Asustor NAS box, running RAID

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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So I don’t have a proper backup solution, I’m running low on storage on my PC that is currently all SSD, considering building my NAS box that I’ve never used properly.

It’s an Asustor AS-204TE there’s a datasheet from their website saying it supports various RAIDs etc, can’t share links apparently.

I have a 256GB boot SSD, a 1TB Storage SSD, and an external 5TB storage drive (USB3 thing), and I’m looking at getting another storage SSD for my PC, or possibly a storage HDD, a 2.5" one (have a spot for it in my case).

Add it up and that is 6250GB, so far so I’d like to have 8TB of usable space, I think, maybe more.

So 4x4TB in RAID 6 gives 2 drive redundancy, and 8TB of space, it’ll cost me about $400 AUD for some basic 4TB externals that I can shuck, or $636 if I go for NAS specific WD or Seagate drives.

Questions I can think you’ll ask, my OS SSD is fine, I store most things on my 1TB SSD, that is nearly full, (15-20% free say), I’m considering buying another 1TB SSD, that would suit well for this.

My problem is, I’m spending a lot of money on storage, without getting more space, and if I’m spending money at all shouldn’t I ensure my NAS will last several years like, 3 or so, because if I’m buying 4 drives, I’ll need to replace 4 drives (?) to upgrade the storage size of the NAS later.

I think I’m a bit lost, would appreciate some advice.

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Reason I’m thinking RAID 6 vs 5, is if a drive fails on RAID 5 and there’s a read error on any of the drives, apparently I just lose all of the data? Is this true? And at modern capacities, it seems 12TB is the spot where you’re almost guaranteed to have at least 1 read error, with 2 drives there can be a/some read errors and it will still rebuild, plus having 2 drives fail is far less likely than 1.

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Welcome to the forum!

If you want backup, cold storage, or maybe a place to hoard stuff you don’t use a lot, watch for those big 10-12TB usb drives to go on sale again. They sell for less than the cheapest bare drive for some reason. No need to schuck and lose the warranty. A second hand LTO 5 drive should be cheap now too, and those are huge cheap tapes… again for cold storage.

For online storage… At home I’ve never seriously looked at RAID6 except for huge arrays I manage at work, where it’s like 30+ drives. My old 2p xeon had 15 drives in it, I ran ZFS in a raid 50 configuration, three raid5 arrays in a stripe set. It worked well but the capacity to wattage ratio was terrible on that machine, decommissioned now.

tl;dr sorry I haven’t really answered any of your questions directly, kind of rambling tonight. Hopefully some food for thought at least?