NAS - 4 Bay - recommendations?

fRostiE · 23 Mar 2018 at 20:38

Hi people who know more than me!!

I'm looking at a NAS drive for storing home media, pictures and HD videos of the kids growing up and other sizable media.

I'm thinking a 4 Bay NAS drive is the way to go running a mirrored RAID 1 drive setup for drive failover redundancy.

Does anyone have any NAS or HDD recommendations please? I've heard Synology and WD Red, thinking 6-8tb drives, hoping I can start with 4bay NAS and 2 drives and add to it when storage limits get hit?

Wanting automated backups from mobile devices as well as PC / Laptops over network.

I think that's the wish list, what do people recommend please?

Thank you,
fRostiE

StevieP · 23 Mar 2018 at 21:30

Having had a cheap and cheerful NAS and then spending a little extra for a Synology I'd definitely recommend the latter - you are paying for the user interface and ease of use and in my opinion Synology is the best ready-made solution out there.

Having said that it does have it's limitations and I've found myself far happier with a beefed-up Microserver running unRAID - far quicker and more versatile for less money than the top-end Synology units! (and dead easy - there are loads of tutorials on the web and the forum/community are very helpful!)

ElliorR · 23 Mar 2018 at 23:22

I recently bought a Synology DS418play, with 4tb Ironwolf drives, and think it’s excellent. It’s a great Plex server as well.

bledd · 24 Mar 2018 at 11:39

As a NAS owner. If you're getting a 4 bay drive, buy 5 hard drives. So if one fails, you've got a cold spare.

I've got a DS414. It's been great.

ChrisD. · 24 Mar 2018 at 12:10

I switched from Synology to QNAP as they're more upgradable and you get much better hardware for the money.

deuse · 24 Mar 2018 at 15:07

ChrisD. said:
I switched from Synology to QNAP as they're more upgradable and you get much better hardware for the money.

This.

fRostiE · 27 Mar 2018 at 12:43

is it possible/practical to but a 4 Bay NAS and only 1 hard drives to run in RAID 1?

Is it like sticks of RAM? Running in slot 1/3 and then able to double storage by adding into 2/4?

Dont particularly want to fork out for 4 x 8TB and a 4 bay NAS all in one outlay!

bledd · 27 Mar 2018 at 13:24

Synology SHR (the default RAID type) = Synology Hybrid RAID

You would set it up as SHR, then it will adapt as you add more drives.

1x8TB disk = 8TB space (non raid SHR)
2x8TB disk = 8TB space (in RAID1 SHR)
3x8TB disk = 16TB space (in RAID5 SHR)
4x8TB disk = 24TB space (in RAID5 SHR)

Takes a long time to convert between RAID types. Talking days..

WJA96 · 31 Mar 2018 at 17:09

If you want the best 4-bay NAS currently on the market then it pretty much has to be the QNAP TS-453B. If that’s a little expensive then the TS-453Be has most of the features that make the TS-453B fantastic value but it does drop a couple of useful things like the SD card slot.

Personally, I’d go for a much bigger NAS and more small disks over a small NAS with big disks in it.

A 2-bay NAS with 2 x 8tb HDD in RAID 1 is going to be 8tb and it will cost x and if one drive fails then you’re down to 1 drive.

A 4-bay NAS running RAID 10 with 8tb HDD is effectively the same thing because if you lose 1 drive from one of the pairs then you can still run with the other pair but you have no more safety.

A 4-bay NAS running RAID 6 only gets you 16tb from 32tb but you can lose 1 HDD and still run completely safely.

An 8-bay NAS running 3tb HDD in RAID 6 would get you 20tb of space and you can lose 1 HDD completely safely.

So long as the price difference between the 4 bay and the big HDD is the same or less than the 8 bay and the smaller NAS drives then you are always better off going for the bigger NAS solution. It will be faster and more robust.

A QNAP TS-831X would be a good starter “proper” NAS with 8 x 3tb or 4tb HDD in it. That’s where my money would go.

Rroff · 31 Mar 2018 at 17:23

For critical data you still want additional backup off the RAID array - while rare for both I've had complete array failure almost as many times as single drive failure over a couple of decades or so of using NAS, etc. type setups.

(Although that might partly be down to using general purpose disc - but then for a good part of that time the alternatives to using general consumer drives was ridiculously expensive enterprise ones)

WJA96 · 31 Mar 2018 at 17:46

Agreed. The OP did specially ask about drive failover redundancy. And I was answering that question. My understanding is that the OP isn’t looking for a backup, but a shared resource system.

The general lack of sensible backup plans in the world today is probably only tolerable because most of the irreplaceable data held on peoples HDDs is photographs and luckily people post everything to a Facebook or Instagram account anyway. So if the HDD does get zapped, they can still look at all the pictures anyway.