NAS suggestions

[Pghpooh]

HI
Looking for suggestions on buying a NAS for my home network. I have a laptop, desktop and a external hard drive. Laptop is wifi, desktop is connected to my router and the external drive is connected to the desktop via a usb cable. Total storage for those items is around 2.5 terabit.
I know very little about NAS.
I would like about 4 tb of space and run it in raid 1.
The best NAS for me is plug and play. Just plug it in and go!! LOLOL
There are units with drives installed and units where you buy the "case" then add the drives. Physically adding drives is not a problem for me. My biggest concern is the actual setup. software install, changes, etc.
I'd like to keep the price between $200 to $400.
All suggestions are needed as this is going to be a first for me and a learning experience.
Oh,,, I store home financial data, pictures and music that have been accumulated over the past 20 years or so.
Thanks

 

[chinchetin]

I know this is going to be polemic but... do not use a NAS at home or in a small office. is the perfect way to increase problems.

I have a lot of histories to tell of people with troubles and losing data using a NAS, specially in RAID setups at home and in small offices.

imagine that the NAS crash and cannot be started. You cannot simply disconnect your drives and plug them to another computer to recover the data.

so my advice is to use a usb portable or just share the disk in the network and have a copy in another disk like you have been done this 20 years.

 

[gea]

A typical NAS is managed by a Web-UI so managing is not too complicated and you have the two options:

1. ready to use with a lot of "extras" like a Synology

Pro
Use if you just want buy and power on with a lot of home apps included

Con
not the cheapest, fastest or most secury option
the cheaper ones are too slow to work from (much slower than a local disk)

2. use a NAS where you can add your own Web-appliance software
like a HP Micrsoserver G8 with the smallest CPU and 2-16 GB RAM

Pro
much faster, professional hardware, ECC RAM, upgradeable, 4 disk bays.
you can use any NAS OS, especially those with ZFS support that offers a
much higher level of datasecurity with versioning and checksum protection.
ideal if you want to work from your NAS where data with snaps/versioning

Con
you must install the appliance OS yourself

If 2. is an option, check webbased ZFS appliances like

based on BSD
- FreeNAS, Nas4Free, ZFSGuru

based on Solaris, the origin of ZFS
- NexentaStor CE (only for homeuse, max 18TB)
- Oracle Solaris (commercial but free for "demo and development")
currenty the most feature rich professional ZFS storage server
- OmniOS, a free Solaris fork

for the last two, I offer a Web-UI and an online installer to have it up
(new setup or a restore on a crash with an import of your datapool) within half an hour

For all options, think of an external disaster backup,
this can be a USB disk connected to your NAS or your desktop.

For my napp-it on Solarish, you can read my HowTo
http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/napp-in-one.pdf

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Get a Synology. Drop in two 4TB HDDs. Drink beer.

Slightly more complicated version: Synology and QNAP both have very good (easy to use and configure) management software. QNAP runs a bit chaeper, but some people REALLY like the Synology software.

A 2-bay NAS with no HDDs might run you $150-$200 (shop sales.) 4-bay units are more expensive.

Example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA9B53KN3273

The advantage being that you can add two HDDs to start with and add two later if you think you might need to.

HDDs not included.

If you're just using it for file storage, don't worry too much about which model you're getting. Some of the higher end units have pretty beefy CPUs in them that they use for video transcoding (PLEX, XBMC, Kodi, etc.) or that they use to host Virtual Machines. The faster CPUs also tend to improve file access speed, but the low end ones are usually sufficient anyways.

Don't overthink this.

Most of these NAS units use linux software RAID. You can install the drives in a linux system and recover data from them if the NAS blows a motherboard or something.

Cloud backup of your NAS is possible with many units as well (backblaze, crashplan, etc.) This simplifies recovery a bit. Support varies depending on the service and the NAS device. (Some CPUs aren't supported.) If this interests you, double-check compatibility before you buy.

 

[Ranulf]

I'd recommend Qnap or Synology. Probably a cheaper 4bay unit to have expansion room in the future like the qnap dave linked to. 2 bay units are fine but I'm a bit of a noise fanatic and the smaller 2 bay units are usually louder due to smaller fans.

I'd also keep using external drives to backup the data that is most important. You want multiple sources.

 

[mpo]

I know this is going to be polemic but... do not use a NAS at home or in a small office. is the perfect way to increase problems.

I have a lot of histories to tell of people with troubles and losing data using a NAS, specially in RAID setups at home and in small offices.

imagine that the NAS crash and cannot be started. You cannot simply disconnect your drives and plug them to another computer to recover the data.

so my advice is to use a usb portable or just share the disk in the network and have a copy in another disk like you have been done this 20 years.

I have a Western Digital MyCloud NAS. I make a backup of the NAS with a portable drive every other week with a portable drive. The backup drive is locked away offsite.

It's much easier than backing up the computers to portable drives individually for storage offsite. Did that for a decade.

 

[Shmee]

Freenas is good if you have spare hardware around.

 

[gea]

The main question is not Synology or Qnap as a commercial NAS or built your own
with an OpenSource or free storage distribution. This is not the point.

Relevant for a NAS is the filesystem at first place as this affects items like data security with bit rot protection, crash behaviour, versioning (go back to former states). performance, online check and repair, pooling or moveability between server and operating systems.

Especially ZFS, developed by Sun/Oracle is the huge step forward regarding these
items. Btrfs and ReFS are two other filesystems that include the ZFS features
Checksums (all data is verified) and CopyOnWrite (crash resistent, versioning)
but they are not as fast, mature or feature rich as ZFS that is now in use on
professional storage systems for 10 years.

So if data security is in any way relevant with multi-Terabyte storage, you cannot
go around ZFS waht I would declare as the very first decision for storage, does not
matter if its a SoHo setup or a professional system.

The next question is the if you use a Solaris based OS, the origin of ZFS with the
in ZFS and the kernel integrated SMB server with ntfs permission compatibility what I prefer or something based ob BSD with SAMBA as the SMB server.

Linux and OSX are other platforms for ZFS bute there are no comparable
webbased storage appliances like on Unix with BSD or Solaris around.