I’m looking for help and advice on choosing a simple and user friendly NAS that doesn’t break the bank.
It would mainly be used for storing and accessing documents, and perhaps pictures and videos. If possible, it would be great if it could be accessed from a phone and perhaps over the net.
A little backstory as to where it would go: my sister’s fiancé runs his own small business as a plumber, and he stored a lot of data, mainly on his jobs and clients, just on his phone and a dying old drive.
As it happens, both his phone and the old drive died, and he lost most of the digital data. As the ‘techie’ guy in the family, it is now my problem to solve.
I tried before to get him to back things up but I couldn’t convince him. Now that this catastrophe struck, he is finally willing to listen and spend some money to properly manage his files and back them up.
I was thinking that a two bay system would be fine to store his things and have a drive as redundancy. I doubt that he’d need more than 2TB of usable data since it’s mostly just documents and maybe vacation pictures and videos.
Any advice is greatly appreciated, since I don’t know much about the topic. I mainly just build my own systems for fun and use them semi casually with some light experimentation with VMs and such.
We are from Hungary, so we’d be shopping from here. As for a budget, hopefully one of these can be had for under $254 (100.000 HUF), but perhaps we can go up to $381 (150.000 HUF)
I’ve not used many of other brands, the one I have at home is the Synology DS218+, the updated version is the DS224+
If you need cheap, basic redundant storage, DS223j.
With all models, I highly recommend RAID1. There are also apps that allow you to backup to S3/Other online storage if you’re extremely worried about data safety.
I would advice against ARM based ones simply because they lack what you’d consider “basic” functionality in a reasonable way or are based on a platform with no “upstream support”. There’s nothing wrong with architecture it’s usually paired with bare minimum hardware to get things running.
You’d want at least 2Gb of RAM (ARM boxes are usually 1Gb or even less) and at least BTRFS/ZFS (I don’t think any commerical “cheap” NAS boxes does ZFS yet) support for basic data integrity. ECC would be nice but it’s very rare in this category. Preferably not something that’s based on ancient hardware too.
That being said, there are relatively decent platforms you can “build”.
Not enough budget for anything good.
Just get on a cloud storage subscription and use an app that syncs certain folders on phone and PC as well as contacts to the cloud system you use. Something like Google Drive especially if he has an Android phone already, or Microsoft OneDrive or even DropBox. With cloud storage you wont have to manage any drives or physical hardware and the probability of losing data at one of their datacenters is next to nothing. For around $15-20 a month it isnt much and should just be added into the costs of running the business.
Boot SSD/NVME: Crucial P3 Plus SSD 500GB - ~35 EUR
Storage: 2TB NVME ( KIOXIA EXCERIA PLUS G3 SSD 2TB / Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 2TB ) ~110 EUR
OS: TrueNAS or something
That’s a decent box however no redudancy (needs an additional SSD but ~405 EUR give he can’t find a free laptop PSU. Not sure if you can beat the easily without getting ancient hardware…
Well, cutting corners would be getting a Rockchip SBC (~100 EUR depending on model) and use USB drives but that’s far from ideal or likely reliable.
Only buy a system that allows a file system with checksumming (e.g. Btrfs in Synology’s case) and enable such checksumming.
1-drive redundancy (RAID1 or RAID5) is the minimum. 2-drive redundancy is better.
RAID is not a backup. If RAID can get zapped by a power spike, RAID doesn’t help you, so make sure to have an automatic backup in place.
I’ve been using Synology NAS for over 10 years and like the product. I don’t use any of their productivity apps ( neither do I use their HyperBackup software, but instead a different docker-based solution), but still the system feels mature. It’s not the cheapest though, but for a small business it should be worth it. The DS224+ (or one its predecessors from the used market) is the smallest model I’d buy.
In the last 5-6 years I’ve been keen on NAS solutions, but considering the end user’s enthusiasm with tech, cloud storage just seems to be the solution.
No hardware setup that will need maintaining and checking.
The user doesn’t have to do anything other than store files in the right folders.
When their computer/phone dies the next time, they just log back in on their own - reducing your burden.
If you already have a NAS of your own @Cyberspirit , you could do periodic full archives “just in case”.
If you aren’t able to help him in future, he’ll have to pay a high price for someone else to help him with NAS maintenance.
May be keep a discrete eye on his cloud usage and if he looks like he exceed 2TB (for Google) in less than a few years, yes a NAS might be a better solution. Of course it’s also important how long he needs to refer back to his larger files (videos/pics), because he might be able to delete them - mind you, building trades really like to keep them as they might re-visit the site many years later.
Cost wise, I think we’re looking at $120 a year for 2TB of Google storage, well under the budget. But like I say, if he exceeds that quickly, I dislike saying it but a Synology 2 bay might be a good start.
Although I love my Odroid HC1 with 1TB hdd and Armbian + OpenMediaVault. I even have a graphical environment there and vlc.
Stable as a rock… but these are rather solutions for connoisseurs with very limited requirements.
I would choose some small quiet PC and install OpenMediaVault… and IMHO you don’t have to go to ZFS and a hundred disks right away.
Odroid hc4 is cool but at these prices it’s not really worth it compared to x86.