I am thinking about getting a NAS unit for storage. This is for home / small business use. I want some decent storage space, don’t want to completely break the bank, but also don’t want a piece of junk. I don’t want anything “cloud”, and I really don’t want it encrypting either (in case I have to recover it). Some form of RAID redundancy is mandatory. If I go cheap enough I will accept 1GbE port(s), but if I do get into spending some good money on it I will want 10GbE. I am not sure of what I want for storage space yet, some of that kind of depends on how expensive it gets. I think minimum 10TB, which could be done with a dual bay RAID 1. But I need to see the cost difference to go bigger than that. Also, I think I want it to be SATA and not SAS, unless there is real good reason for it to be SAS. It must be fairly easy to connect to from both Windows and Linux to map drives, no special software needed to connect.

I am asking here because I know some of you must have experience with NAS, and would have some opinions

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After thinking about it, I bet the first question with be "what is your budget?". I figure $1000-$2000 USD. That is total cost for NAS plus drives. If I am going to spend more than the $2000, it would have to be a spectacular bang for the buck.

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This question is frequently discussed at tomshardware.com. IIRC, Synology and QNAP are popular choices.

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Before I posted I looked on Amazon and saw lots of Synology. But when looking I saw the descriptions mentioning encryption, and also some sort of file system snapshots. The snapshots sound cool, but also sound like something that can complicate things. And I don't want encryption. Maybe someone can explain those things and how they work, and if they can be turned off if desired. I can obviously research myself, but I was not confident in my initial search results and thought to ask here.

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Do you need a NAS, or just more and reliable storage?
ICY Box is a good DAS (direct accessed storage) with usb 3 and Raid 1 capability, and if the box would fail with it's electronics the drives can be accessed directly in a computer and has no linuxsystem on it or encryption.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2-bay-i ... via-usb-30

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I like the idea of setting up a simple DAS with a mirror raid.

Could one just make the usb3 connection directly to a modern router with a built in usb3 port?
What kind of performance across the network would be typical?

If the port allows read/write it should be no problem...have seen some USB ports that only allow read on a external connection.


Have not tried, so don't know

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Not that anyone cares that I have over thought this to a crazy level, but I made a spreadsheet for myself to compare values and cost for different NAS units and drives. It is enough to make my head spin. Plus I searched for some answers on Reddit for what NAS to get (Synology vs QNAP). I am sticking with 1GbE ports, as 10GbE would require more costly infrastructure. I will be using WD Red 8TB drives, as the cost per TB is most effective. I chose regular Red since they are quieter, and I am only going for 1GbE port performance, so the Red Pro would likely not be much improvement. I will be choosing a 4 or 5 bay Synology NAS unit. The cheap version is a DS418 4 bay, total cost with drives would be $1160, giving 24TB in RAID5. On the higher end is the DS1019+ 5 bay with 2 NVMe slots for cache, total cost with drives including cache would be $1820 for 32TB in RAID5. There are options in between, but I am leaving them out, as I can’t justify them. The part of me that wants to save money would go for the cheap version, but the part of me that wants more storage and performance is telling me to go for the bigger faster one. Go big or go home? Normally I would go big. But the reality is that with my current meager network infrastructure, and looking at the performance specs, I think going big may be a waste of money. I think the $1160 for the 24TB RAID5 setup is about the most bang for the buck I can get at this time, without going to the next level. Obviously this will change in the future as options change, but I thought I would share what I found and decided.

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I think that Red Pro models may be rebadged HGST drives. I don't know about standard Reds, though.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

My point about choosing the regular Red over the Red Pro is that in this case, I don't think the extra performance gain would actually make an overall difference. I think a single 1GbE port is the limiting factor. Aggregating 2 ports could maybe make a difference, but you need a proper network switch to do that, which takes a bit more money. Maybe I am wrong, I only have so much information to work with.

FYI I also did compare Seagate Ironwolf drives for this.

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And actually from my research, I think the WD Red drives are basically WD Green drives with minor firmware tweaks to be optimized for NAS.

Edit:
Since there green drives don't come in the bigger sizes, I am guessing my above statement is not correct.

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