NAS choice?

[Enquiries]

Hi,

First of all I'd like to thank you for your videos and site. I found them on a random google search and they've been incredibly helpful, especially as someone who is quite hardware illiterate.

I'm interested in getting a NAS but have had a bit of hesitation due to its relatively high cost plus my complete stupidity in the area. My use for the NAS is a wireless media server in my apartment, where I can access my movies and shows in any room on any device, as well as work related videos (and possibly PDFs?). My files are largely 1080p x265 or 264 and have almost no 4K files since I couldn't even take advantage of 4K until recently. One of my big problems is that my library is quite massive. I'd say it's around 10 TB right now, and that doesn't include any work or lecture related files as well as my data hoarding ways having to be tempered due to space limitations.

I'm a bit unsure on what to get. Does it make more sense to get a 2-Bay due to the initial cost being lower and the ability to get more space? Or a 4-Bay since, y'know, 4 bays and all but the initial cost making the realistic drive choices much smaller? Am I also right in assuming that since my files are largely 1080p and it's just myself or at most one other person in an extreme rare case accessing the files, I don't need to worry too much about whether or not the CPU is good enough when thinking about solutions?

Thank you!

[ed]

The main benefits of having 4-bay NAS are price per terabyte and expand-ability. If you buy a NAS you will very likely have a RAID. Unless you have a backup in place and time of restoring backups do not bother you.Mirror or RAID1 will keep a copy of a first drive. This means that you can only use the storage capacity of a single drive. With a 4-bay you can set up RAID5 on the first 3 drives or all four. This means that you lose only one drive and protect the other 3 or more drives.If you wanted 12TB capacity. With a two-bay it would look like this :2 * 12TB (one drive used for redundancy) = £274 * 2 = £548with a 4 bay it would look like this :4* 4TB (one drive used for redundancy)= £89 * 4 = £356More drives you add, cheaper it gets.You can even start with one or two drives in a 4 bay. This allows you to upgrade to RAID5 later when you add a third or fourth drive. You can also use extra bays for caching you you use it for virtualization, webserver or multi-user environments. Or as per DS918+, you get nvme cache slots built-in.DS220+ would be a good solution, but there is no option to expand apart from replacing drives or a new NAS. DS420+ or DS920+ would be a better option.I hope this helps.