New to NAS and wondering if it will meet my needs

[RonA]

Hi all,
I've been looking at alternative back-up and storage options for a while and am almost sold on setting up a NAS particularly given the very useful ability to access my files from multiple devices or remotely however, I still have a doubt whether it would fully meet what I'm looking for and I hope some of you might be able to clear up the remaining question I have.

Some background is necessary to frame my question. I'm a hobbyist photographer and have amassed a sizeable library of just under 800gb and growing. I run a MacBook pro with 500gb SSD and use it for my photo editing, exporting the finished images to an external hard drive so as not to clog up the mac and copied to a 2nd hard drive as a back-up. I also have 3rd & 4th external drives for 2 back-ups of the rest of my Mac.

Regularly hooking up multiple external drives is a hassle as you can probably imagine and on the face of it a NAS would simplify everything but......

Is it possible to set up a 4 bay enclosure where the bay 1 & 2 drives back up my Mac in a RAID 1 mirror set-up (with no photo library included) and I can load my photos to the bay 3 drive and mirrored to the bay 4 drive and then periodically I can hook up portable external drives for additional off-site back-ups as required.

I seem to be narrowing down to a Synology DS416 ....if it does what I need - if not any suggestions most welcome.

 

[RMerlin]

Is it possible to set up a 4 bay enclosure where the bay 1 & 2 drives back up my Mac in a RAID 1 mirror set-up (with no photo library included) and I can load my photos to the bay 3 drive and mirrored to the bay 4 drive and then periodically I can hook up portable external drives for additional off-site back-ups as required.

No need to go with two separate RAIDs there, you can create one single RAID, and within that create separate shares: one for the system backups, the other for photo storage.

You are less likely to waste space that way (in case one of the two ends up filling up faster than the other).

External backups to a USB HDD would work.

I can't comment on that Synology model as I'm not familiar with their devices, but I know QNAP's line of products would work quite well for your needs.

 

[News at 11]

Pretty much any decent NAS will do what you need.