help with decison on synology NAS

[dess1313]

looking for advice. i'm new to NAS and RAID systems

I have had multiple computer problems in the past and have worked with mostly western digital portable external drives to back up my files. i've had hard all sorts of problems with HDs, ram, motherboards, etc over the last 10 years and 3 different computer brands. i'm just an attactant for lemons and breakdowns

what i want to do is have a larger storage than my WD externals. one gets near full, then there isnt enough room to store this, or that, and each successive computer has a larger and larger hard drive so i need more and more room each time. i'm currently bouncing between about 3 of them as i am again experiencing problems and trying to back tings up before doing a system restore.
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What i need is:
1. just more brute storage that isnt limited having a single drive for excess movies, photos, and other media and files
2. a active backup, even if its just once a day or twice a week of my laptop, and also another desktop computer that is attached to my network
3. space to temporarily store other computer files as i help repair other peoples as well. USB connection sounds to be the best method for this
4. share files from my laptop to my desktop which is hooked up to my tv, so i can watch movies from it

I have seen about not using the RAID as a total backup because failures do happen. If i were to use a synology model with the synology hybrid drive, i would have either 2(Ds213) or 4 (Ds413) drives respectively with copies of my laptop information i beleive from what i have read about it. but i'm not sure if that is correct.

this would not constitute a total backup, but by using my 2TB WD external drive periodically that would then i think adequately cover most bases and give me fairly reasonable protection.
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I have found the synology Ds213 an Ds413 systems. reviews seem positive enough on them and so far they seem to be my best couple options i've found so far unless someone can point me at something else

Being new to these NAS devices, i'm looking for any advice to help point out other products, options or errors in my logic/information i have found. i had been looking at drobos initially, and ended up finding synologies through various searches i have been doing. i dont see much on the drobo platform here which makes me wonder why too. thanks for your input

 

[stevech]

Try the demo websites for SYnology and QNAP.
My choice was a small Synology (2 drive), non-RAID config.

Another thing you can do: if you don't need a NAS to be shared among serveral PCs... then maybe you would use a RAID/JBOD box. These are about $100. Lots of vendors. Interfaces to one PC via eSATA or USB(3?).

That PC can of course create shares on the LAN for other PCs. If applicable.
This is just file sharing and backups. A good NAS as above has many more features, if you need them.

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Curious about your PC woes. I've home-built 4 or so PCs over 10 or so years. In succession... retired one, moved some guts to the new one, etc. I've always bought ASUS motherboards, and top quality memory and Disk drives. No motherboard issues in all those years. No drive failures (but I backup the heck out of things. The 2 or so drive failures I've had were cheap-o drives not used for anything important, on secondary PCs used to fool around with things like Linux.

Way, way back, I learned about junk products such as ECS motherboards. Data loss is too much of a PITA to cheap-out and save $25 on drives and motherboards.

But then, maybe I just beat the odds.

 

[dess1313]

thanks for the info! i will look into those for sure. sounds like i'm on target and will look to the other one.

first lappy i owned i didn't have a clue much about hardware other than what specs i wanted. got a compaq laptop. learned a ton that next 2 years(including never buy compaq again). hard drive was failing, but couldn't send it away for 3 weeks to get it repaired when i needed a comp for schooling. Formatted it monthly by the time it was really bad but hell i needed to finish the school year. got pretty good at it too lmfao. got lots of help (and no help) through their awful tech support in repairing it. later on i think it was related to multiple brown out power service in my very very old building. ended up with not only a hard drive, but also motherboard replaced, ram replaced, and they wondered why i was hostile on the phone.

next was a dell lappy which was fine till i moved to another building where it somehow overheated and cooked its self with no fans running inside of the first month of living there (again poor power source, this is where i learned about mini surges and brown out damages) got it replaced and a UPS at the same time. no problems again for a while. now a Toshiba with a burnt out hard drive from 2 years of hard running bots and torrents. think though the ram is also on the fritz maybe too so this is where i'm stuck on my backup situations. i built a basic desktop to run extra things on it and as a backup computer as well. next time i'll be moving to a self built gaming desktop i think. it was fun to do.

i definitely agree about the quality products. i'm a lemon magnet! $25 is worth the investment esp if it keeps things alive for a long time.