Building a NAS

G-Slev

G-Slev

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I am thinking of building a NAS with the bits of an old PC that have lying around, but I don't intend to use it like a NAS in terms of leaving it on all of the time. Rather, I am intending to use it for hosting my Jellyfin shows/movies and for backing up my photos. So it will only be turned on when I am either watching something on Jellyfin or backing up my images.

The question I have is whether I need true "NAS grade" hard drives if I am not leaving it running all of the time? I have seen different views online as to whether I need true NAS drives for this use case. My intention is to have have two 6tb drives in a mirrored array, so that if one fails, I can restore from the other. This is alongside the copy I hold on my main photo editting PC and a backup held on Amazon Photos.
 
I don't bother with NAS drives in my NAS.
My DS214 was on 99% of the time from 2014 (ish) to about 5 months ago when I replaced it with a DS923.
The whole point of RAID is that you can replace a failed drive without dataloss, so meh, I use the cheapest drives I can find (but try not to use drives from the same batch). The "I" in RAID used to stand for Inexpensive - though these days Independant accepted as the meaning.
 
I'm not sure you need a NAS, based on your backup process a single drive would be more than good enough.. You already have an off-site backup and a master, you just need a backup of the master - either way, you're covered with 3 copies.

Just a thought, unless you like tinkering with tech :D
 
MarkWalker said:
I'm not sure you need a NAS, based on your backup process a single drive would be more than good enough.. You already have an off-site backup and a master, you just need a backup of the master - either way, you're covered with 3 copies.

Just a thought, unless you like tinkering with tech :D
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Fair point. If I went with just a backup drive, should I mount it in my editting PC, or run it in an external caddy so it only spins up when I deed it to?
 
G-Slev said:
Fair point. If I went with just a backup drive, should I mount it in my editting PC, or run it in an external caddy so it only spins up when I deed it to?
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If its an HDD then external that will extend life if SSD as there are no moving parts then there is nothing to wear out so to speak but i would still use as external powering up when needed only
 
Part of the benefit of a NAS for me is that it is always on, and connected to the network. My main machine is a laptop though, so it is difficult to always have an external drive connected if I am using it in different rooms around the house. Another benefit is that I can use it to do the large uploads to the cloud - basically any images that I download to my laptop are copied to the NAS immediately, then the NAS can send them to the cloud overnight. Or if I need to upload extremely large files I can get the NAS to do that, and not have to worry about the laptop interrupting anything.

FWIW I use WD Red Plus drives, which so far have proven to be both reliable and quiet.
 
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