Very happy with my Synology 2-bay NAS with 2 x 3TB WD red HDDs

HGST Brand, reliability test here. I put them in external enclosures, which tend to fail before the drives, so in future I'd get an eSata card/dock.

Any data you care about should be stored on at least two media in two locations. All hard drives fail, the only question is when.

I store quite a bit in Amazon S3 / Amazon Glacier. Much much more reliable than a single hard drive, 99.9999999% durability.

JoJo2: What external storage do you love the most? Any bŕands better than others? Am I better off with (say) 1 x 2TB or 2 x 1TB in case of failure? Cheers!

Synology or QNAP are both excellent, with a wide range of models.

Synology is more user-friendly - great software.

You DEFINITELY need at least two HDDs.

Don't waste your money on small HDDs - the "sweet spot" for price ($ per TB) is about 4TB - and you always need more storage than you think you will.

I recommend WD Red HDDs.

Disclosure - I run five Synology NAS boxes - 2-bay, 5-bay, and 8-bay - I've never had any problems with them.

Love Synology.

@Sideface - have you done model upgrades of any Synology NASes? I have a DS 1512+ and would love to upgrade to the newest DS 1517+.  Would that be straight forward?

Have a feeling I should probably migrate to it when upgrading instead of just swapping over the drives. Because when expanding it with an extra drive bay I was stupid enough to choose the wrong RAID setup, so I went from a fault tolerance of 1 in 5 disks to 1 in 10 disks! :(

Just remember, RAID / NAS is not a backup, it's a copy.

jarledb:

 

Love Synology.

 

@Sideface - have you done model upgrades of any Synology NASes? I have a DS 1512+ and would love to upgrade to the newest DS 1517+.  Would that be straight forward?

 

Have a feeling I should probably migrate to it when upgrading instead of just swapping over the drives. Because when expanding it with an extra drive bay I was stupid enough to choose the wrong RAID setup, so I went from a fault tolerance of 1 in 5 disks to 1 in 10 disks! :(

 

I have swapped drives from a DS 1512+ to a DS 1515+ without any problems. I was using 5 x WD 8TB Reds in RAID 5 configuration.

Use one spare drive (any size will do) to install the DSM operating system in the new NAS, close down, remove the spare drive, and insert your 5 old drives in the same order as in the old NAS.

However, if you are unhappy with your present RAID setup, then I would migrate to to your new RAID setup. Slower but better.

Your DS 1517+ would work even better with faster drives - I am running a DS 1515+ with 5 x 10TB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs (7200rpm).  Fast and quiet, but not cheap.