Home use NAS Qnap 453be?

[Enquiries]

Hi there, I am looking for a little bit of advice. I think I've pretty much decided on the Qnap 453be. My questions are around what to "add on".

We are a recently retired couple. I have a Chillblast tower, which I've upgraded with a Win 10 (x64) 1 TB SSD and 32Gb memory. We have a lot of photos, and a music collection of 450gb which is now housed on a spare 1TB HDD platter in the tower. We stream the music around the house. We have a Lenovo T420 laptop (also upgraded to win 10 x64) a couple of tablets and a prehistoric laptop (also upgraded) which is an emergency spare not in day to day use. We DON'T watch films, or stream TV content, and are never likely to (life is too short to waste on a 90+ minute movie) I do a little gaming on Steam. That's it. What we do need is a reliable backup, and somewhere to act as a central hub so we don't have to keep manually copying files and photos from one machine to another.

My stepson has persuaded me that a two bay NAS would be a false economy as sooner or later I'd have to upgrade, and I think he's probably right. However, I am not sure whether to go for two HDD initially, or three / four. Neither do I know what size they should be to achieve "future proofing " but not be so big as to be silly for a pair of late-middle aged private individuals. I'm not sure our needs run to RAID 5 as things stand, but I am happy to be corrected. I believe I could add more HDD at a later date. I am inclined to go for more than the basic memory, but again, I don't think we need to get too whizzy given our needs. We do use the Chillblast Tower pretty well 24/7.

I've watched your videos till I feel as if Rob is a member of the family......so I'd really appreciate your thoughts.

[ed]

Yes, choosing a 2-bay model will eventually mean a stressful time to move all data to a bigger NAS. Having a 4-bay will allow you to start with just two or three drives and will let you add another drive later when you need to. RAID5 will protect your data against one drive failure. Choosing a Qnap ts-453Be is a very future proof decision. It is a very capable model which will cope with future updates for a long time. But if you needed something cheaper then DS418 or even DS420j would be a much slower NAS option but would also easily cope with automated backups for your computers and mobile devices, and of course, serve as a network drive for easy multimedia and file access.I hope this helps.