What NAS drives are people using?

[Donut417]

Got a 4 bay Qnap. Currently have a 8TB WD drive shucked out of an Easystore external drive. And some random 500 gig laptop drive. 
 

Looking in to utilizing Time Machine to back up my MacBook and backing up. 
 

The options I’m looking at:

1. buy and external drive and call it a day. 
2. Buy a single drive for my NAS 
3. Buy multiple drives for the NAS so I have some redundancy. 
    

Would like to add I pay for 50 gig of iCloud storage and I keep the most critical data there as well. Don’t have a ton of money to throw at the problem. Also the NAS is in my bedroom so quiet ish drives would be preferred. 

[Needfuldoer]

I shucked HGST white label drives out of MyElements enclosures. Best as I can tell, the ones I got are the same as Red Plus NAS drives. 

 

They live in a Dell PowerEdge R540 now.

[OhioYJ]

WD Red Plus, had a total of 32 of them now. Been solid drives for me. They are quiet in my opinion. I don't hear them. I do hear my WD Gold drives, Black, and HGST drives. 

 

16 of them sit on the desk next to me, noise has never been an issue:

 

 

 

 

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, OhioYJ said:

WD Red Plus,

Looks like I can get 6 TB for under $200. 
 

 

[OhioYJ]

9 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Looks like I can get 6 TB for under $200. 

If you aren't in a hurry the WD Red drives go on a sale fairly regularly.  Aren't the 8 TB normally around that price?

 

Amazon (Amazon.com as the seller) $170.64 for 8TB WD Red Plus The 6 TB is $139.99.

 

 

[Donut417]

6 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

If you aren't in a hurry the WD Red drives go on a sale fairly regularly.  Aren't the 8 TB normally around that price?

 

Amazon (Amazon.com as the seller) $170.64 for 8TB WD Red Plus The 6 TB is $139.99.

 

 

I have to decide if I’m going to connect the drive directly to my Mac or to my NAS. I also have to decide if I want redundancy, if so how many drives. As I could move my current 8TB directly to my Plex server meaning I could buy one or up to 4 drives. I’m not sure how much storage I’ll need. 

[Donut417]

@OhioYJ let me ask you this. Do you think redundancy is a must have? I know the 3-2-1 back up strategy. But if I have the data on my computer, a Network connected drive and for very important cant loose info on my iCloud, that should be sufficient? 

[OhioYJ]

7 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

 Do you think redundancy is a must have? I know the 3-2-1 back up strategy.

That's going to depend on your risk tolerance. How much do you trust iCloud to really not lose your information, or reduce your storage one day? Technically I would say yes you have at least two sources, and an off-site storage, so that meets the minimum requirements.

 

Redundancy is a nice to have (not a must have), as right now if a drive fails in my NAS, I just pull it, throw in a new drive, and it keeps going without missing a beat. I don't need to worry about copying anything back over.  However it is also a "luxury" as the data is on multiple drives on other machines, and can just be copied back over.

[Donut417]

15 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

That's going to depend on your risk tolerance. How much do you trust iCloud to really not lose your information, or reduce your storage one day? Technically I would say yes you have at least two sources, and an off-site storage, so that meets the minimum requirements.

 

Redundancy is a nice to have (not a must have), as right now if a drive fails in my NAS, I just pull it, throw in a new drive, and it keeps going without missing a beat. I don't need to worry about copying anything back over.  However it is also a "luxury" as the data is on multiple drives on other machines, and can just be copied back over.

I’ll wait to see if drives go on sale. Based on that I’ll decide what to buy and in what number.