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Forum Discussion
Advice before buying my first NAS?
I'm looking to start with 6GB in a NAS but will need to expand within 12-24 months looking at the current consumption of storage space in the family. The content is mixed in type, format and size, including everything from family photos, to episodes of MASH, to the kids' Justin bloody Bieber music, to hi-res scans of utility bills and birth certificates.
With that in mind I'm trying to decide on 2 bay versus 4 bay. I can get 2 3TB drives into the Duo V2 or I can half fill the NV+ V2 with the same drives if I read the brochure correctly.
Looking at the Duo V2, based on previous Netgear NAS products, how likely it is that in 12-24 months time it will support 4TB drives via updated firmware? If that support does come, how easy would it be to upgrade the Duo to 2 4TB drives and migrate over the existing data from the original 3TB drives?
Am I better off to go with the NV+ V2, even though I won't be using it fully quite some time?
From the point of view of redundancy and reliability I'm talking about putting 15+ years of family history on the NAS, some of it is personally priceless and irreplaceable. How good are the Netgear NAS boxes at predicting drive failure in time for you to do something about it before the data is unrecoverable? Do I really need to use RAID, and a UPS, and cloud backup?
With that in mind I'm trying to decide on 2 bay versus 4 bay. I can get 2 3TB drives into the Duo V2 or I can half fill the NV+ V2 with the same drives if I read the brochure correctly.
Looking at the Duo V2, based on previous Netgear NAS products, how likely it is that in 12-24 months time it will support 4TB drives via updated firmware? If that support does come, how easy would it be to upgrade the Duo to 2 4TB drives and migrate over the existing data from the original 3TB drives?
Am I better off to go with the NV+ V2, even though I won't be using it fully quite some time?
From the point of view of redundancy and reliability I'm talking about putting 15+ years of family history on the NAS, some of it is personally priceless and irreplaceable. How good are the Netgear NAS boxes at predicting drive failure in time for you to do something about it before the data is unrecoverable? Do I really need to use RAID, and a UPS, and cloud backup?
3 Replies
- (a) going with a 4-bay gives you more expansion options. Even with 4 TB drive support, it is likely to be cheaper to get more bays and use smaller drives. With 6 TB of storage now, you should also price 6 bay units.
(b)X-RAID2 makes your data more available when disks fail, and also makes it much easier to expand your storage. So it is recommended. Note that with 2 3TB drives you will get only 3TB of storage. A 4-bay unit with 3x3TB drives will get you 6.
(c) RAID arrays and NAS hardware can fail. Personally I would not use a NAS w/o a UPS. A backup strategy is also essential - I have had to rebuild my array from backup.
Having a local backup (buying a duplicate NAS) is the fastest and easiest, but the most expensive. USB backup is possible, but requires more discipline. I went with a duplicate NAS myself. I use Cloud Backup for disaster recovery (fire, etc), I personally wouldn't use it as my primary backup. - Thanks for the input. I hadn't really thought much about using the NAS drives as a redundant pair. I haven't had any redundancy or backup before now so I hadn't given it much thought, the idea of getting a NAS was more for the scalable capacity and the single point of storage. Obviously there are big differences between a USB drive that is used irregularly and a NAS box that is always on and I need to consider the fact I won't always be there when something goes wrong and so need to plan ahead a bit.
How good are the Netgear NAS boxes at dealing with power outages/surges/brownouts? Are they fairly tolerant or realistically is a UPS pretty much a requirement to regulate the power supplied to the NAS? - Power outages can corrupt the raid array (as writes in progress are lost). Leaving journalling on helps prevent that, but also hurts write performance. Even with journalling on, I still recommend a UPS - not so much for power conditioning as for allowing a proper shutdown on power loss.
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