I have a 2 bay QNAP NAS. Why not go with one of the out of the box solutions that have RAID and all that built in? You don't need that many drives if you can support these 4-6TB drives....or can do multiple arrays for fast/slow storage or tiered storage.
I'm just curious... I really like the compactness, canned configuration, and Linux back-end of those similar systems.
RAID 1 or 10 beats no raid. I actually had a drive fail on my qnap and I was able to swap the drive and have the array rebuild. I haven't had many issues with it, but it's more of a storage valut for me.I have a nice QNAP 2 bay NAS and I love it but it has severe limitations. Two bays just don't cut it. Four bays doesn't even cut it. Not only from a pure storage pool size limitation but also your lack of RAID options. Now you throw in the poor performance and lack of value versus what you can build for the same price or lower and it is a no brainer to build your own NAS. There are a myriad of good software solutions that blow away QNAP or Synology. You just have to put the time in to familiarize yourself to say FreeNAS or OpenMedia Vault.
RAID 1 or 10 beats no raid. I actually had a drive fail on my qnap and I was able to swap the drive and have the array rebuild. I haven't had many issues with it, but it's more of a storage valut for me.
I know where you're coming from... I installed freeNAS maybe 15 years ago and like the flexibility...but am tired of maintaining stuff. I have administered a number of EMC Clariions as well as other Enterprise storage solutions and know the difference between those, the small business and home solutions. It sounds like the OP wants to use hardware on hand. I personally like the small footprint and low power consumption of those devices....as well as firmware-style patching...everyone has different needs. With SSD is cheap as it is, it's going to be great seeing hyper-fast arrays being created for not a lot of money.