EB-1 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
I have multiple NAS units, 3x QNAP, 3x Synology and home-built with FreeNAS.
QNAP offers QTS and QTS Hero, the latter uses ZFS as their more resilient file system. Synology supports btrfs as their better file system. Either ZFS or btrfs should allay data integrity concerns, especially if you also use a NAS that supports ECC RAM. Both QNAP and Synology also support the traditional EXT4 file system. If you don't know about Linux file systems, read this for example.
I typically use the Seagate Exos helium drives. Enterprise drives are often less expensive or at least similar to the NAS branded drives. I look for drives with the highest MTBF (2.5M hours), highest annual TBW (usually 550TB), and low UBER (10^-15). You don't want any drive that uses SMR rather than CMR.
I tend to use RAID 5 up to 5 drives and RAID 6 for 8+ drives, but I have fully redundant NAS units so RAID 5 doesn't bother me too much.
The CPU and ethernet connection can be performance bottlenecks. Avoid the wimpy ARM processors and look for an Intel or AMD x86-64 CPU if you want to reach anywhere near saturating 10GbE with a parity RAID mode. If you only use 2.5GbE, then a weaker CPU might be OK, though RAID 6 (RAID-Z2) requires nearly double the processing of RAID 5 (RAID-Z1). 1GbE is slow, being more suited to backups than a primary drive for large amounts of photos or videos.
Take a look at the Synology DS1621+/DS1821+ or QNAP TS-473A/673A/873A as relatively inexpensive NAS with good performance, slots for 10GbE cards (IIRC MAC uses 10GBASE-T), and support for ECC SO-DIMMS. You can get better NAS with Xeon CPUs, but that might be beyond your needs. Unfortunately Synology is practically enforcing use of their ridiculously overpriced Toshiba drives with firmware in their higher grade NAS (newer xs and 22 series).
EBH
|