With a four-bay setup, you can get RAID5 going, which will give you a better balance of both security and capacity. When using this type of setup, you can protect your data from a failing HDD as it everything is copied to both drives.įor those that need more storage space or have a larger budget for finding the best solution, a four-bay NAS device could be a better choice. As a bare minimum, you should look for a dual-bay system with two matching HDDs in a mirrored RAID1 configuration.
Which NAS device you buy will obviously reflect your storage needs and what kind of setup you are going for. The variety of NAS devices out there is quite large, often with varying amounts of drive bays, with consumer-level models usually coming with one, two, three, or four bays. In this article, we are going to look at the recommended NAS devices out there, how they work, and cover some of the terminologies too for those who are new to NAS. NAS acts as a safe and reliable way to store your precious data, and the beauty of it is that a multi-disk RAID array will have you covered if an HDD fails.įinding the best NAS drive can be quite tricky, but don’t worry, we are here to help. You can use NAS drives to store your personal media files, create audio libraries, run security management systems, and of course, databases.
NAS has a variety of uses, but what is considered to be the best NAS drive? NAS drives are similar to cloud storage as they allow you to access your data regardless of where you are (as long as there is an internet connection).
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NAS acts as your personal cloud, easily accessible with no download required. Lastly, I don't see how you reliably RAID external drives.Network-attached storage does a lot more than just simply storing your files, and despite what you might think, NAS isn’t just for large businesses. One RAID 10 array: Two drives worth of storage available in total. One RAID 5 array: Three drives' worth of storage available in total. Two RAID 1 sets: Two drives' worth of storage available in total. With four drives, you have an option to create two RAID 1 (mirror) sets, one RAID 5 array or, possibly a RAID 1+0 (RAID 10) array where a pair of drives are striped with no data redundancy and that pair is mirrored to another pair.Īvailable storage in each of the above cases is as follows: There are plenty of commercial (and probably home-built) NAS systems with only two drives in them where the only choice of protective RAID is RAID 1, but I see you're planning on starting with four drives. What it is is a copy of your data on a degraded array of disks. You'd need an even number of drives for this, of course, and you'd be "wasting" half the storage you have in your NAS, it being mirrors of the other half of the storage.Īlso, the remaining drive in a broken mirror set (after one drive in the set fails) or in any other type of RAID is NEVER referred to as a backup. Again, generally speaking, if you wanted all your data protected by RAID 1, you would pair drives and mirror each of the first drives in a pair to each of the second drives. I almost all cases, a RAID 1 (mirror) protects your data against a single dive loss. It's not going to be 200W higher or anything insane. But either option will work.Ĭons: Power Consumption (Unsure exactly how much higher though, but I expect it to be much higher.) Probably a better option from an expandability standpoint. Option 2: Lenovo P500 Workstation - $163 USD May or may not be annoying for day to day use.ĭrives may require cooling during peak operation (ZFS scrubs / resilvers, intensive writes) This is fixable by running some commands I have LONG since forgotten though. This isn't a huge issue but may cause weird behavior when it tries to use dual path on the drive (which physical isn't possible with SATA and USB), and will email you alerts about it. Some crappy sata to USB converters gives the same ID to the system, which confuses the hell out of TrueNAS sometimes (and probably other OS's too).
One potential issues you might face outside of USB durability is the chipset. Standard disclaimer, RAID is not a backup etc etc. I would ideally want Raid1 as then if one drive breaks, there would be backups on the others.