5 hours ago
Hi NAS Compares
I’m a beginner when it comes to NAS but I’m thinking about getting my first one. I’m a part time photographer. Currently I have my images on two external SSD, which are backed up to an external HDD and the cloud. Used storage is around 8 TB at the moment, growing 1-2 TB a year. As my two external SSD are getting full I’m looking for a different solution as I’m tired of plugging in different external SSD.
I was looking at the Synology DS1825+ and DS1525+ being fully aware of the drive limitations Synology put in. My concern is mainly the availability of the drives, I guess if you go that route you almost have to have a spare drive.
Performance:
My understanding is that with more used bays in a NAS you get better read and write performance. Which is important for me as I flick through thousands of images through Adobe Lightroom and if the read speeds are slow the workflow gets quite annoying. However I don’t know how much the performance increases from a 5 bay unit to an 8 bay unit is, because in general I should have enough storage for my needs with a 5 bay unit. In addition I read that you shouldn’t use up all of the space on your drives because you will lose performance. Is that the same experience you have? What is a rough rule? 70-80%?
Back-up:
Currently I’m backing up to an external drive which I would plan to continue to do. I also have a Backblaze back-up in the cloud. What I read is that Backblaze doesn’t let you back up a NAS under the plan for private customers, but that plan is great value. I was thinking to back up my external back-up drives to the cloud in order to keep the current Backblaze plan. But I’m not sure if this is a big „No No“ when it comes backups. Could it give me extra troubles when restoring a backup?
Synology yes or no:
First of, would you highly recommend going away from Snyology? My needs are a reliable system with strong security and I don’t like to tinker with things myself too much. I just want something that runs smoothly, is easy to use and what I read is that the Synology Software provides that.
Upgrades:
If I go with either the DS1825+ or DS1525+ are there any upgrades you would recommend in order to improve performance for my main use case of going to through lots of images. This is where I sometimes get annoyed by performance because I only need a quick look, decide to keep the image or not. If it takes quite long to even load the image it is a never ending task.
Recommendations:
Are there any other options that I may should consider? I have not yet mentioned SSDs. I’m happy to pay a bit extra for better performance but for Synology I could only find the enterprise series which is ridiculous expensive. Maybe there are other options I’m not aware of.
I’m a beginner when it comes to NAS but I’m thinking about getting my first one. I’m a part time photographer. Currently I have my images on two external SSD, which are backed up to an external HDD and the cloud. Used storage is around 8 TB at the moment, growing 1-2 TB a year. As my two external SSD are getting full I’m looking for a different solution as I’m tired of plugging in different external SSD.
I was looking at the Synology DS1825+ and DS1525+ being fully aware of the drive limitations Synology put in. My concern is mainly the availability of the drives, I guess if you go that route you almost have to have a spare drive.
Performance:
My understanding is that with more used bays in a NAS you get better read and write performance. Which is important for me as I flick through thousands of images through Adobe Lightroom and if the read speeds are slow the workflow gets quite annoying. However I don’t know how much the performance increases from a 5 bay unit to an 8 bay unit is, because in general I should have enough storage for my needs with a 5 bay unit. In addition I read that you shouldn’t use up all of the space on your drives because you will lose performance. Is that the same experience you have? What is a rough rule? 70-80%?
Back-up:
Currently I’m backing up to an external drive which I would plan to continue to do. I also have a Backblaze back-up in the cloud. What I read is that Backblaze doesn’t let you back up a NAS under the plan for private customers, but that plan is great value. I was thinking to back up my external back-up drives to the cloud in order to keep the current Backblaze plan. But I’m not sure if this is a big „No No“ when it comes backups. Could it give me extra troubles when restoring a backup?
Synology yes or no:
First of, would you highly recommend going away from Snyology? My needs are a reliable system with strong security and I don’t like to tinker with things myself too much. I just want something that runs smoothly, is easy to use and what I read is that the Synology Software provides that.
Upgrades:
If I go with either the DS1825+ or DS1525+ are there any upgrades you would recommend in order to improve performance for my main use case of going to through lots of images. This is where I sometimes get annoyed by performance because I only need a quick look, decide to keep the image or not. If it takes quite long to even load the image it is a never ending task.
Recommendations:
Are there any other options that I may should consider? I have not yet mentioned SSDs. I’m happy to pay a bit extra for better performance but for Synology I could only find the enterprise series which is ridiculous expensive. Maybe there are other options I’m not aware of.