ASK NC

Hey! Love your channel, you guys do a great job and clearly know your stuff so I thought I'd ask the experts!

I have a new Drone company, we work for clients on a monthly basis and have to store their footage (usually 20GB/month/client). At the moment we use onedrive to store the footage and our business files, though we are only 6 month old company. I was looking for a NAS solution for better value for long term archive storage and we will also use it as a shared drive hub for the employees to all access and save daily files into. The drone footage can be 4K video, which I presume would need to be able to be streamed from the NAS if a client was accessing it. It would be good to have password protected folders in the NAS which different clients can access at will from our website too?

As we get more clients we can upgrade the NAS but at the moment we only have 2, so 4-8TB would be sufficient for a decent amount of time and the price seems to hike up in the 4 bay, 4K, 8TB+ NASs.

Thank you for the kind words! Based on your requirements, it sounds like a NAS would be a great solution for your drone company. A NAS can provide you with centralized and scalable storage, which can be accessed by multiple users from anywhere with an internet connection.

For your use case, I would recommend looking into a 4-bay NAS with at least 8TB of storage capacity. This should provide you with enough storage space for your current needs, as well as some room to grow. As you mentioned, the price of 4-bay NASs with 4K support and 8TB+ capacity can be high, but it's important to invest in a reliable and high-performance NAS to ensure the safety and accessibility of your data.

When it comes to streaming 4K footage from a NAS, it's important to ensure that the NAS has enough processing power and memory to handle the task. I would recommend looking for a NAS with at least a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM to ensure smooth video playback. Also, keep in mind that the speed of your internet connection can also affect the quality of the video playback when streaming remotely.

As for password-protected folders, most NAS devices come with built-in user and group management, which allows you to create different user accounts with varying levels of access and permissions. You can also set up FTP or WebDAV servers to allow your clients to access their folders securely from your website. Just be sure to enable SSL encryption for added security.

Overall, a NAS would be a great investment for your drone company as it will provide you with scalable storage, secure access, and peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and easily accessible.
Consider Celeron based models such as DS420+, ds920+ if you need to share 4k remotely. If you need to edit 4k then ds923+ or similar models with nvme storage pools and 10gbe option is a way to go.