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Choosing NAS Drive? - Enquiries - 02-28-2020
Hi
I have a 3TB airport time capsule that is now 10 years old and seems to be failing. I have worked out that I have approx 800GB of data on my iMac to be backed up. I also have a my passport 2TB drive which holds my TV, Movies, Photos (approx 26,000 pictures so far) and Music, this is almost full and is backed up to the time capsule. So in total I have approx 3TB of stuff backed up. As the time capsule is not looking good I think it is time to look at getting a NAS. I think I have narrowed it down to a QNAP-TS-453D or Synology DiskStation DS920+. We run in our house 1 x iMac, 1 x MacBook (occasionally) 1 x iPad mini, 2 x iphones, 1 x apple TV. Also have 2 Bose systems, 2 DVR recorders, 2 oppo blueray units, Bose soundTouch with 2 x wif amps. We also have 4 hikvision cameras connected to an NVR (don't need connecting to NAS). I have just bought a Linksys poe+ 24 port switch which ports everything around the house via cat cabling.
My first question is with the amount of data I have as explained above, am I being over the top with my choices of NAS? Here in Australia I would be looking at approx AU$1600 to buy this, including Ironwolf drives. If it is overkill, what NAS drives would you recommend stepping down to? I only require the backup and storage for a growing media collection and assume a NAS will give me access to all files and media files from any computer/device being used. Also at the moment stream media from iMac to apple TV2 to Loewe TV, would Plex be better?
Second I am not sure how big I should go with the Ironwolf drives. My logic says I have 3TB already, 4TB won't last long, 6TB might last a while and 8TB would be perfect but if I am buying 3 drives for either of the NAS drives mentioned does that give me over the top storage capacity. Can't get my head around RAID capacities over actual capacity required. I think a total of 8TB should see me through the next few years so would I get away with 3 x 3TB drives and be able to have enough room for all that I need to back up, 3TB, and the amount of storage I need for my growing media collection.
I only started researching this last week and have learnt quite a bit from your videos etc. But as you know it is a minefield out there, I'm happy to spend AU$1600 if it gets me a future-proofed but if I can save some money and tone it all down a bit my wife would be happy!!!
Sorry this is a bit long winded and I hope it makes sense to you, but I want to get my choice right!!
Thanks for all your hard work in making your videos and I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions
Kind regards
David
Choosing NAS Drive? - ed - 01-18-2021
You certainly would want to have some future proofing in a NAS. If you would go for value series NAS then you would need to upgrade it every 2-3 years like an iPhone. DS420+ is still a plus series NAS which means it can be upgraded and it also is compatible with all apps Synology makes. It also features Celeron CPU with graphics chip which makes it a multimedia friendly solution.DS920+ comes with 2 more CPU cores making it a better choice if you want to use it for more then just a few things. Something like Virtualization, web server would certainly make use of this extra power.When choosing the size of the drives, try to calculate how long time did it take to grow your backup to this 3TB size. Then you can predict how much more you might need in the next 5 years. But if you start with 3 drives in a 4 bay model, you can add additional drive when you need that space. Saves energy. RAID5 will loose one drive for parity/redundancy. So 3 drives will have a total size of 2 drives available (3*4TB = somewhere around 7TB).I hope this helps.