I have been investigating an updated replacement for an EOL NetGear RN422 initially acquired back in 2019 !With basic specs of Intel® Atom C3338 Dual Core Processor, 2GB DDR4, Drive Bays 2
No further explanation warranted lol !
The two units I put to scrutiny are the Asustor 5404T and the QNAP TS-464 after much scrutiny I decided upon the QNAP TS-464 based on my use case and what appears to be a vastly larger amount of peer based user community resources – albeit understanding the configuration terminology etc. may be a steeper hill to climb !
I am posting this plethora of questions for one simple reason I rest firmly in the school of “Fail to Plan …Plan to Fail” !
The hardware configuration I plan on assembling consist of the following and I plan to use the NAS as both a media server for locally stored media files hopefully via Jelly Fin and for serving files for primarily PDF’s MS Office .docx, .pptx, .xlsx etc.
Ø QNAP TS-464 4-Bay vendor states pre-configured with 8GB of RAM and QTS 5.0.1 Operating System pre-installed , Intel Celeron N5095
Ø Crucial RAM 16GB Kit (2x8GB)
Ø Seagate IronWolf Pro 10Tb NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD x 2
Ø Western Digital 2TB WD Red SN700 NVMe M.2 SSD x 2
HERE ARE MY QUESTIONS STATED AS SUCCINCTLY AS POSSIBLE
I have studied to the point of information overload on what might be the best way to configure the drives. In regard to storage pools, volumes thick, thin, static etc. Note I have little to no desire to use caching as I see very little benefit from it due to its primary focus on serving up small files quicker etc.
I am looking for suggestions/advice on QNAP ecosystem configuration/provisioning based on my stated use?
Since the retailer of the QNAP TS-464 is an unpopulated enclosure and the vendor proclaims the OS QTS 5.0.1 is pre-installed this begs to question were exactly is it installed? When I upgrade the memory to 16 GB and install the new drives will I have to reinstall the OS ? or is the OS installed on the 4GB Flash Memory simply requiring me boot it up and add the drives once the OS has loaded ? If the latter is the case is there a wy I can force th OS to load to the NVME’s to use them for the smoother /faster operational speed they might bring to the table ?
Is the hardware I have chosen the best use of $$$ seeing my minimalist understanding of what the two NVME’s will bring to the table in terms of daily use would I be better off expanding the HDD capacity to 4 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 10Tb NAS Internal Hard Drives configured in a RAID 5 configuration were I could gain the additional storage/file hosting of 30Tb and utilizing one 10Tb to store parity information while dropping the NVME’s ? Thereby creating and environment with good balance between data protection, increased practical useable capacity, and speed ? I have had very good luck with the Seagate IronWolf PRO’s to date !