I Built a NAS: One Year Later. EVERYTHING I Learned and the Mistakes
NASes are pricey but provide a level of robustness that a beefy external hard drive or cloud storage just don’t provide. In a NAS you can configure drives into an array, meaning drives can be combined to basically form a bigger super drive, by splitting the load of data across each of the drives, increasing the overall speed of the group, and using one drive as redundancy. So that if one drive fails, the whole thing doesn’t go kaput. So if we have more bays, we can consolidate more drives together to make even faster storage.
Affiliate Links to Products Mentioned:
Synology DS923+: https://amzn.to/3BZLFfn
10GBe Module: https://amzn.to/3N0eiPL
Synology DS1821+: https://amzn.to/428bapr
DS1821+ 10GBe Module: https://amzn.to/42dgxUz
Ubiquiti Flex XG: https://amzn.to/3C6dTVH
TP-Link 10GB Ethernet Pcie Card: https://amzn.to/3IInC8B
Samsung 870 EVO 4TB: https://amzn.to/3N0EYQA
Affiliate links to YouTube gear I use:
Sony a7siii: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8i/
Sony A7c: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8k/
14in M1 Pro MacBook Pro: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb83/
Mac Studio: https://go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8o/
0:00 Intro
0:48 Current NAS Setup
3:59 What Do I Use the NAS For?
6:30 My Issues with it
9:20 The Solutions
13:40 What would I recommend?
16:22 Conclusion
Some NAS have multi-gig ethernet out of the box, but with our Synology box, we have to install this 10 gigabit ethernet card, giving us up to 1250MB/s per second of data, which is fast. But there’s a catch, to use 10 gigabit, everything between the NAS and your computer, has to be 10 gigabit. So this means the network switch and computer this NAS is connected to has to have a 10 gigabit ethernet port and support those speeds. 10 gigabit is expensive, and replacing everything around the NAS and computer to be 10 gigabit could add up fast. Network switches with 10 gigabit start around $300 for 4-5 ports, 10 gigabit pcie cards for your PC costs around $100, and for your Mac, you gotta have it selected when ordered, or pay $200 for a bulky dongle.
A single NAS alone is not a back up solution, especially if it’s the only place I have my precious files on. For that, you’d want to follow the 3-2-1 rule of data back ups. Having 3 different copies, across 2 different types of devices, and 1 copy stored off site. Hard drives when paired together in raid, and all working together increases read and write speeds significantly, but a nas does not remove the Hard drive’s latency and poor random read and write performance. How long it takes to execute an action and find random files across a storage pool. Even a single SATA SSD is faster than 6 hard drives working together when it comes to random reads and writes. Video editing relies on a mixture of good sequential speeds, and good random speeds. With the 6 Hard Drives in SHR, opening folders and video project files took a few moments longer than if they were running off of my computer. So, really with this NAS I had 3 major issues with it. I’m not really following the best practices of 3-2-1 data backups, I’m running out of drive bays, and editing off of it, I introduced some annoying lag. How did I go about resolving these issues? Well, the first solution I thought of was to cut my losses, buy big jumbo sized hard drives, consolidate my data onto those drives and find a new purpose for those old hard drives. Then install an SSD into one of the drive bays, and use that for my video editing, and sync it to the big drives. Then I’d use a cloud storage provider, like backblaze to back up the whole NAS to the cloud. This would mean I could solve all of my issues. But cloud storage can get expensive fast. Then another solution appeared, why not add a new NAS, that will be all flash, nothing but SSDs to use as a nice, quiet and fast NAS dedicated to just my current video projects. And that’s what I ended up doing.
With this DS923+, I installed a 4TB SATA SSD. Which gives me plenty of space for video projects. By using such a large single SSD now, I can expand with other large SSDs when I need more space, or when video editing gets more intensive. So now I have a single small NAS for my current projects, a bigger nas for archiving purposes, some external hdds I’ve had laying around connected to that for another copy. While I keep these NASes in separate rooms, The really important stuff gets backed up to Backblaze, while less commonly touched files with lesser importance get updated on an external hard drive that I’ll store away.
With what I know now, what would I recommend for someone who’s looking at starting their own NAS journey? Get a good 4-6 Bay NAS and, splurge for 2 20TB drives run in SHR or Raid for redundancy and add more 20TB drives as needed. You could start off with just 1 20TB drive but you’ll need a good backup solution in case it fails. So I’d really consider thinking ahead here and prioritize hard drive size over bigger NASes. It’s really my biggest regret.
How can you say this video wasn’t sponsored? They sent you an expensive product on the condition you made a video about it. That’s what sponsored means… And it just destroys any credibility you once had.
Everything about this video is terrible. Essentially you have a very complex network hard drive. You should never have a network storage device unless you have some kind of parity set up. it is just complicating everything unnecessarily.
Can you mix types of drives (HDD and SSD/m.2) in the same Synology or NAS box? Does the Synology have a good onboard encoder if you want to rip blurays or dvds or is that just done on the PC and then transferred over?
As a pipelayer by trade, your analogy was perfect
I’m actually looking into doing the process could you point me into software or videos for photo back ups, I like apples formats on the cloud and how I can still use the Live Photos and the details on the photos when downloading
building a NAS is trivial even if it’s a DIY nas… the tricky part is to get the money to buy HDDs for the nas (at least in capacities that make sense to have a separate machine, nas, being deployed like if its like 2-10TB that’s something you can put inside your desktop or have in an external USB disc lol )
So are you using the SSD for like current projects and the hard drives for past projects?
I don’t know if I am missing something or not, but I am checking up this current NAS setup, and it seems that the hard drive and ssds wont work together within the NAS drive? So I am confused how you are able to make a small setup using the SSD with the other hard drives? Let me know!
No one needs to keep lots of data. It’s arguable that your life would be better not doing so. You don’t have to post content to be content.
Can’t speak from personal experience, but it does sound like you’d benefit from more RAM and an NVME Cache drive or 2 on that 1821+ to speed up your work projects if you’re using the same files in a session.
Thats still a lot of money having two nas devices
I feel like a better advice would be to buy the nas box with the best cpu you can afford, since ram and storage is easily upgradeable later, where the cpu is not.
Instead of buying a weak nas box just to get more storage, and then get annoyed with performance, which will then drive you to uograde anyways.
20tb is not enough !
I am doing close to what you are doing. I do not do any video editing or play games. So some latency is not an issue. I have a primary and secondary NAS. Primary is sync’d to the secondary every night. Hyper Backup and Snapshot Replication. Also my important data is sync’d to the cloud. I use C2. A small amount but important. Much less than a terabyte. The rest which are mostly media files I store on an external HDD like you do but after I update it I put it in a fire safe.
For video editing you should maybe look at ssd cache solutions. Used tiered storage to speed up access and then you can use smaller ssd for access speeds and larger hdd for the storage capacity.
Azure Blob staorage has EXTREMELY low cost per TB depending on the amount of access you need>
They use cold storage or Archival storage options for really low cost.
Hi, Thanks for your great vdo. I’m planning to setpup one Synology for my archival needs. I have couple of Qs though, which I expected to get from your this vdo.
(1) In Synology or any other NAS servers, is there any data limitations? Like for example, 108TB in total.
(2) If I understand correct I can mixup with SSD & HDD in the same NAS, Right?
(3) Can I mix sizes, like now 24TB HDDs are decen price?
(4) I guess, like WD, Synology have it’s own software to manage the local & cloud spaces?
(5) I guess the single Synology NAS can be shared with other users?
Please share some more technical information. Thanks in advance.
Why didn’t you get some nvme drive for cache? Then you can edit off the nas.
10:38 Hi Synology!
🙂
I have my rack mounted Synology NAS with an external disk and I run Hyper Backup to run daily backups to it. I also pay Synology C2, which is their Cloud backup for 60.00/year and Hyper Backup backs up daily to C2. When I make videos in my mac, I store the video file on my mac, but Synology Drive syncs it to my NAS as a backup, when changes are made to the video file.
You forgot to mention something super important when buying large NAS drives: Avoid shingled drives at all cost! Western Digital has been caught selling red series shingled drives. The iron wolf up to 16tb is ok, but not the 20tb. Do take the time to dig the specs, manufacturers known shingled drives are bad for NAS and they “hide” this information because shingled drives are cheaper to manufacture. Be especially wary of western digital in that regard.
Gary loses yet another one ! 😂
I don’t think I heard you say you tried NVME SSD caching?
Keep a backup drive in a bank safety deposit box?
i’m gonna be starting a nas journey soon. But not a actual nas box. Gonna start with a Riad-1 2 bay enclosure with 2 x 2TB WD Red 3.5" drives. The 2 bay will be connected over USB 3.0. Just as a budget nas/home server. Connected to a Lenovo SFF M series m93 or m710q. Running Debian Linux + CASA OS
I can tell you have fears of clogging up the toilet at your friend’s house.
you did not "build" a nas…. LOL. you bought one… some people actually build NAS
Another good option is building your own Nas. Might be harder to set up certain softwares but would be very worth it
If it’s for backup then just use aws glacier, which is much cheaper. You’ll pay for retrieval though, but that may never happen unless you lose the other backups.
Exactly what part of the video you are building a NAS?
I wanna switch to NAS, but I am concerned of safety. Google servers are well protected against malware, randsonware etc, your NAS it only protected by average cost Router…. How safe is that?
Dont have problçemas attached WD HD ? I tried my WD and dont work in other bays
What setup and drives are the best for storing movies?
Great video.
Great video, how’s it going in 2024?
bro, yourt title is misleading. you chosen to use a Synology NAS, you didn’t build one from scratch.
Ok I thought I was crazy for thinking about all this, but apparently it’s a real thing. Thanks for sharing! About to possibly get my first NAS.
Synology is so outdated. I would not buy a Synology
would the M.2 nvme slots not been good for the SSDs?
Synology SNV3400 series M.2 NVMe SSD drives can be installed through the built-in M.2 slots to enable SSD caching or create SSD storage pools. Drives are sold separately.
I am a novice editor so my storage needs aren’t that important but I do like keeping all my projects. What I have been doing is I pay for the 2tb Gdrive plan and have offline access always on. I offload all my footage into my current ending folder on Gdrive and make sure my laptop is on so it can sync the files between each PC. I do this because I edit away from home and save it to the Gdrive folder in File Explorer. This way my current project is backed up to the cloud and I can even remote into my desktop at home and export a project to be more efficient. Then, when I am done I move my finished projects onto an external hard drive. This really only works because I have fiber (1gb up and down) so it’s technically quicker for me to upload files to drive than have a NAS. Plus I can access it from anywhere without having to set up a VPN.
NAS is supposed to be a long term data storage, yes?
The DS923+ offers storage pool for the NVME bays on the bottom of it, so long as you use their drives, which are expensive but you’d be getting a twice as fast experience with it. Personally I’d suggest just plugging the SSD in to your Mac as that’ll be faster than 10Gb (with an NVME) and using the NAS as archive data.
Error on my part. The smaller NAS in the video is the DS923+ The number after "DS" in the Synology naming convention means how many drives it supports when you include the expansion units they sell. These add 5 drive bays. The larger 8bay one supports 2 expansion units for a total of 18 (DS1821+). In my mind, I kept thinking the smaller one had support for 2 expansions but it only has 1, hence me saying "14" instead of "9". Not sure how the 14 stuck through my script review. But everyone can enjoy my blunder now 🙃
Storing your offsite NAS at your parents’ basement is a solid plan. Your tech support is the rent payment already 😛
I really dislike this video. Your video title is clickbait. I expected you to build and configure a nas, but you didn’t actually build anything. You give bad advice on multiple occasions, such as buying a separate NAS to use as a backup. I don’t know who told you this, but that’s not a solution unless you want to throw away money. What if your drives in your backup NAS fail? Why would you recommend to buy an entire NAS (synology) just to put a single 20TB HDD in it? that’s literally the worst thing you can do, you might aswell just install the HDD to your computer and throw $300 out of your window. These things make it seem like you have no idea what you’re talking about. Overall a terrible video, in my opinion.
I have the ds920+ with 2 10tb drive in shr. I wonder sometimes if I should have went with 2 20tb. Bc I running low on space after 4hrs
They sell firesafe lock safes at Walmart or on Amazon that you could keep your "offsite" files in.
Thanks for this…I’m researching my first NAS now, since starting to do video/YouTube my storage needs have just gotten crazy out of hand.
Nope, I still don’t need nas
Great video! Very helpful. I work with large photos and videos and video editing as well. I built a new PC with a 10GB Ethernet ported motherboard (Asus ProArt X670e) with four 4TB NVMe drives and 2 Samsung 870 Evo 8TB SATA III drives. One of the Samsung 8TB drives will be for photos and videos for fast editing, the other will be for graphic design, large Photoshop files, graphics, etc. I’m thinking about a NAS for backing up the two Samsung drives. What would you recommend?