Best storage solution for a Professional Photographer, Graphic Designer and Videographer

[Enquiries]

Hey Hey Hello,

I am a professional graphic designer, photographer and videographer living in the corrupt city of Chicago. I have been on the topic of storage other than external drives for over a year now. Your content helped me a tremendous amount and each video I watch and each article I read from your website, I learn more. Thank you for your dedication in this field!! I will continue to support your channel and listen to your content because you are the best at it, period. My favorite youtuber, hands down, and I only have like ten subbed accounts of many I generally listen to.

I am looking for your advice for my needs to store and safe keep my years of data. So far, I am at 4 TB of data I'd immediately like to back-up. I think a NAS is the best solution as I can share, up/download & edit content while away from home. I am looking at the new Synology DS1522+ running SHR 2 or RAID 6 at 8TB Seagate Ironwolf HD discs. In that configuration, 24TB usable and I'm okay with that. I'm unsure if these drives are the absolute best for me, but what do you think? Should I set up for more storage? Do I need to fill all 5 bays upon initial set up? Primarily one person accessing the device from a PC (home) and a laptop (when away from home). I don't know if I can achieve 10GBe given my router is a rented one from my ISP and my PC Motherboard has one 1GBe port. But I am open to buying a new router of my own, again. My internet is 100MBps, but effective up to 55MBps. My RAW files are huge, 60MB each and that’s when compressed, otherwise 120MB! That’s Sony A7RIV for you. Otherwise, my Nikon RAW’s weigh much less but 4K videos are the most. Fortunately, I sparingly shoot 4K and RAW uncompressed. By the way, I wouldn’t like to have my NAS on all the time. Just like my PC is on for a few hours a day, hard drives aren’t on the whole day either. There’ll be times where I’ll be taking a break from all this because of school and such.

I am open to your suggestions and am eagerly awaiting any advice. But take your time, I know you are busy. Keep up the fabulous work, you’re amazing Thank You very much.

[ed]

DS1522+ is very innovative. But there is one issue and it is accessing 4k remotely. This NAS can not handle it. But you can download videos to a remote location and stream them. Or you can use the offline transcoding feature and keep a small video copy of all 4k videos to stream remotely. Local streaming has no issues even with 4k files.
Setting up RAID6/SHR2 would give you speeds around 400MB/s. If you get a cheap 10gbe switch with a couple of ports, you could connect it to your existing router. Whichever device connects to this switch will get 10gbe bandwidth between these devices. You can also avoid the switch and connect NAS directly via 10gbe while it is also connected to a 1GbE LAN.
When filling up bays, you can start with just 2 drives. It is easy to add more drives without a need to reset the system. Maybe consider having a remote drive or two (doesn't need a RAID) for syncing/backups. In case of fire/flood/burglars.

I hope this helps.