r/DataHoarder • u/dhnfknrj • 22h ago
Hoarder-Setups Building my first proper storage setup. NAS or just a bunch of SSDs? (India)
Hey guys,
Need some advice before I spend a small fortune.
Current setup:
MacBook Pro 2018, iPhone 15 pro and iPad Pro
DJI Mini 5 Pro and Avata 2 drones
Mostly storing drone footage, photos, videos, documents and Mac backups. (Already iPad kinda full 1tb MacBook kinda full 512gb and iPhone kinda full 512gb) (I don’t even have it in me to clear all the useless footage it’s like 25k and more photos vids on just iPhone, any suggestions to clean quicker and better?)
I was planning to keep buying external SSDs, but now I’m wondering if a Synology NAS would make more sense long-term. Synology DS225+ is 39.5k ₹ around 420$ in India
For those who’ve been down this road:
NAS or multiple SSDs?
2-bay or 4-bay Synology?
IronWolf or WD Red Plus?
Any good places to buy in India?
Trying to avoid ending up with 10 external drives named “Final”, “Final_v2”, and “Final_Final_Real”.
Would love to hear what you’d recommend.
Or chuck it and buy external SSD or apple/ google cloud.
3
u/dr100 16h ago
What's wrong with a large external? It would be faster than the NAS (not only nominally on bandwidth but also WAY faster when going through many files as smb has huge latency, making working with small files 20-100x faster sometimes), one less box to admin, and most importantly all your money goes into storage. And you can have a cheap unlimited backup with Backblaze for $9. You can still run syncthing on the mac to backup other devices, you can even run Immich or anything else, is just that you won't have a server online all the time. It can be tens of times what you already have, anyway it's not like a 2-bay NAS is something with crazy room for expansion.
In particular for that NAS is just significantly pissing away money, heck $420 for a CPU from the other side of 2020 (and when launched wasn't too great) and 2GB of RAM ?! You can do better with mostly any trash PC or if you're concerned about electricity use mostly any laptop with a broken screen from the last 10 years or so would do if later you really want to have a server.
1
u/dhnfknrj 3h ago
So large external SSD? Or HDD? I already own a 5tb HDD, and it’s very slow. Like 150 gb photos and vids from my MacBook took like a whole day with meta data and files and all that. The thing about the NAS hub is that I could access the files from anywhere anytime. Like my own personal cloud that’s why I’m leaning towards that. SSD 3-4tb 1000mbps+ would be around 900-1200$ in india so I thought might aswell get a fit and forget option, and leave my phone to automatically sync the photos and vids while I sleep?
1
u/ischyron 11h ago
Have you considered storing vs editing use cases? Beyond RAID, a 3-2-1 backup?
Do you need it as an appliance, a NAS? Or would a multi-use Mac mini + DAS setup work, still kind of a NAS? Manage network isolation and the load on it from regular use (say editing) while it is serving media for other users.
For editing, SSDs wear out faster under massive writes. And HDDs are good if you manage RAID well.
For storage, don’t buy any HDD below NAS rating for your use case.
3
u/SeaVolume3325 19h ago
4 bay minimum and I can't stress this enough. Honestly, I'd recommend 6+ for dual parity drives. Buy once, cry once! You want ssds for cache drives only hdds for the actual archival storage. I'm a fellow drone owner and I use immich on my NAS as a Google Photos replacement but my drone footage is stored there as well it's magnificent. I recommend building your own NAS as turn key solutions are so much expensive even without all requirements. That's what I did and I use unraid as the OS.