First NAS How to build or What to buy (prebuilt)

[Silent440]

I have watched nearly all of the NAS videos on the channel but I am still wondering what I should do to have reliable storage for all my photos that I accumulate as a Photographer. Should I buy a prebuilt nas or should I build my own? I want the data to be safe so i was thinking raid 1 or 6 but i also was curious if you can mix and match hard drive sizes etc. i would think the answer would be no. also if i build what should i pick up?

 

I built my pc and I know how to upgrade it to some extent but I am nervous how different a nas unit would be.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The "do I build it myself or buy a prebuilt?" question is more of a question of "do I have potentially a lot of time to devote on this project or not?" If you don't want to spend the better part of a weekend setting up something, get a pre-built NAS box. Plus some NAS providers offer extra services, if you trust them. Like Q-NAP has a service that'll let you access the NAS from the internet without going into your router and mucking with portforwarding and such. Plus they'll offer SSL encryption (for a fee of course). So look at what the prebuilts have to offer beyond just giving you a box that you can plug the HDDs in and spend about 20 minutes setting up and see if paying extra is worth it to you.

 

As far as the RAID thing, you should be using drives of equivalent size. Otherwise if you have higher capacity drives, they'll have extra space that won't be used by the RAID system. You should in theory be able to mix drives of different manufacturers together, but it's best to get the same model from the same manufacturer. It'll be less of a headache if you do.

[Electronics Wizardy]

how much storage and budget are we thinking.

 

do yo like to tinker or a box that just works?

 

do you want to do ther thind on your nas(plex, seedbox, basic webserver, domain server, dns server,dhcp server, other usees)

 

 

[BaneOfKnoll]

12 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

As far as the RAID thing, you should be using drives of equivalent size. Otherwise if you have higher capacity drives, they'll have extra space that won't be used by the RAID system. You should in theory be able to mix drives of different manufacturers together, but it's best to get the same model from the same manufacturer. It'll be less of a headache if you do.

You can also use unRAID which is one of Linus' fave OS's. You can use many different size drives and have 1 as a Parity drive (it has to be the largest drive in the array) Also, it means you can run VM's and Docker's such as plex. etc.