No idea what to buy. Help me with NAS recommendations please.

[dhokes]

With a failing hard drive on my iMac, I’m looking at possible long term solutions and could do with some advice as to what’s best for my needs. Sorry for the many questions as I'm very new to this sort of stuff!

I’ll be getting a MacBook that I want to back up regularly (probably best to use Time Machine?). I’ve also got a few external hard drives containing videos that I want to collate so that they’re together and be able to stream on Plex. I don’t believe they need to be transcoded. I’ve got a large mp3 collection too and not sure whether to keep it on my laptop or the final solution. I want to be able to access the songs on my laptop and on my phone. I don’t particularly need any of it to be accessible outside my home network. I believe I could transfer the music I want to my phone. I’ve also got things that I want for medium term storage that I may want to access e.g. photos, tutorials, ebooks. Apart from the time machine backups (or included, if it’s easier), I want everything to be backed up in case a disk starts to fail.

Summary:
- Time machine backups
- Videos (Plex)
- Music + other medium term files
- The above two I wanted backed up too.

What would you suggest that’s easily available in the U.K.?

I’m confused about RAID. Would you suggest it? If a video or a file becomes corrupt, I don’t need immediate access as long as there’s a backup available that I could use. Or is it good practice to use RAID so backups are available if files get corrupted?

Would I generally be better off by buying the enclosure + hard drives separately?

I understand the cost vs speed/efficiency argument of HHDs vs SSDs. What’s the typical life cycle for each? I don’t want to have to keep replacing them.

Should I avoid certain branded hard drives and only consider certain ones? I've hard bad experiences with Seagate external hard drives before.

Finally, does the NAS have to be connected directly to the router or can it be elsewhere and connected by power line adapters?

Also, are there are particular retailers in the UK that you'd recommend to buy hard drives from i.e. that have decent packaging and customer support if they fail?

Sorry, I'm sure I'll have future questions later on.

 

[Snapshot]

This could get a bit lengthy so bear with me. You have two conflicting requirements for one device: you want to access your data and you want a backup. A backup is something that is only accessed when needed, not as a matter of course, so a device on which you regularly access data should not be considered a backup. Let's put that to one side for the moment and look at the physical side of things.

Let's say you buy a two-drive NAS. You would add two relatively large HDDs and run them in RAID1 (mirroring). This gives you protection against one HDD failing but RAID is not a backup. If funds allow, a four-drive NAS running RAID10 is faster and slightly more resilient.

Yes, SSDs are inherently faster than HDDs but that becomes less important when there's a 1Gbps network involved. You would also not be prepared to pay for SSDs to provide the amount of space you're likely to need. So you will be buying HDDs. If you're buying for a NAS then your realistic choices are WD Red Plus, Seagate Ironwolf and possibly Toshiba N300. I'd be happy with either of the first two (I am!) but I'm not sure about the N300s.

The lifecycle for SSDs is still not fully known but the current indications are that it may not be significantly better than HDDs. Good HDDs will last five years or more.

Powerline adapters are slow, whatever their headline speed claims may be, so you need the NAS connected directly to the router.

So, going back to your conflicting requirements, I suggest you get a NAS for your day-to-day usage and use the external disks you free up for the backups.

I hope this helps and I haven't totally confused you.

 

[SonicSW20]

N300's are fine, been running them for a good few years. Decent performance and at the time of purchase the price/TB was excellent. My only complaint is they're quite noisy when in heavy use but thats not really a problem unless the box is close to you.