3 hours ago
Hi, thanks for getting in touch. For your budget of two hundred fifty to three hundred dollars, the main goal is to get a reliable four bay system that can hold all your older drives, centralise your fifteen years of media and make the library accessible from multiple locations. At this price point, Synology and QNAP are generally too expensive, so the best option for you right now is a TerraMaster F4-423 or F4-423 (refurbished) if available. It is usually the only solid four bay NAS that sits close to your budget and still gives you good performance, remote access, snapshots and easy multimedia sharing.
You can install your existing hard drives, build a single array and then grow the storage later by swapping larger drives one at a time. For multi-location access, you can use TerraMaster’s remote access service, or for better reliability, you can add Tailscale, which is free and secure. With sixteen terabytes total, it will easily act as a central archive for your studio work and remove the need to keep using loose USB drives.
You can install your existing hard drives, build a single array and then grow the storage later by swapping larger drives one at a time. For multi-location access, you can use TerraMaster’s remote access service, or for better reliability, you can add Tailscale, which is free and secure. With sixteen terabytes total, it will easily act as a central archive for your studio work and remove the need to keep using loose USB drives.