Answered Upgrading my NAS

techno79

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I have a single drive Qnap NAS (TS112P) which I use to store media content. There's nothing hugely critical on there that if my hard drive failed, that I'd be devastated. However, there would be some degree of hassle with setting up a new drive so a couple of years ago, I purchased a 2nd single drive Qnap NAS (same model) and then setup a NAS to NAS replication job to backup the content on a weekly basis. The amount of hassle of losing a week's worth of data is almost zero. There are many reasons for this solution but them main ones are:
  1. Single drive NAS drives are ultra power efficient and very quiet
  2. They are also relatively cheap
  3. Having a NAS backup to another NAS gives me some protection from hard drive failure without getting into complexity of RAID.
  4. I can selectively choose what to backup which means my backup NAS doesn't have to be the same size as my primary NAS.
  5. Given I only need to backup on a weekly basis, I have scheduled my backup NAS to power on for a 30 minute window each week. During which the full back up process is easily complete. This saves a lot of energy cost overall.
I've got a 3TB drive in my primary NAS and 2TB drive in my backup NAS. This has been more than enough space when I was mainly using 720p content but now that I've started to store 1080p in preference and selectively storing 4K content, my storage space is quickly filling up.

I think my single drive solution will soon reach a physical upper storage limit and I'll need to upgrade to a multi drive NAS. My questions are:

  1. Are there any good low powered 2 or 4 drive NAS?
  2. Is the above strategy still workable/worth it for a 2 or 4 drive NAS (i.e. I don't use redundancy RAID, because my NAS to NAS backup covers me for the data loss I might incur)?
Essentially, my strategy came from some early dabblings in Windows Home Server which gave some RAID like qualities without having to have identical HDD sizes. You could just throw in whatever drive sizes you had. You could configure what sections you wanted to be protected by being on multiple drives and what could be run at risk by being on just one drive (and this would take up less HDD space). I've kind of got the same setup using NAS to NAS backup which seems to work for me.

Thoughts?
 
How much storage do you need?

e.g. a single 12TB drive will give you x4 more storage.

Does the space need to be under one share/volume?
 
Ah okay, that might be a good solution. 12TB is a lot more than I need but I guess it future proofs me. 12TB aren't cheap though. Just need to make sure my NAS can support such a big drive. Thanks for the help.
 

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