the data is stored on the harddrives) and a handful of VERY frequently used blocks end up in RAM. This means that the harddrives get hit WAY WAY less and often you get overall SSD-like performance.

[LOOKTheMagician]

You may wont to keep in mind the added complexity of using the HPE server for a NAS.  Having to troubleshoot storage controllers and OS can be extremely annoying if you aren't that handy with these things.  Something that people tend to forget is that for most use cases you don't need a lot of power to get good performance from a NAS since most of the time you are using high capacity HDD that don't have high IOPS.  If you are just going to use it for storage and not modify files from it directly I would stick with one of the consumer NAS that were suggested for simplicity.  QNAP maight have some good options that work too. My firend has one and he said the interface for it is really nice and straightforward with great speed (even with a old Celeron 2 core processor). 

[DogKnight]

A Synology unit is a good option. Low power, easy to manage and plenty of apps available to provide a number of different capabilities. 

 

I have a DS918+ which is almost identical to the model you linked. 

There are definitely cheaper models available, but it comes down to your use case. 

 

If you are only using the NAS for file storage / backups, then a lower end model will be fine.

If you are wanting to actively work on files stored on the NAS or you want to leverage it to perform other functions like a Plex Server, etc; then stick to the model your friend recommended. 

 

The good thing about a NAS is that it will generally remain useful for a long time. So it is a device that will be used for many years or across multiple PC's depending on your update cycle. 

[sm1th5]

I have a 16 bay server case from ali express. If your going to be data hording then invest in one of these. Then buy pc parts to build a windows machine. I'm now up to 80 plus TB.

And I initially started with external hard drives. Got 4 now. Then an 8 bay orico enclosure. Filled it. 

 

Don't limit yourself to a low number of drives. 

 

Regards.

[SamucaFO]

On 4/28/2022 at 8:17 AM, sm1th5 said:

I have a 16 bay server case from ali express. If your going to be data hording then invest in one of these. Then buy pc parts to build a windows machine. I'm now up to 80 plus TB.

And I initially started with external hard drives. Got 4 now. Then an 8 bay orico enclosure. Filled it. 

 

Don't limit yourself to a low number of drives. 

 

Regards.

True. I use SHR2 for redundancy with 4x 10T HD (20TB usable), that is 4 used bays already.