Advice Request NAS recommendations

[notabot]

Hi All,

I was looking for NAS recommendations, I don’t plan to store sensitive data there but I don’t want to lose the data either eg a raid setup with disk mirroring would be nice.

Size of data is approximately 3TB

 

[ForgottenSeer 72227]

I guess the first question is how much are you looking to spend approximately? You can get some entry level products and it can get very expensive very fast especially once you start adding HDD's, it adds up pretty quickly. Have you also considered building your own with a old computer that you may have laying around, something like freenas, nas4free, unraid etc...?

Personally I like to build my own, but if I had to buy one Synology is a good brand IMO.

 

[Black Wings]

FreeNas here. It has a good forum and friendly in several languages

 

[notabot]

I guess the first question is how much are you looking to spend approximately? You can get some entry level products and it can get very expensive very fast especially once you start adding HDD's, it adds up pretty quickly. Have you also considered building your own with a old computer that you may have laying around, something like freenas, nas4free, unraid etc...?

Personally I like to build my own, but if I had to buy one Synology is a good brand IMO.

Spending 500 USD , including the drive costs, would be something I’m ok with.

I’ll check out the ones you mention, I could buy an old box second hand - what I’d want then is the open source solution to auto manage patches, updates etc so that I don’t need to spent time on maintance.

 

[notabot]

FreeNas here. It has a good forum and friendly in several languages

Thanks ! I’ll check it out!

 

[ForgottenSeer 72227]

Free NAS is pretty powerful and you can do a lot with it. It's primary feature is the ZFS file system which is very good. I would suggest reading the knowledge base articles on FreeNas's website to understand how it works. One thing you may notice is that a lot of hard core FreeNas users can be very vocal about using ECC ram with FreeNas. IMHO, while ECC ram is probably a good idea (heck all computers should use it), it's very expensive and you pretty much need server/workstation grade parts to make use of it (ie: Xenon CPUs). That being said, you can run FreeNas with non-ecc ram, which is pretty much all the ram you can get for the majority of computers available and is much more affordable, compared to it's ECC counterpart.

The reason I suggest to read the knowledge base first and or watch some YouTube videos is that depending on what you want to do with it, and how much space you want, it will dictate how much ram you may need as the ZFS file system is highly dependent on ram.

It may take a little tinkering, but if you can swing it, FreeNas is a very good solution.

 

[R2D2]

I bought a Netgear 6 drive and a Synology 2 drive NAS boxes. But I'd have preferred a FreeNAS if I had an old PC that could be repurposed. Sadly that wasn't the case so I had to shell out a tidy sum for those NAS solutions + the cost of 8 hard disks. It can pinch the wallet.

Set your budget according to the amount of storage you need and the Apps/tasks you intend to run on the NAS especially CPU and RAM intensive tasks like video transcoding. If you intend to keep your NAS on 24x7 use WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf drives.

PS - Do consider future data requirements too. I just noticed you mention 3 TB in one of your posts but given the way things are that data can grow to 2-3x that over the years depending on what you choose to back up especially videos/movies/music that are pure data hogs.

 

[Aleeyen]

I think if old PC is not available then a new PC with processors and other parts a few generations old could be used. Just my opinion, I don't have any knowledge regarding NAS.