Hi all,
I've been considering a NAS for the last 5 year and actively planning to get one for the last 2 but every time I look seriously I end up bewildered what to go with, and end up doing nothing. I just can't seem to figure out which manufacturer to go with as you can find people advocating and criticising everything.
It's something I don't look forward to doing either as I hate sysadmin stuff, but I've just got a new Mac and maybe it's time to use the momentum I've got migrating it to get this done.
We're a household of two, my wife uses her laptop to run her small business and I'm a freelance software developer. We use cloud services like Google Drive and Github for our critical files (yes I know NAS isn't backup!) so I'm looking at a NAS for the following:
Any recommendations on specific devices or ecosystem are welcome. Thanks for reading all this guff...
I've been considering a NAS for the last 5 year and actively planning to get one for the last 2 but every time I look seriously I end up bewildered what to go with, and end up doing nothing. I just can't seem to figure out which manufacturer to go with as you can find people advocating and criticising everything.
It's something I don't look forward to doing either as I hate sysadmin stuff, but I've just got a new Mac and maybe it's time to use the momentum I've got migrating it to get this done.
We're a household of two, my wife uses her laptop to run her small business and I'm a freelance software developer. We use cloud services like Google Drive and Github for our critical files (yes I know NAS isn't backup!) so I'm looking at a NAS for the following:
- Time Machine/Windows backups in case a Mac/PC dies
- Central store for all our photos, right now they are strewn across multiple PCs, SD cards, USB drives, etc. I want the NAS able to link to a cloud service (not sure which) to manage backups automatically.
- We want to rip all our CDs and DVDs (some BR but no 4K) simply because none of our devices have optical drives now. We are not film bufs looking to buy and rip 4k movies, we want to sort out our legacy media - new content we just stream. I do need the easy ability to stream music/video to our TVs, Chromecasts, etc.
- I'm not sure if it's possible, but if the NAS can be used to cast Spotify, Amazon music, etc I would much prefer that than doing so from my phone which is often flaky
- When we get security cameras I'd like to use the NAS as storage hub for them
- As a developer having a low-spec always on PC is handy. Maybe for custom smart-home stuff, or basic web-server, etc.
- I probably want an Intel-based system, like a micro-PC CPU rather than ARM.
- I want a mirrored drive setup but only the minimum to protect me if one disk fails, so I think a 2-drive NAS is sufficient. I am interested in flexibility so ability to resize RAID volumes sounds good (I know of SHR not sure if others exist), I'd probably prefer a NAS that supports additional enclosure than buying a 4/6 drive NAS.
- The only content that will only be stored on the NAS and nowhere else will be video/music which will also me a lot of data. I don't ever want to have to re-rip DVDs but this data is static so I would probably use an external drive to backup this content - store it in the car or something. Maybe even put a super-cheap NAS in my garage and setup a sync between them.
- Ease of use software is valuable to me, and a system with good support/community.
- I don't want to spend a fortune.
- I am expecting it to live in my office or hidden away, so it doesn't need to be silent.
Any recommendations on specific devices or ecosystem are welcome. Thanks for reading all this guff...