Storage space has suddenly come to a head in my household.

My set up is as follow's


Dell Precision M4700 Laptop with 500 GB ssd boot drive + 2 TB 2.5" HDD:

• Photos from DSLR, and smartphone's every time they get full
• Some archival stuff from my wifes business
• Some video footage from my childhood
• General personal files
• I use this laptop for downloading media (mostly torrents), but immediately transfer it off to our NAS so we can watch it on our TV, bedroom projector etc.
• Backed up via blazeback.
• Yes it's a 2011 era laptop, but is still going strong for this application. Work has issued me a modern high end work station that I use most of the time (I have admin privileges on this, but want to keep it fairly clean and not cluttered with my personal stuff, and of course I don't want to run any risky programs etc on my employers computer)

QNAP TS-212 NAS (2011 era i think) with 2x 2TB disks. Brought used with disks many years back

• Functions as a file server for media (plus a small handful of files that me and my wife want to work on at a similar time).
• Set up as two independent volumes
• No RAID, No mirroring, No backup. (data on it is largely replaceable if a drive should fail)
• Been running at the limit of capacity with this for 2+ years. Delete old stuff to make room for new stuff.
• Runs 24/7, with disks spun down most of the time (and compact enough to wedge into the bottom of my data panel).
• Kinda slow. Tops out at ~30MB/S copying files, with CPU at 100%.
• Has lots of capability (torrents etc), but interface is clunky so I don't use it.

I also have a stack of external hard drives (often the boot drives of systems that died, or when I upgraded the boot drive and did a clean install). Have stuff files from past employers if I ever wanted to become professionally chartered (Working in a different field ATM). Prob 2.5TB of drives, but mostly junk on them. Don't really have time to purge, but don't want to throw away.

Current situation:

• Collection of photos has grown to a point where my personal laptop is becoming full, Likely could purge a lot, but would rather not.
• Purchase of a 4k TV means media is now ~4 times larger, so NAS is going to run out of space fast.

Options I am considering

• Upgrade laptop HDD to say 4TB, and upgrade NAS capacity and continue as per currently.
• Move all my large storage to a NAS or file server. (photos etc would need some back up method)

First option seems essayist, but I am a little weary that my laptop drops out of windows 10 support next year (and modern laptops don't tend to have multiple disk bays). Means #2 is the obvious pick.

But if i move all my photos to the NAS, I can on longer use a single computer blaze back licence for all my backups. And to be prudent I should start mirriong drives. And the bottom line is doing data storage properly is quite expensive...

On the NAS upgrade I have a few options:

• Shoehorn some more storage into my current NAS (drive upgrade or external drive via USB).
• Upgrade to a modern faster NAS. Either set up to tolerate a drive failure, or not.
• Get a file server to replace the NAS, could mean I could remote in (never had done remote access before), and download media direct to it's storage location, rather than the somewhat painful download then transfer. If it was a computer, not a NAS, I could use a single blazeback licence on it (and back my laptop up to it, meaning I don't need a backup licence for my laptop).

Any thoughts on this? Want to keep the cost & power consumption reasonable if I can, but this gear is not cheap.



Security camera's for our house is in the maybe, some day category. But I assume having them go the cloud would be better than local storage?