I’d love some advice from the data-hoarding hivemind! I currently have a ton of video projects and footage sitting on random hard drives around my office—about 15TB worth.
Since Black Friday is around the corner, I figure it’s a good time to set up a RAID 5 enclosure instead as “cold storage” for my finished projects.
I’d likely need 20-25TB to start, but it’d be great if I could add new disks down the line to keep it somewhat future-proof. Since it’s storage, speed is less of a concern than cost and storage space. I’d love to keep everything around $1k or below if at all possible. It doesn’t need to be network-attached or anything and if it makes a difference, I’m on Mac.
Anybody care to point me in the right direction? I won’t pretend I’m techy, this is not my area of expertise so I’d be incredibly grateful for any input or advice!
I understand it doesn’t have to be a NAS but it would be much better in my opinion. RAID enclosure over USB is…well, not the most reliable solution. I would look into some Synology options. As has quite nice DSM and it can combine drives of different size in the SHR RAID: https://kb.synology.com/en-af/DSM/tutorial/What\_is\_Synology\_Hybrid\_RAID\_SHR
The cheapest solution would likely be a Mediasonic Probox or some other USB drive, throw some 20 to 22 TB drives in that, and call it done. The ideal solution would be to have a four bay NAS with RAID 5 or (even better) RAID 10, so you can keep snapshots, the NAS can optionally do backups, etc.
What about this QNAP for a direct-attached storage solution (it also works standalone without a NAS, which is how I’d be using it): https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1454549-REG/qnap_tr_004_us_qnap_tr_004_4_bay_usb.html
with these drives: https://www.newegg.com/seagate-exos-x20-st20000nm007d-20tb/p/22-185-011?Item=22-185-011&cm_sp=product-_-from-price-options (the only good NAS HDD BlackFriday deal I’ve seen so far).
Overkill on storage space for sure, but at least somewhat future-proof…? What do you think?