[SOLVED] Drive configuration in NAS

[RoccatKanga]

Hello, I bought my first NAS with 4 bays.
It's meant to be used for Various things:
-VPN Server
-Photo Storage
-Shared Storage
-Family Cloud
-Computer Backups(5 in Total----Time Machine & Windows)
-Storage of footage of 1 Security Camera running 24/7
-maybe web-server
I'm still at the beginning of my learning curve

I don't know how many drives of what size to get:
my gut feeling is I want something between 5 and 10 TB of total capacity.

I figure having few large drives is better for expanding later on.
On the other hand, I understand expanding RAID Arrays(wich I assume are a must) Is no simple task and requires huge (equal to old capacity) amuonts of temporary storage.

Does that mean I just use all 4 slots now and future-proof?

Or is it a good Idea to start with two, and maybe later add another 2 drives as a 2nd Volume, and then divide the data onto different volumes.

And is it rational to buy "NAS"-drives?(This is probably answered somewhere else ,so you can ignore it)

I hope you can help me in my confusion.

 

[dudeman509]

Two drives will duplicate data in most NAS setups for backup purposes (RAID 1). If you lose one, you won't lose all data.

4 TB drives are fairly cheap now, but if you need more storage, go ahead and spend the extra $ up front for 2x 6 or 8 TB drives, and that should put you right in the storage range that you want. You can then easily add 2 additional drives later on if you still need to expand. Most NAS software makes this fairly easy to do.

Yes, there are a variety of NAS-specific drives that are engineered for running 24/7 and large I/O loads. Those are what you should buy (WD Red/Red Pro, Seagate Ironwolf/Ironwolf Pro, etc).

One of the things I discovered with my NAS that you don't necessarily notice in normal Internet usage were the WiFi "dead spots" in my home where I couldn't get a steady 5GHz signal, and would fall back to the much slower 2.4GHz band. It was painful in some areas of the house to get a speedy connection to the NAS until I added a WiFi extender.