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Low maintenance NAS solution for parents

jaypro

What is the best NAS solution for my father who takes a ton of photos and currently has them stored on just a stack of external hard drives.

 

I'm thinking 10TB + of usuable storage (how much redudancy do I need), although it needs to be expandable beyond that because he takes a lot of photos.

 

Needs to be as low maintenance as possible because he likes the simplicity of drag and drop into external hard drive, write a date on it, and put it on the shelf.

 

Should I be looking at FreeNAS, or a pre-configured NAS system? or some other solution?

 

I know his current solution is not a good way to keep his data safe.

 

Thanks.

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What's your price point? As a $600-800 pre-built 4-bay NAS will give you 8TB of useable space with four 4TB HDDs in Raid 10 which is what's recommend to run.

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FreeNAS is harder to set up, doesn't work out of the box and you need to scrap your ZFS storage regularly to keep your RAID healthy. In terms of simplicity Drobos are perfectly suited. If you go for a bit more flexibility go for Synology NASes

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I don't want to come across as a fanboy for Drobo, but the 5D it probably the best bet here.  http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/

The one I have is comparable to the 5N, but I would not recommend a NAS with such overwhelming number of photos.  too many reads for thumbnails over a network would make using it a rather slow process.  A direct solution would (IMO) provide a more comfortable and usable experience.  The 5D would be best if used on a desktop, or physically attached to a dock for a laptop.  Mobility and thunderbolt/USB3 connectors are an accident waiting to happen (so sayith me, someone with zero cred)

But if they need a network solution then 5N is what to look at.  When it comes to the "Keep it simple, stupid" philosophy for safe storage, Drobo is hard to beat. 

 

Just today I got some help via E-mail support for my product which is 2 + years out of warranty, which impressed me enough to where I would write this out for you to consider them.  checkout their product and my comments/experience in the sticky thread above should you desire to.

 

if the price is too much to bite, can also check the normal 4 bay drobo, which should still meet the 10TB requirement, perhaps not with dual drive redundancy enabled.  But I believe has dropped in price quite a bit.

 

p.s. you taking steps to care of your parents made me feel warm and fuzzy.  like watching an episode of full house!

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Do not go for a DIY solution. It will not end well, unless your parents are technically inclined.

 

Synology has a bunch of good NASes with optional expansion units. Here is one that would be good to start off with, and you would expand it with these (supports two of them).

 

With 4TB drives you can start out with 12TB of storage in RAID 6 (please do not use RAID 5 with this much storage), and expand to 32 TB with a second unit. Make sure you use either a WD Red or Seagate NAS drive at the bare minimum. You can go for an SE series drive if your parents really need performance.

 

Also, don't forget a backup solution. Either a second NAS or an online backup.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. - Galileo Galilei
Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD?, ZFS From A to Z (Eric1024), Advanced RAID: Survival Rates, Flashing LSI RAID Cards (alpenwasser), SAN and Storage Networking

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QNAP

Synology if money is no object

 

NAS is not a backup solution, it is an uptime solution. I suggest to still do the external HDD stack method he is using or online like crashplan.

Pardon my English. Not my native language.

 

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I'd like to also suggest looking at "Storage Spaces" in windows 8 if your family does decide that a direct solution would work better.  I haven't tested it out myself, but I think I will incorporate it when I get the opportunity.  

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