First-time NAS buyer

[Xcydus]

Hey guys,

 

I'm looking to purchase my first NAS for my home of ~4 people and was wondering about no. of drive bays, no. of drives and of what capacity, whether or not I should have them in a RAID configuration and also in general, which makes of NAS i should go for and which to avoid.

 

Thanks in advance,

Xcydus

[anybodykek]

I don't know if you care about data integrity or speed, but go for a RAID 10, perhaps?

[Xcydus]

I understand that I will have piece of mind with redundancy so I am leaning towards a RAID 0 at the least (since I can achieve this even with a 2 bay NAS). While I certainly would like to have a RAID 10 configuration, it also means I need a minimum of 4 bays, which might not be necessary haha. I guess what I'm looking for is some personal experience working with server storage

[Carlos1010]

What are you looking to do with it?

[ARikozuM]

I suggest getting 3 WD Reds or equivalent NAS (very important) drives in the 2-4TB range. Personally, I use 2 RAID 5's. One for the hospital files as an off-site backup and the other for home as a Steam server.

[Xcydus]

For the time being it'll will mainly serve as a family file domain, so it will like just be filled with images, music, video, documents, and games. 

[Xcydus]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I suggest getting 3 WD Reds or equivalent NAS (very important) drives in the 2-4TB range. Personally, I use 2 RAID 5's. One for the hospital files as an off-site backup and the other for home as a Steam server.

I was definitely considering this but from a Linus video I saw that it might not be best since I won't be using in the context of an enterprise so the slower writes may not be what I'm after

3 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

1. How much storage do you need?

 

2. What is your budget?

 

3. What do you want to store on this thing?

 

4. Do you want a premade soloution for more money or are you willing to go DIY?

1. At least 3tb, however future expansions are a real possibility

 

2. None for now but I don't imagine a home NAS could cost upward of a grand for 3tb

 

3. Images, music, video, documents, and games

 

4. Which do you recommend?

[ARikozuM]

5 minutes ago, Xcydus said:

-snip-

I would suggest UnRAID and a single 3TB disk to start. You will need a 32GB flash drive for UnRAID. A GPU to pass to a VM for gaming. How will you set the system up? ATX mid-tower or Micro ATX/Mini ITX cuboid case or server chassis?

[Xcydus]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I would suggest UnRAID and a single 3TB disk to start. You will need a 32GB flash drive for UnRAID. A GPU to pass to a VM for gaming. How will you set the system up? ATX mid-tower or Micro ATX/Mini ITX cuboid case or server chassis?

I might just have it standing on a shelf if I get a premade solution, if I get a DIY version then I don't know where to store it except maybe in my ATX mid-tower, though I don't want it to spoil the aesthetic

[Lehti]

1 hour ago, CUDA_Cores said:

Actually I suggest using HGST drives instead of WD reds. I'm sure the WD reds will work fine but over the several years I have been working with HDDs HGST makes the best damn HDDs out there. If you care about your data that you put on the NAS then yes, spend the extra money for an HGST drive.

HGST is a WD brand, though.

[leadeater]

@ARikozuM @Lehti

Talk about that? I don't see anything? 

[kirashi]

2 hours ago, CUDA_Cores said:

A premade soloution will be easy. Buy the thing, plug in your drives and you are off to the races. I however like to buld my own NAS, I actually did this awhile back because the problem with the prebuilt soloutions is your drives are usually locked into a proprietary filesystem that will not allow you to recover the drives in case your NAS dies, and therefore all your data is gone.

This is the thing that has always scared me with Hardware RAID - if the hardware controller dies, there is ZERO guarantee you'll be able to salvage your data if you don't have an exact replica of said hardware controller. I've even seen RAID controllers that have different firmware versions fail to read drives, even though they were the same model as the prior RAID controller.

 

I've moved on to running software-based Disk Pools, and am currently running StableBit DrivePool on my desktop with dual SSDs and HDDs. If my motherboard exploded tomorrow, I could simply plug either duplicated SSD or HDD into any other system via SATA or a USB adapter, and read my data.

I believe ZFS is very similar, but does require an underlying NAS operating system to access or rebuild your drive pool. And it eats ECC RAM.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, kirashi said:

This is the thing that has always scared me with Hardware RAID - if the hardware controller dies, there is ZERO guarantee you'll be able to salvage your data if you don't have an exact replica of said hardware controller. I've even seen RAID controllers that have different firmware versions fail to read drives, even though they were the same model as the prior RAID controller.

 

I've moved on to running software-based Disk Pools, and am currently running StableBit DrivePool on my desktop with dual SSDs and HDDs. If my motherboard exploded tomorrow, I could simply plug either duplicated SSD or HDD into any other system via SATA or a USB adapter, and read my data.

I believe ZFS is very similar, but does require an underlying NAS operating system to access or rebuild your drive pool. And it eats ECC RAM.

I've typically only seen RAID import issues on lower end cards but yes this is one of the problems with hardware solutions. You can however recover data from an unrecoverable RAID array using tools like Recover My Files, you do however have to remember the RAID type AND stripe settings of the array to do it.

 

Software solutions are what almost everyone is moving to now days, Microsoft included so there are tons of options out there.

[Emmien]

12 hours ago, CUDA_Cores said:

Your drives are usually locked into a proprietary filesystem that will not allow you to recover the drives in case your NAS dies, and therefore all your data is gone.

Normally, the NAS or RAID controller manufacturer will help you, or you just buy one of the same type, and may need to change firmware to the same version as the previous.

 

There are several pieces of software as well that can understand these filesystems.

[Rob_LC]

It sounds like a 2 bay consumer NAS with dual 4TB drives would be fine for your needs. You could go cheaper with 3TB drives if the budget is tight.

I would look at what devices in your household will connect, and compare features on the lower priced consumer NAS devices to find one that is suitable.

If its just windows file sharing you need, most lower end NAS devices will be fine.

 

Remember that Raid is not a backup. If the data is important, you should also be backing it up to another place.