Help me with buying NAS

**malvolio** · 2026-02-07T13:47:43

Faster LANs represent bandwidth and less contention as much as they do download speed, if that helps. Probably not significant for your purposes of course.

I've used a pair of 2Tb disks for many years, in a RAID 0+1 configuration for resilience (and double the read speed) with a separate !Tb USB hard drive as incremental backup, and never got near filling either of them up. Had a disk failure early on and recovered everything with no loss of service. Upgraded to better HDDs later, again with no service loss.

RAID 5 looks good but is not all that disaster tolerant and is slower than RAID 0+1 - although technology has moved on a ways since I set mine up!!

As always, cost is the thing, but get the best/fastest disks you can. Mine are Seagates, been in use permanently for around 12 years now, rather longer than the attached PCs and laptops!

**Dorkeaux** · 2026-02-07T14:29:43

Many of the cheapo consumer NAS devices use a chipset that is a severe bottleneck in terms of performance and reliability.
In otherwords, RAID is pointless if your tulipy hardware fails, bringing all the drives down with it.

I would do my research with that in mind.

I have an antique QNAP NAS that serves me perfectly well. As you say, music, photos, Word documents, bookmarks etc.
These days, every device in my house seens to have a USB port to accomodate a shared network drive.
Do you have anything like that? My WiFi router has a fairly advanced capability for this, unused at the mo.

You should probably figure out what your appliance will do when not used for a bit. Energy efficiency really is a factor in the UK, and low power consumption and dormant modes save a surprising amount of money.

I ran a blade server for a while, it was like being mugged.

Lastly, I wouldn't discount the more advanced capabilities of modern NAS devices.
They can run music and streaming services, but what really attracts me is the docker support for containers.
You could spin up DNS sinkholes, DNS caches, DHCP servers, all sorts of cool stuff.

And do backups. RAID is no substitute.

**hobnob** · 2026-02-07T15:00:24

Originally posted by malvolio View Post

I've used a pair of 2Tb disks for many years, in a RAID 0+1 configuration for resilience (and double the read speed) with a separate !Tb USB hard drive as incremental backup, and never got near filling either of them up.

Surely you need 4 disks for that?
RAID 0 is striping
RAID 1 is mirroring
RAID 0+1 is a mirror of stripes
RAID 1+0 is a stripe of mirrors

**malvolio** · 2026-02-07T15:22:37

Originally posted by hobnob View Post

Surely you need 4 disks for that?
RAID 0 is striping
RAID 1 is mirroring
RAID 0+1 is a mirror of stripes
RAID 1+0 is a stripe of mirrors

True, but you don't have to use more than one stripe...

Just fyi i was building RAID arrays in the early 80s. Old habits die hard!

**sadkingbilly** · 2026-02-07T15:27:16

Originally posted by malvolio View Post

I've used a pair of 2Tb disks for many years, in a RAID 0+1 configuration for resilience (and double the read speed) with a separate !Tb USB hard drive as incremental backup, and never got near filling either of them up.!

2x2Terabyte => 1 terabyte for backup??
how?

**malvolio** · 2026-02-07T16:10:29

Originally posted by sadkingbilly View Post

2x2Terabyte => 1 terabyte for backup??
how?

Depends how full your 2Tb partitions are. Using incremental backup from a roughly 0.75Tb dataset refreshed every 10 days keeps it tidy. Obviously I monitor disk occupancy.

If it gets close to the limit, there's lots I can archive to another removable HDD. Or I can update the backup disk, which is on a USB connection to the NAS server.

Like I said, it's been a stable config for 12 years, no need to change things that work.

Help me with buying NAS