I’m not using a NAS right now, but I’m seriously thinking about it, as my disk usage has been exploding since I got a new 24 megapixel camera. I’m eating about 164GB a year in photos, and way more in video. Right now I have a home-made server with a 4TB drive and it’s about filled up. My workstation is similarly getting filled with those pictures, but I still have a while to go there, especially since I have the option of using Darktable’s “local copy” functionality.
I got a 8TB drive that I yanked in a friends’ server that serves as an offsite backup as well. All this is synchronized everywhere with git-annex, which is a little hard to use, but has served me very well over the years.
Still, I’ve been looking at NAS options, especially since I’ve replaced a part of that server. I just got a Vero 4k to serve as a home-cinema/set-top box, but it has basically no storage whatsoever. So I either need to add yet another external drive that dangles off of it, or try to fix the problem in the longer term and centralize storage in one unit, with multiple (possibly redundant) drives.
I’ve looked at many options. I know that Synology make good products, but I find them a tad expensive and I would prefer something that runs Linux and free software and preferably open hardware as well. This leaves me with the following options:
- Gnubee - not quite mainline, may be a bit slow
- Helios 4 - back ordered, but more promising
Then there’s also the option of building your own. The problem with that is you end up with a “tower” setup with hard drives hidden deep inside a machine: very few cases have “trays” that allow swapping drives in and out easily. That’s why I am thinking of getting a “real” NAS: each drive gets its tray, with a little light that tells you when it’s time to change it. There might be trays (like the Orico) which could enable this in a custom-made setup, but at that point, it’s basically a NAS as well since you don’t own the SATA controller.
Oh, and so far, I’ve bought normal desktop drives, except for the 8TB one where I specifically bought a “Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS” (ST8000VN0022) - it was not much more expensive and it seems logical to buy a drive specifically for that purpose. The drives generally fill up before they start failing, but I do install a SMART monitoring tool and act on warnings the hard drives give me. Ideally, I’d have the main storage on RAID-1 so I could recover more easily from failures, but with redundant copies, I can always restore on a new drive when trouble comes, and uptime is not critical since I’m an amateur.
Long story short: I would love to hear more from people here about the hardware solutions they’re using.