Looking at network attached storage for about $1000-1200

[Deleted member 126051]

What would everyone here recommend?

No "build it from an old computer".

Looking at a 4 bay, 16TB (4x4) in RAID10.
Or a 2 bay 20TB (2x10) in RAID0.

Space is important, but data integrity is important.

Any suggestions?

 

[RedWagnum]

A 4 bay (4x4) in RAID 10 will only net you 8TB of usable space whereas the 2 bay (2x10) will net you 20TB.

How much space do you need? What is most important? Space, data integrity, or performance?

 

[workingnonstop]

I would be hesitant to implement Raid0 on a NAS, especially given your flagging of data integrity as important. As far as bang/buck goes, 4-8tb drives are probably the sweet spot right now.

What do you need the NAS to do? Just hold the data, or other functions as well? Want to build your own, or buy off the shelf? For the former, Unraid and FreeNAS are popular and configurable NAS software packages. If the latter, Synology or Qnap boxes are likely the easiest options; just add drives.

 

[Brian_B]

What everyone else has said - don't use RAID0 if integrity is an issue at all. RAID0 is just for the performance boost and actually doubles your chances of data loss.

4x4 in RAID10 gets you 8T
4x4 in RAID5 gets you 12T

2x10 in RAID1 gets you 10T

There are other options as well, but those are the most common I see in low intensity applications - without going to something more flexible like LVM or ZFS or Storage Spaces.

There are trade offs between RAID10 and RAID5, but both provide for graceful single device failure and array rebuilds. The largest difference (without getting into the argument of MTBF and statistics) being that you get more capacity with RAID5, but slower write speeds and rebuilds.

It really comes down to how much capacity you need, vs the price of hard drives to store that amount of data, and how much you value the ability to survive a drive loss. Personally, I'd go with whichever is more cost effective between 2 bay RAID1 and 4 bay RAID10 -- the knee in the curve of cost per TB in drive space versus number of drives required. You will get to a point where you have to go up in drive count just because the maximum size of available drives.

There is also the question of how fast you need data access to be and how many people will be hitting the device simultaneously: gigabit, 10G, faster? Those don't have to do with storage, but do have a lot to do with the network interface and capability of the hardware in the NAS.

I use a lot of QNAP and Synology devices over gigabit for just data storage/archives. I don't run anything off of them in real time so I can't speak as to their performance, but they have been great, inexpensive plug-and-play devices, with a lot of additional capability above and beyond what I'm using them for, and I would recommend either brand equally. Both are nice to work with. I use RAID1 in the 2-bay and RAID10 in the 4-bay models I have. I have used RAID5 in the past, and honestly, I would go back to it if I needed the additional bump in capacity, I just went to RAID10 once I could get large enough drives that I didn't need that extra 50% capacity to see what the difference in write speeds was in my work environment -- while the write slowdown was noticable, but apart from rebuilds (which I tend to only do when upgrading/intentionally retiring drives) it wasn't a real factor in a NAS used almost exclusively for archiving.