Best storage for me? Techie please help me!

[cmb]

We've got 3 computers. 1 photographer, 1 videographer and a musicphile (itunes library 15,000 songs+). In other words all our computers and external hard-drive have maxed their memories. I confess ignorance regarding the topic of storage but through my limited research it would seem a NAS system is idea for us. We need more storage and would like to share files between computers over our network. That said I'm looking at the Synology DS410 and wondering if that's a good choice and also how to purchase. I see it empty (no hard drives sold with it) vs loaded with 4T. If I don't need 4T right off the bat, could I purchase it empty and add hard drives as I need them? How do I determine which hard drives it will take? Will it only take up to 4T total or could I add 4 hard drives each with 1.5T? Lastly any other storage options I should consider?
Really appreciate any advice an experienced techie can give.

 

[Michael Reynaga]

first things first, what is your budget?

the Synology DS410 is a good choice, it will accomodate 4 drives and each drive can be up to 2TB's giving you up to 8 TB's of space (assuming you run a RAID 0) if you want any redundancy you can setup a RAID 5 array and with 4 2TB drives you will have 6TB's of available storage.

as has been mentioned on this site, you can get much better performance out of building your own NAS if you are up for it, and it wont cost you much more money.

If you are going to be implementing a RAID array you don't necessarily want to purchase a couple of drives now and add more later as some systems will NOT allow you to expand the array, which means you will have to backup all the data, destroy the array, add the new drives re-create an array with all drives and then restore the data back onto the NAS.

I have done this before with just over 2 TB's of data and it took all weekend.

I would check out the reviews on this site (he does a great job) if you want to buy a pre-packaged NAS, but would seriously consider building your own, its not that hard, not much more money and will smoke any pre-packaged solution in terms of speed, if you are dealing with a lot of photo/video editing you want something that will perform really well or you will hate it because its to slow.

plus its fun (if you are into doing this stuff).