Advice in NAS purchase

[joppefierens]

Hi,

I'm quite the newbie when it comes to NAS. Ive been getting advice from here and there but in the end I have no clue which NAS would suit me best.

I'm looking for a NAS for home use, dual bay (so I can run raid1 for backup safety). I want to be able to use couchpotato & sickbeard to download my favorite movies & series. Besides this, I already own a media player (ac ryan playon!HD) so it would also be my media server.

It would really only be used for this, maybe some files will be put in a cloud but nothing to intensive.

For all this, what would you suggest? I was thinking of a budget below 180$. But if this is not enough, I'm open minded.

Besides this, I was thinking of WD red, but some people told me to get green?


I do appreciate the advice.

Kind regards,

Joppe

 

[L&LD]

Your budget is limiting your options and you don't mention how much capacity you need now and for the future. The RED drives are certainly recommended over the Green drives in a NAS unit. Depending on the capacity; just those will easily double the budget you have set for this expenditure.

Also, RAID1 should not give you too much peace of mind with regards to a reliable backup of your data. It will simply help with a simple mechanical failure of a single HDD. If the data gets corrupted, stolen or otherwise mangled (think virus), both drives in a RAID1 setup will be effectively lost; that is why it is not considered a backup.

A backup would be a NAS that is backed up over the network (to another location, within or outside the LAN it is on) to another physical drive. Or to a USB 3.0 drive that is physically moved/stored in another location entirely and that is not automatically updated.

A backup is also something that needs to be tested continuously to ensure that the files contained are actually readable and haven't been corrupted (disk file system wise or otherwise).

The other requirements you have is not something I can comment on. But the issues above seem to me to be a show stopper from the get go anyway.

 

[joppefierens]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

I was thinking of about 3 TB of capacity.

If a raid isnt the best backup option out there, I guess a 1 disk NAS would be more than enough for my use for media streaming, downloading and remote file access?

The budget I mentioned was only for the machine, excluding the hard disk price . But as mention, Im flexible if its worth the extra buck!

I appreciate the advice,

With kind regards,

Joppe

 

[stevech]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

I was thinking of about 3 TB of capacity.

If a raid isnt the best backup option out there, I guess a 1 disk NAS would be more than enough for my use for media streaming, downloading and remote file access?

The budget I mentioned was only for the machine, excluding the hard disk price . But as mention, Im flexible if its worth the extra buck!

I appreciate the advice,

With kind regards,

Joppe

2 bay Synology or QNAP. And some way to backup (RAID is not a backup, as is often said). USB3 external disk is a good way to go.