Buying a NAS

[Olli]

I'm looking for a NAS, and would like to have some help choosing a good one - for example should I buy a NAS or a PC. I'd prefer a cheap price, so used units are okay as well. Seems that QNAP TS-253A is available at least. Here are some my requirements for it:

• Time Machine backups
• store photos, and videos (also 4K from iPhone & DJI drones)
• burn in subtitles on-the-fly preferred or in background, for example during night
  - watch these locally & remotely as 4K
• support for ownCloud or similar

The Internet connection is 1/1 G. I don't care about the power consumption as it's included in my rent. For disks I consider WD My Book recertified 6TB which are about ~130 $/pcs. Thank you.

 

[Olli]

Anyone? Thanks! =)

 

[EngChi]

The difficulty in answering your question is that it is way too generic (I want to buy some car, cheap, what should I buy?)

- how much storage you want?
- how will you handle redundancy/data protection against failure ? what is your backup strategy?
- how much hurt is to lose all of that data you put on NAS? (cheap, recertified, etc don't belong if your data matters)
- what is your true budget for this?

without this, it is a pointless exercise.


also, your NAS should be a NAS - lower power consumption , available /highly available resource with large amount of storage.
if you want to do 'server' things on it , get a server.

 

[Olli]

Thanks for the reply, and sorry for not being specific enough. Here's replies to your questions:

- 6 TB would be most cost efficient now I think.
- backup would be made to external USB HDD and probably to off-site location with NAS and/or OneDrive
- it hurts. If I have understood correctly WD recertifying process replaces the disk inside with a brand new disk but the enclosure is used
- disks 130*3 (one would be the external USB) so 400 $, and then for NAS/PC - should be preferably less than 500 $. Optimal would be like 200 $ but I don't know if that's possible.
- not doing any server things. With power consumption I meant that I'm fine using old computer with high power usage if that suits my use case and budget better.

 

[EngChi]

The other question I forget to ask is whether you consider your time as worthless (how much does your time worth)?

Pretty much any two bay solutions would work - major vendors are Synology and QNAP. their 2 bay solutions are cheap (170$), add two hard drives (does not have to match capacity), do not raid them (create two separate volumes), attach any USB backup drive , and configure backups within the NAS between the volumes/to the drive. you would have 3 copies of data, multiple volumes within single NAS (so no issue with single volume takes you down), backup jobs/versioning, etc.

I think both vendors (Synology and QNAP) let you play with their software online for 'demo' purposes if you want feel of it. yes, it can do other things if you want but if all you care is cheap, power efficient, sharable storage, ARM based cheap NAS boxes would do the trick. you can even go to the single bay solution if you want to and connect external HDD to it, would still give you 2 copies of data.

"burn in subtitles on-the-fly preferred or in background, for example during night"
that is the job of the server/workstation. as you can hack the NAS to be bad server but it would be bad NAS _and_ bad server, no longer as power efficient to run 24x7, overpowered for 90%+ of the time, and underpowered for 10%+ when you need compute capacity (transcoding videos into new format). how often are you planning to mess around with video anyway?

 

[Olli]

I can spend some time adjusting and tweaking it but not too much. Should work well most of the time. I'd like not to have a separate machine for video conversion. The energy usage isn't a problem like I said in the first message. Video converting wouldn't be a daily process, but my goal is to be able to save 4K videos captured with my iPhone to the NAS and then watch them at lower quality on the go. Single bay solution sounds great too, but do those machines have enough power for 4K Videos?