NAS Drives

[Seanbg]

Hello I am having a bit of a dilemma as I am looking to get a NAS drive for my home. This is mostly for me as I would like to back up and store videos and photos that I take as a hobby but I would also like this to be a shared drive for my family where anyone can add a file to this shared drive that anyone can access as well as every single one of us having our own space within the NAS to add to whenever we want. 

 

there is a mixture of MAC and PC users so it would need to be able to work on both. I am pretty computer literate this is just a topic that I am not very familiar with so I would like some advice on this.

 

thank you in advance for any ideas and suggestion that any of you may have.

[NelizMastr]

Get a Synology NAS. They're easy enough to setup for anyone and work great with PC and Mac. They even support Time Machine for Macs  

 

Disk wise, WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf are the way to go. Even the basic DS218j NAS will probably do.

[seagate_surfer]

Second what @NelizMastr had to say, a NAS like Synology is a solid option here. Other options in this space to look into could include QNAP, Asustor, & Thecus. 

As far as drives go, regardless of which brand you decide to roll with, make sure to go with drives engineered for NAS. As mentioned, our product family in this space is the IronWolf & IronWolf Pro. 

[NelizMastr]

Also, make sure you have a back-up solution to make a copy of your NAS once in a while   RAID is not a back-up, just a method to reduce the chance of data loss. Get a large enough external USB disk to back-up your NAS once a week or whatever and put it away somewhere safe.

[Seanbg]

@NelizMastr I am not sure how I could back up my NAS drive if I am planning to have over 6TB on this drive

[NelizMastr]

14 hours ago, Seanbg said:

@NelizMastr I am not sure how I could back up my NAS drive if I am planning to have over 6TB on this drive

There's no point in having a 6TB NAS if there isn't a way to back it up since the NAS could suffer from a catastrophic failure. RAID doesn't protect from power surges or water damage etc.

 

Also, there are external hard drives in high capacities available. 4TB is currently becoming the norm, but 8TB and larger drives are also available.

[Seanbg]

okay @NelizMastr thank you very much for your help. will be ordered within the next two weeks.