Just make sure you have a spare drive handy. I went with RAID 5, which seemed to provide the best protection vs.
I’m not an expert in RAID, though, so do your research. Basically, if one drive fails, i should be able to replace it and let the array rebuild itself. I went with four 4TB Iron Wolf drives ($464.) That gave me 12TB of usable storage (4TB is reserved for parity in the RAID array.) RAID configurations are beyond the scope of this post, but worth looking into. I’ve always bought Western Digital drives, but the Seagate Iron Wolf drives seemed to get slightly better reviews. I tried not to cheap out on the hard drives. The model I got seems to be discontinued at this point, but it’s still humming along perfectly. The DS418j fit the bill perfectly–and didn’t hurt the wallet as much as some of the other options ($299 on Amazon.) It has a 1.4GHz Realtek processor, and 1GB of RAM. I didn’t need to run virtual machines, or stream video, or any of the things that require faster processors and copious amounts of RAM. I knew I didn’t need a super fast drive the primary purpose of purchasing a NAS was to archive my photo collection. That’s okay–the internet needs to be flooded with posts about how important backups are. This seems to be turning into a post about backups. I don’t remember now exactly why I went with Synology, but I don’t have any regrets. I went back and forth for a few years, and finally settled on Synology. Every brand seems to have pros and cons, good reviews and bad reviews–I didn’t know which one to pick. Several years ago I started looking at NAS drives. It made me nervous, but it was the only solution I could afford, (which is crazy–I was spending thousands on cameras and lenses, but didn’t think I could afford to actually protect the irreplaceable photos themselves.) Synology When I first started maintaining backups, they were on external USB drives (Western Digital MyBooks.) That was better than nothing, but didn’t have any redundancy, and wouldn’t have protected my photos if the house burned down. Side note–the Erase Device function in the Find My app works really well. Fast forward to this week–the guy who was my boss back then called to tell me that he had inadvertently wiped his entire laptop with a few erroneous clicks in Apple’s Find My app.
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