2 Bay NAS for backups and file share

brakeinup · 17 Sep 2022 at 13:06

I'm looking for a 2 bay NAS that has gigabit ethernet or 2.5GBe for high-speed transfers from a Win10 PC. The PC has 2.5GBe capability.

I do not need transcoding tools or apps and such. Just need a fast NAS that can use one large drive for backing up files and another drive to share large files on a gigabit network. I do not need to access the NAS from outside of my own network. I have been looking at Synology and WD devices, but they seem to be loaded with extras that I wouldn't use.

Any recommendations please?

Snapshot · 18 Sep 2022 at 08:46

Asustor Nimbustor 2 would be my choice. I've been using a Nimbustor 4 since it was released and have only stopped because I wanted six drive bays. It's somewhere in the sales section BTW....

I would recommend selecting a drive that's large enough to hold both sets of files, if possible, then running two of them in RAID1 to give you some protection against drive failure. You can select who has access to what with user/group permissions on the NAS.

Minstadave · 18 Sep 2022 at 09:32

Synology DS220+ is what I have got and it's been a dream. Only has 1GbE which seems an oversight but given it's only 2 drives it's not a massive issue.

rhysduck · 18 Sep 2022 at 10:10

QNAP TS251+ I have. Had it's a good few years with 2x 2TB drives.
Hold photo, doc and video backup with a Plex library.
Had zero issue aside from the constant firmware updates

brakeinup · 18 Sep 2022 at 13:47

Snapshot said:
Asustor Nimbustor 2 would be my choice. I've been using a Nimbustor 4 since it was released and have only stopped because I wanted six drive bays. It's somewhere in the sales section BTW....

I would recommend selecting a drive that's large enough to hold both sets of files, if possible, then running two of them in RAID1 to give you some protection against drive failure. You can select who has access to what with user/group permissions on the NAS.

Thanks. The backup the NAS would do is a backup of a PC drive on a home GB LAN. My wife uses Photoshop and has an NVME drive for editing and those folders are backed up to the internal backup drive which is then synched to another PC with an identical drive in it. So is Current Work>Internal Backup>External Backup so always 3 copies so don't really need disc redundancy (but I could move the two large drives into a RAID1 - hmm).
I'm moving from an aging Dell T20 server tower to an NUC for my security cameras and a NAS for backups and such. Smaller footprint, more energy efficient.

lsg1r · 23 Sep 2022 at 11:37

Does your router have a usb port? If it does it may actually be able to act as network attached storage if you plug a usb drive in.

If it doesn't and you want to go full nas, I'd suggest mirrored raid minimum and I'd also suggest going for more drive bays than you currently need so you can expand by adding in more drives (most nas support expanding storage these days)

NAS suggestions - Synology is the obvious choice although I'm kind of anti them at the moment due to their hard drive restriction shenanigans.
QNAP and Asusstor are well regarded, although both did get ransomware attacks, I've not heard of synology having this issue.

Terramaster is another option, with in some cases the ability to remove the os usb drive and use unraid/truenas instead

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