Old NAS worries

[Powercat46]

I am running a NAS on my network that is now into its 13th year, both the 2-bay unit and the drives.
They are WD 2TB red drives. I have never had an issue with this hardware, and every time I run
diagnostics no problems are found. It is just a simple duplicate RAID config, so if one fails I will have
the other. It is a Zyxel brand, and support was ended long ago for it. Most of what I hear and read
I should expect to replace this system soon, and I have started saving for it. I recently upgraded my
network to a 2.5gb switch and put 2.5 cards in my PCs with proper cabling for it, so in buying a new
NAS 4-bay I plan to purchase one that has at least 2.5gb LAN ports. Wondering if anyone else has
any NAS lifespan recommendations?
Powercat46 in Texas

 

[RMerlin]

If you want to stick with prebuilt NAS, look at the QNAP TS-464. It has dual 2.5 Gbps, and QNAP tends to provide fairly lenghty support on their products. I also have a number of QNAP NAS deployed for my customers that have been deployed for 8+ years, with so far just a single NAS failure (it was actually a CPU failure, that particular Celeron model was known for having a design flaw where it would degrade over time).

One thing I like about QNAP is if you want to replace a NAS (because it died or you are upgrading), you can take the disks out, and put them into a new one without losing anything. I've done it a number of times when replacing a customer's NAS and we wanted to keep the same disks.

Sadly, now might be a bad time to build a new NAS, due to disk shortages. You might have to compromise on the capacity, with possibly planning a capacity upgrade in 3-4 years once pricing stabilizes.