I’m looking to spec out a new NAS. I have a relatively small media collection, that I hope to grow as I digitize more family VHS tapes etc. Right now I have around 4 TB of data, shared across an external drive and my internal ssd.
Whats the best path forward on drives in this new NAS? I’ve heard advice for buying one big 20TB drive over multiple smaller drives. What’s best for mitigation of drive failure? Is that even a concern? If I do multiple drives, should I use RAID?
I’m a little new to this. If you have resources for learning some best practices I’m all ears.
RAID helps protect you from certain failures, and also allows you to add more storage inexpensively. Typically buying multiple small drives is cheaper than one larger drive, but you do have to buy at least one extra drive for failure.
You do need to plan for backups. RAID is not a backup, it doesn’t protect you from fires, computer failure, or accidentally deleting things. So a backup is necessary. Look into 3-2-1 backup solutions. At least 3 copies of your data, 2 different hardware types (like SSD and HDD), with at least 1 offsite copy.
People often keep their NAS at home, with a cloud storage provider as an offsite backup, and an external drive for local backup.
If you have the money, and a family or friend with space, you can buy multiple complete NAS solutions and back them up to each other.