Please can I have some NAS advice.?

[Enquiries]

Hi, first off, thank you for having this help section on your website.

Basically I am looking to get my first NAS to backup family photos and brief ~30s to 1m videos. Currently I am storing these on my PC in 2 locations (1 copy on a SSD and another copy on a mechanical HDD).

With that, I think that 2TB should be more than enough to start me off with a NAS, and I was thinking that possibly RAID 1 would do the job? Again this will be my first NAS, so with RAID I'm not sure what would be best.

I do have a network switch setup in my house that has 2.5Gbit speed although my PC only has 1Gbit, but that is easy to upgrade.

The absolute main thing that I'm looking for is silence along with reliability. I am looking for a NAS that could be upgraded down the line, so do you think that a 4 bay would be sufficient? Regarding the silent part, do you think that installing SSDs would be a better choice than mechanical ones.

Oh 1 final part. I know that some NAS have an app for mobile devices, so that I could transfer photos right from my phone to it. If that is the case, a NAS with that feature would also be a must.

Wow, there is so much to learn with NAS, I'm actually finding it really fun to read up on them!

Thank you again for your time,
Christopher.

[ed]

If this is your first NAS I think Synology would be a great choice thanks to its simplicity and reliability. But if you want to double your data transfer speeds with 2.5GbE you would need a USB 5GbE adapter or Qnap NAS with 2.5GbE LAN.When choosing NAS for backups there are few things to look out for. Any NAS will be able to run a file server and therefore automated can be done on a computer side. But some other NAS will automate backups on the server-side. If you want a snapshot technology you may want a NAS with Celeron based processor. This will protect your NAS against things like ransomware and accidental data deletion. You will also get file version control just like on Dropbox. So if you made some changes in the file by mistake, you can always roll back to a few previous versions. Some models also come with a USB quick copy button at the front. This is a configurable button and will automatically copy data from/to the attached USB drive. This is helpful if you do weekly backups on the external disk. You can also set up a remote replication service with another NAS over the internet. Either it is your seconds NAS or friend's NAS, your data will be automatically stored remotely and be encrypted. This protects your data against disasters like flood/fire/thieves.All Qnap and Synology models come with an app that SYNC all mobile multimedia with a NAS. Adding SSD would speed up the NAS and lower the noise (which is low already with home models).You can have a 4 bay with 2 or 3 drives so that you can add more drives alter and increase the storage space. This makes it a future proof choice. But if you want to replace this NAS sooner then consider a 2-bay.DS218+ or TS-251D from 2-bay range and DS420+ / TS-453D2 from 4-bay range.I hope this helps.