NAS vs RAID Box vs External Drives vs Cloud Storage

[agladstone]

1 hour ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Another reason is support post purchase from an established manufacturer.  

 

I have got to say that in getting another PC up and running, reinventing the wheel and learning all kinds of detailed trivia in setting up a DIY NAS configuration, frankly for me, the thrill is gone.  Life is short.  I could do it if I wanted to.  I have the skills, but I would rather spend my time listening to music, romancing the old lady or watching football, not necessarily in that order.  And, the $ savings from the DIY route are trivial.  My time is way more valuable.

Agreed, I looked at the FreeNAS website, etc - not for me!! I'm definitely not technical enough to get down to the Nity Grity level required to make the best out of a DIY NAS box and the cost seems higher than a Synology or a QNAP (but with much more speed and power vs Synology and QNAP), however it seems like you need to be an IT and or Network professional to make the best of a DIY FreeNas NAS, and I'm basically the furthest thing from that!! So Synology it will most likely be for me!! (Seems like even though the QNAP HW is faster and maybe more advanced, everyone seems to say the Synology Software is the best and most stable and user friendly and that the Synology support is very good too.)

[foodfiend]

2 hours ago, agladstone said:

Yes! I have Bluejeans Cable Cat 6a run throughout my entire place in wall and with plugs at each location. I have 500mbps internet speed right now (I will upgrade to 1Gbps as soon as it is available (soon I think). 

I also have a Netgear Nighthawk R9 router/switch with built in Port Aggregation, so I can run 2 Ethernet cables between NAS and Router/switch and I will have 2GBps LAN speed and I have a brand new 10Gbps modem , however 10Gbps internet speed is not available as of now (and prob not for years ), but I'm ready:) 

Good! Looks like your infrastructure side is taken care of.

 

2 hours ago, agladstone said:

Agreed, I looked at the FreeNAS website, etc - not for me!! I'm definitely not technical enough to get down to the Nity Grity level required to make the best out of a DIY NAS box and the cost seems higher than a Synology or a QNAP (but with much more speed and power vs Synology and QNAP), however it seems like you need to be an IT and or Network professional to make the best of a DIY FreeNas NAS, and I'm basically the furthest thing from that!! So Synology it will most likely be for me!! (Seems like even though the QNAP HW is faster and maybe more advanced, everyone seems to say the Synology Software is the best and most stable and user friendly and that the Synology support is very good too.)

Yeah, Synology provides the most user-friendly interface, although QNAP has been trying hard to improve too. Both are definitely miles ahead of building your own box, when it comes to support and ability to work out-of-the-box.

[R1200CL]

12 hours ago, agladstone said:

however it seems like you need to be an IT and or Network professional to make the best of a DIY FreeNas NAS, and I'm basically the furthest thing from that!! So Synology it will most likely be for me!!

 

Not with Highpoint, and probably not LSI either. 

Just plug in the PCI card and access the web interface. 

It's easy to setup.  Really. The Rocket Raid 3700 seems to be the best you can get, and way below $500. Up to 16 ports. 

You can set up the web interface to email you if (or when) the disk get bad sectors. 

And from that first message, it take quite a while before the disk dies. 

 

With those Ethernet speeds you have available, you will gain something doing proper HW raid. What I don't know is if you have a PC available. Even an old one will do fine.

You may even considder a Linux image, just to keep it simple. 

 

I have not not looked into free NAS website.

And if you like to be scared, look into the number of pages in NAS user manual ?

 

It seems automatic syncing to the cloud is better done with a dedicated PC. Set it and forget it. 

Once you build a HW raid like this, it will run for ever. Mine is more than 10 years. I think. At that time 2TB disks was the best you could get. Before NAS almost existed.

 

Even if I have a nice Qnap NAS abailable. (453-pro), I would never trust that NAS as my main storage. 

There are to many functions I don't need, and to easy to probably make a mistake, and every month there is a firmware update. So much could go wrong.

 

The Highpoint has well proven HW and SW. What can go wrong is a HW failure. That will not make you loose data necessary, as a new card should work.

With Raid 6, I think you're well covered. And I have had two disk failure, so I don't like RAID 5. 

 

 

 

[agladstone]

So just to update everyone that was so helpful to me in this thread:

i purchased a Synology 916+ and 4 WD RED 8TB Hard Drives. 

I'm just starting to get it set up now, but per my conversation with Synology tech support, I plan to set it up in a RAID 5 (they said RAID 6 would probably be a little overkill for my needs and that it would take up 16TB for redundancy (leaving me with only 16TB available space, whereas RAID 5 will give me 24TB's of space). 

As far as backing up the Synology NAS, they did tell me that really the absolute best and safest method would be to purchase a second Synology NAS and to also set it up in RAID 5 and to locate it off-site at a friend or relatives home and set up my primary one to auto-sync / backup to that one! 

They said this would be even better than trying to use a cloud service for backup and sync (due to time required to upload and also to download if I ever needed to). 

They also said, I could additionally perform a regular backup to cold external HD's if I wanted to be extra safe/ paranoid. 

Wish ne luck