I have multiple terabytes of data that I need both highly accessible and moderately redundant on-site for photo storage, laptop backup, and general archival purposes. I've been looking at NAS for a couple of weeks now, and I'm fairly settled on the Synology DS412+. The 412+ offers both gigabit networking and USB3.0, which allows me to use fast connections to other devices on my network while allowing plugged-in access via USB for my primary computing devices. Along with that, I plan to use three or four Western Digital 3TB NAS-grade harddrives.

I think most of you know me, and I'm very much into the software side of things. Hardware generally bores me, and I don't have a significant amount of time to build my own NAS, nor am I interested in that route. I'm looking for something which is not only reasonably fast, but reliable and also gives me the capability to recover from a single local drive failure. (I will maintain an offsite backup, naturally).

Is this the solution folks go for these days? Or are there other things to consider that I've missed?

Serendiptious find: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_NAS
Just needs a Raspberry Pi.

That sounds about right to me. The DS412+ is Hardware RAID which manages the RAID itself which is desirable in NAS situations. Though, with hardware RAID you can't switch enclosures if this one were to die on you but with redundancy across your network (I presume) and offsite, it won't be an inconvenience.

Just out of curiosity, are you planning to go RAID 0 or 1? Or RAID 6 or 10? (For those who aren't familiar with RAID, includes a storage calculator!)

I've been looking at external storage options and would prefer more insight into your storage network (Do you already have a NAS? Or one local RAID and now getting a NAS? etc).



That's the Hardware side of things. As you may not have read his post, Nikky isn't interested in building his own NAS.

Yes, I'm aware of these considerations.


RAID 5, 'natch

Without any direct experience with the hardware (my NAS is a mini-ITX server), that looks like a solid choice.

IIRC you were initially looking at a Drobo unit. I'd be interested in hearing your reasons for choosing Synology instead.