How much NAS do I need?

[pipnina]

The family & I all think we should get a NAS box to back up photos & documents in case one of our computers dies, my brother and I would probably store videos & I would be archiving RAW photos from my camera.

I am wondering if 1 hard drives, or two SSDs in raid 1 would be a good configuration, how much of a speed benefit would you see in using SSDs over hard drives in a nas for these purposes? Or would 4-bay raid-10 be better?

Another question is what kind of CPU/RAM would a nas box for these uses need? There are 1GB boxes, 4GB boxes and bigger, as well as dual and quad core CPUs.

 

Most importantly, we work with different OSs, I use Linux and most of the house runs Windows. How would the nas box show up for the different machines? Do they show up like new drives (C/D/E or /media/<user>/<nasbox>) or network locations that need to be logged into?

 

 

Cheers a bunch!

[flibberdipper]

Anything being used for a backup should have redundancy of some sort so that if one drive pukes, you don't lose everything. And obviously, for more devices you'd want more storage, especially if you plan on keeping say, 3 backups per device (sounds wasteful but it is handy sometimes for deleted files). Personally I'd probably go with like a 4 bay setup with 4TB drives in RAID 1, or if people in your house don't keep a whole lot of shit on their PC's then 2TB drives.

 

CPU wise, if it's only doing typical NAS duties and not encoding media then you're probably fine with a lower-tier config, given it's just a household application.

 

And with the mounting, it'll show up as a network location that you'd have to log into and optionally mount as a network drive for convenience.

[Oshino Shinobu]

If we assume that your network is Gigabit, using SSDs won't benefit you much. It may help with moving over lots of small files (provided the drive on the other end can keep up), but in terms of large file transfers, you'll be limited by the network. Using a small SSD for caching may be the better option, though I wouldn't really worry about using either and just stick to HDDs, at least to begin with. 

 

I would forget about RAID, for a home NAS it's not needed and doesn't really solve any issues. Rather than going for redundancy, I would have an external drive setup as a backup, which is much more worthwhile than redundancy as it protects against malware and data corruption as well while RAID doesn't. RAID 10 is pretty wasteful and inefficient, wouldn't recommend it. 

 

If it's just for storing files and isn't going to be used for things like hosting a media server, then the specs don't need to be very high. I would advise going for something mid-range, rather than the cheapest or the most expensive. If you have any old PCs lying around, you could use one of those for a NAS and save some money. 

 

As most of the house is Windows based, you'll likely want to use CIFS/SMB shares. Windows will pick them up easy and they can then be mapped as a network drive to give them a drive letter in Windows. Linux will pick CIFS/SMB shares up as well and you should be able to mount them as well.

 

EDIT: To be clear, I don't consider what you've described as a secure backup, it would just be extra redundancy. You can have as much redundancy and failsafes as you want, but as long as the data is readily accessible from a PC, it's not a secure backup and is vulnerable to corruption and malware. I would first invest in a secure backup solution that isn't readily accessible from your PCs before you consider RAID. 

[GDRRiley]

you need very little cpu power. core 2 duos make a fine nas. you need 4-8gb of ram. look at 3-5 3tb+ hdd. if you only get 3 or 4 run raid 5 if you get 5 run raid 6.

I would then use an external drive and back this up once a month and then move the drive to a fire/water proof safe. 

for os it doesn't really mater. freenas will work if you just want a simple os. 

[pipnina]

5 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

you need very little cpu power. core 2 duos make a fine nas. you need 4-8gb of ram. look at 3-5 3tb+ hdd. if you only get 3 or 4 run raid 5 if you get 5 run raid 6.

I would then use an external drive and back this up once a month and then move the drive to a fire/water proof safe. 

for os it doesn't really mater. freenas will work if you just want a simple os. 

Can most NAS' ram be upgraded? (like laptop's dimms?) I was looking at the 4-bay dual core of this which has 2GB.

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, pipnina said:

Can most NAS' ram be upgraded? (like laptop's dimms?) I was looking at the 4-bay dual core of this which has 2GB.

no. almost all are soldered down. its fine for these prebuilds to have a small amount of ram as their os is cut down a lot.