building NAS

[sessi4ml]

I have two 5 1/4 500GB drives and planning to build a NAS
The NAS will connect via RJ45 to the network
I know WD has a disk system, I have one.
or I could give the 2 drives and buy ?

Ideas...THanks

[jmcilhinney]

Are you asking whether you should buy a device with new drives or buy a device that empty and use the drives you have? If so then that really depends on how much the price difference would be and whether the drives you have would do what you need them to do. There's not really any one answer to that question.

[sessi4ml]

I'm not sure what my question is..
Buy a NAS box for two drives or WD system
The WD system I could access the files remotely via app
The NAS system...I am not sure
Your thoughts..
Thanks

[jmcilhinney]

My thoughts are that if you don't know what your question is then it's a bit much to expect us to and if we don't know what the question is then it's a bit much to expect us to provide an answer.

With regards to being able to access files via an app, or any feature for that matter, the very first thing is to determine whether you think that feature is likely to be useful to you. We can't determine that. If it's not useful to you then it can't be considered an advantage of that option.

[passel]

I have two 5 1/4 500GB drives ...

That seems highly unlikely. I don't know that they manufactured 500GB 5 1/4 drives.
If they are 5 1/4 drives I wouldn't want to use them as they would have to be relatively slow.
Common desktop drives have been 3.5 inches for quite a while and 2.5 inches for laptops. You can buy a Terabyte 3.5 inch drive for less than $50.

[sessi4ml]

Ops, long days, WD5000AAKX
Sounds like, dump the drives and purchase a WD system.

Here in North California, we had a fire that burned 1000 plus houses.
I am looking to build a disk system and place it in a hole ? under the house ? and not worry about it for 50,000 hours. There is the learning curve, so what do I ?have...2 500GB...What could I build with this?
A network drive..

Ideas...Thanks

[2kaud]

If you are looking to build a NAS system, have you considered what level RAID you are going to employ? With 2 matched drives you can go with RAID 1 which gives you the space of 1 drive but will keep working if one drive fails until the failed drive is replaced (some models even allow hot replacement). If you can go to multiple drives, then you could have a RAID 5 system whereby if any one drive fails then the system will still work - or even RAID 6 which will still work if 2 drives fail. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

[Steve R Jones]

I wouldn't dig a hole and bury hard drives.... I'd get some drive space in the cloud or put the drives at a friend/family member's house in another state.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

Funnily enough i am looking to buy a NAS,

i have been looking at the Synology ones and in particular this one - Synology DS416

You generally buy the enclosure and drives separately and i think you would need new specialist drives like these - Western Digital 4TB

I am sure they sell the same ones on the Amazon US site !

I am probably going to get 4 drives and mirror them using RAID, you can get up to 10TB drives for this model so even using RAID thats 20TB which should be plenty of space.

[topshot]

The Synology units are nice (and the WD Reds NSA mentioned are well regarded), but likely more $ than other options. Their support not so good (unless maybe you buy direct from them or pay?). It's just a forum, but I've never had my questions answered. You could replicate between 2 units (one local and one in another state). Of course, both sites would need decent connections if you're storing lots of stuff.

Cheaper and simpler to use the cloud, but some are not comfortable with that.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

The Synology units are nice (and the WD Reds NSA mentioned are well regarded), but likely more $ than other options.

Oh yes there are definitely cheaper options, and i am trying to do some comparisons at the moment but i keep coming back to the Synology unit.

I might look at some cheaper hard disks but i am still not sure, i am more interested it getting a really nice reliable NAS.

Yes the Cloud is an option but i am a bit old school i like to own and host my own stuff where possible.

[jdc2000]

For some reviews and test results of NAS systems, check out the link below:
(ZDNet did a series on them):

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&....0.kJmm8mm6SU8

[topshot]

Oh yes there are definitely cheaper options, and i am trying to do some comparisons at the moment but i keep coming back to the Synology unit.

I might look at some cheaper hard disks but i am still not sure, i am more interested it getting a really nice reliable NAS.

Yes the Cloud is an option but i am a bit old school i like to own and host my own stuff where possible.

I understand perfectly since I'm the same way. I ended up with a pair of DS416 with 8TB Reds for our client.

Their lack of support was a big turnoff for me. It looks like they may have improved it since March. I see there's now a link to submit a ticket in the header of each forum section.

Their updates sometimes have bugs (check the forum) so hold off on installing for a while. Mine would hang every so often for no apparent reason. Went away once I installed the next update a couple months later.