Storage Solutions NAS For My Home

anmolbhard004

anmolbhard004

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Hello
I am looking to setup a NAS for my home it will be basic as I intend to store photos and videos mostly no movies and all that.
Currently have approx 25-30k photos in total

So Some questions

1. What brands will you suggest for both NAS and drives NAS should be user friendly not of much hassle
2. Kindly suggest specific models
3. Can you also share some authorised distributors for the same or from where you bought yours so that I get the best deal [ Location should not be a constraint as all shops mostly ship pan India]
4. How frequently do drives malfunction?
A friend suggested me Synology DS 923+ [its a 4 bay NAS] so is it an overkill? Should I take another model Pls suggest
He says that it will come useful if one of my Drives fail something he mentioned RAID 5.
fellow members can tag who has a knowledge about this
 
anmolbhard004 said:
Hello
I am looking to setup a NAS for my home it will be basic as I intend to store photos and videos mostly no movies and all that.
Currently have approx 25-30k photos in total

So Some questions

1. What brands will you suggest for both NAS and drives NAS should be user friendly not of much hassle
2. Kindly suggest specific models
3. Can you also share some authorised distributors for the same or from where you bought yours so that I get the best deal [ Location should not be a constraint as all shops mostly ship pan India]
4. How frequently do drives malfunction?
A friend suggested me Synology DS 923+ [its a 4 bay NAS] so is it an overkill? Should I take another model Pls suggest
He says that it will come useful if one of my Drives fail something he mentioned RAID 5.
fellow members can tag who has a knowledge about this
Click to expand...
Mention your storage space requirements, budget, if you're looking for repurposing already acquired hardware or looking to purchase everything (used or new), networking setup at home and number of clients (no of devices that will use the NAS).

We can help you choose the best solution possible.


I opted for P330 Tiny from Lenovo (got it from @aasimenator here itself ) as it has 2x nvme slots plus pcie slot (so 2 more SSDs one nvme one SATA) and I also converted the WiFi slot to nvme for boot drive.
So it runs 4x SSDs in RaidZ1 And 1 boot drive. Enough storage and speeds for my family, and enough compute for all I need to host.
 
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Can you expand on your use case ?
A NAS to just store photos and videos ? Are you looking for anything beyond storage as otherwise even a couple of USB drives will cover you ?
You can always roll your own NAS using older and cheaper hardware or, alternatively, look at any of the 2 bay Synology options.
 
@napstersquest
Mostly looking for new have not bought anything so far , budget is not a constraint number of clients would be me and my mother mostly,
for storage space am not quite sure.
devices that will use NAS will be a iphone+ 2 android phones
now for networking setup I have a ubiquiti udm pro and mikrotik rb5009 if this helps .

I don't think I would be expanding on my use case photos and videos would be all.


This is my for my mothers use mostly she wants to have all photos and videos in one place [ that includes some wedding function albums too those are 5-6 TB in size]

@ibose usb drives wont be practical for my mother. and will 2 bay ones fail quickly?
and for other hardware except for my mac I dont have any.
 
You can either go for 2x12TB or 4x8TB depending on what you can find in your budget.
anmolbhard004 said:
will 2 bay ones fail quickly
Click to expand...
Failure is not a matter of quick or delayed. Failure is a matter of time. If it doesn't fail in 1 year (quickly) and it fails in 7 years (in a long time), you still lose all your photos if you don't have a second copy. So it doesn't matter how fast it fails, if you care about the data on it, you need to have another copy somewhere. Setting up a RAID array protects you from disk failures.

If budget is not a constraint, then I'd recommend Synology. It's easy to setup and operate. If you want something cheap, then get a used Tiny PC like the Lenovo one @napstersquest mentioned or an NUC. Even old celerons are good enough for this. Install openmediavault on it. After you spend some time setting it up, it will require very little maintenance. Linux is rock stable and runs 24x7 without issues.

If you need remote access to the drive, you can setup tailscale or Nord VPN's meshnet on it.
 
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anmolbhard004 said:
@ibose usb drives wont be practical for my mother. and will 2 bay ones fail quickly?
Click to expand...
Looks like your Microtik has a USB port. If the objective is to share files centrally, I am would have just attached an USB drive to that port on the router.
On the failure, it can happen any time to any hardware. A two bay nas affords some protection and as long as you have an additional backup, it should be fine.
 
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@ibose will be selling the Mikrotik soon sorry I forgot to mention that.
what exactly do you mean by keeping an additional copy do I have to manually upload the photos to my backup then each time i click pictures?

@gourav will Synology ds923+ support RAID array ? will this be suitable for my needs ?? will go with 4 * 8TB ones or 4* 4TB [ or 2 - 4tb -2 8tb]
as far as setting up tailscale or nord vpn one these things are above my point of understanding as am not a tech geek like you guys am just a surgeon, so looking to keep things simple this was one of the main reasons why I shifted to Ubiquiti from mikrotik for ease of access..

waiting for input from @napstersquest enjoy your trip first
@vivek.krishnan also.
 
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anmolbhard004 said:
what exactly do you mean by keeping an additional copy do I have to manually upload the photos to my backup then each time i click pictures?
Click to expand...
A periodic backup of your data elsewhere either offline disk storage or cloud like Office 365 (there is a thread in the marketplace) just in case your NAS goes down. You can enable automatic backups directly from your NAS to any location.
There are threads here on backup strategies so you can read up on those.
My suggestion is to not keep a single copy of your personal data like photos and videos.
 
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I would say go the route of an older PC, a second-hand raid card, with IT bios flashed in. and 4 HDDs with raid 5. (note - u don't need a raid card, if you have 6 ports on the motherboard itself and are going with a bare-metal install of TrueNAS)
For software - you can try TrueNAS core/scale on unraid (paid one time) or TrueNAS scale on bare metal (this would be more optimal for ur use case) with a photo/video backup application like Immich (I use this and it is very good and stable for general use case once setup correctly).

Why TrueNAS?
It uses a filesystem called ZFS which is awesome for redundancy and recovering data from snapshot backups on drive, in case you perma delete something or lose something somehow. It also has other awesome features which i wont be mentioning here. U can check this for more details if interested - OpenZFS

Also as @ibose mentioned... do keep a backup of ur media off-site. You never wanna know all the ways you can lose ur data.
 
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If you are not into linux and tinkering, I would suggest go with Synology 4 bay and use Synology apps to back up your data to your NAS.
As others suggested, maintain multiple copies at different places of your important data. I usually keep one on my NAS, one on my PC and one on cloud. Everything is automated.
 
napstersquest said:
If you are not into linux and tinkering, I would suggest go with Synology 4 bay and use Synology apps to back up your data to your NAS.
As others suggested, maintain multiple copies at different places of your important data. I usually keep one on my NAS, one on my PC and one on cloud. Everything is automated.
Click to expand...
Could you share more details about your setup, mostly about the automated sync between cloud, storage and computer?
 
nithin1992 said:
Could you share more details about your setup, mostly about the automated sync between cloud, storage and computer?
Click to expand...
NAS runs TrueNAS Scale.
I use Immich on each phone to automatically sync photos (works like GPhotos).
The PC syncs with selected folders on NAS using Syncthing.
The Onedrive sync is through Windows VM running inside the NAS. I might switch to Rsync cron jobs later.
 
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anmolbhard004 said:
will Synology ds923+ support RAID array ? will this be suitable for my needs ?? will go with 4 * 8TB ones or 4* 4TB [ or 2 - 4tb -2 8tb]
Click to expand...
All synology devices support RAID.

For your use case, even synology 423 or 423+ will be fine. 923+ supports expansion bay to add more drives later, which 423+ doesn't. Otherwise not much of a difference for a regular user using it for backup purposes.

For hard drive capacity, I would recommend going with the maximum you can afford. If you're using RAID1, all data will be mirrored in 2 drives and you'll get half the capacity. If you're using RAID5, you'll lose the capacity of one of the drives. Either way, setup will be easier if all the drives are of the same size. So 4x8 is recommended. You'll get around 14.6 TB of usable space in RAID1 config or around 22 TB in RAID5.
 
anmolbhard004 said:
So Some questions
Click to expand...
1. Synology is straight forward and easy to use in your case. Using an old PC will be a lot cheaper if you buy used and install TrueNAS or normal Windows server.
2. For photos only + Videos + Movies, buy the cheapest 4 bay if synology or other prebuilt NAS with 4 bays. U can add more drives down the line if you need expanding in Synology.
4. Have you tried calculating the price of subscribing to Google Drive and if that might be a cheaper option?
 
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Avoid "J" series models from synology, they are slow as hell because of severely underpowered hardware.

gourav said:
Backblaze is much cheaper for backup and will actually work out much cheaper than a NAS if the purpose is only backup and not to run other services like Plex/Pi-hole off the NAS.
Click to expand...
Backblaze personal plan requires a windows pc & covers all the drives connected internally or via usb & 30 days grace period before the stuff on any disconnected drive is deleted permanently from backup. Their restore capability also has issue over 1TB restore & majority of there consumers which are in US choose the "send a drive home with backup & return" option.

Astrek said:
unraid (paid one time)
Click to expand...
unraid.net

Upcoming Changes to Unraid OS Pricing

Upcoming Changes to Unraid OS Pricing
unraid.net unraid.net
 
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guest_999 said:
Avoid "J" series models from synology, they are slow as hell because of severely underpowered hardware.


Backblaze personal plan requires a windows pc & covers all the drives connected internally or via usb & 30 days grace period before the stuff on any disconnected drive is deleted permanently from backup. Their restore capability also has issue over 1TB restore & majority of there consumers which are in US choose the "send a drive home with backup & return" option.


unraid.net

Upcoming Changes to Unraid OS Pricing

Upcoming Changes to Unraid OS Pricing
unraid.net unraid.net
Click to expand...
I mean they gotta sustain the company and I dont feel like it's a bad deal for a consumer... It's still a perpetual license, just limited to a certain version. If there are no security bugs or flaws found all's good. If u see a new feature u want down the line and u feel tis worth the extension fee, then go for it, or else enjoy ur current version till u want to enjoy it. This is still better than going the monthly subscription route that companies usually take.
 
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