Thanks again to everybody for your help.

I placed my order for drives yesterday. Ended up ordering three ~18,000 hour ultrastars for $350 each via trademe. Same city, so hopefully they turn up tomorrow.

NAS turned up today, yet to power own, but seems like a solid bit of kit.

Will likely max out the RAM at some point, but don't plan on adding a Cache.


Fairly expensive outcome, But I am going from 4 TB (no redundancy), to 36TB (with redundancy), and the ability to just keep adding 18TB drives if i want more, (up to 108TB). Will mean I can seriously clean up my data storage, getting everything off my personal laptop & the various 2.5" / SSD externals I have.

Likely will be able to sell a bunch of gear too once I have migrated, which will offset some of the cost.

Just need to decide on how much I will test the drives before install.

And what backup arrangement to run. Would love something automated, but I am leaning towards the idea of a pair of 4 - 8 TB drives, so I can keep one offsite and swap them every few months, meaning one is always cold & offsite eliminating the risk of catastrophic failure during backup. I'm going to miss blazeback, but with the decision not to go with a windows file server, I am out of their USD99/year unlimited plan, and would be in their USD6/mo/TB plan. While not unreasonably priced, I think I can do it cheaper myself.

• Is it acceptable to just have the drives naked, and hot swap them into a NAS bay for each backup run (storing them in a purpose designed box)? or should I do USB enclosures?
• Is it a bad idea to encrypt my backups? - Storing them at my office would be by far the easiest, but would rather keep my data private.