Hi,
I request please provide suggestions for Home Cloud or NAS.
Requirements
2 Users
4 Laptops
Max data is 2TB (General Files like word/excel/pdf, Photos)
No Movies or Games
NBN at home
Best way to access the data from any laptop or outside home.
Budget preferably less than 1000 dollars.
Done some research and got confused.
Please suggest which one I can buy and use as home cloud.
Thanks in advance.
Thanks. I agree it is not best way and I already have this option. But not safe. I can spend money to save data and easily accessible anywhere.
Oh sorry I didn't realise you imply safety is your real reason. What brand do you / don't you trust then from your research?
The best would be the Dell Diamond Ultra Corporate Barracuda system, which is $265,000 per year and comes with a rotating shift 24/7 manned station to maintain security and uptime.
I've tried this with about 4 routers, and it was always shockingly bad. From painfully slow to not working at all, no matter how much I fiddled with settings on the router and PCs.
My money is on a basic name-brand 2-bay NAS. A lot less than $500 total, including drives. Synology is a good brand.
Get a Synology 2 bay NAS (DS218?) and get 2x 4TB hdds and run those in RAID 1. You can either connect to it remotely using Synology quick connect or by setting up secure VPN (such as using OpenVPN) either on your router/Rpi or the NAS itself.
I believe the update of the DS218, is the 220j. But they are pretty similar units. What NAS drive would be best for OP?
Thanks. There are few DS218 220 models. Please recommend which one is value for money.
The DS220J should be the newest model (2020 release), which would probably be the better unit.
The older models run the same operating system, so features etc. are the same. There is a speed boost with newer models.
Synology NAS as mentioned by Harry. Web-interface, easy to manage and remote access. Don't forget to add a UPS as well and configure auto-shutdown.
I run Synology Drive client on my computers and laptops and DSCloud on Android phones and tablets. Everything gets automatically uploaded to the NAS and the most important folders are being backed-up to Backblaze.
Thanks a lot. Very much appreciated. any particular model you suggest?
A 2 bay one like DS220j (entry-level) or DS218. If you want to use it for Plex and/or photo station, go for the DS218play.
If you want disks 6TB or less, stay away from Western Digital as they are SMR drives. WD 8TB and over is fine. With 2TB of data, I would go RAID-1, mirror, two Seagate Ironwolf 4TB or more. I use a basic CyberPower BRICs 700VA/420Watt UPS. Supported by Synology, runs the NAS for 5 minutes and after that it shuts-down the NAS.
Thanks Marty. Very much appreciated. Do I need to install two seagate drives now itself or can I install when one is full?
@jpramkish: You'll need two, the data is written to both drives to cover you for a drive fail.
Silly question, but have you thought about just getting something like an Office 365 subscription? Home will give you up to 6 accounts with 1TB each. Would mean you don't need to set anything up and have the data stored remotely in multiple places (ie. what would happen if your house burnt down?).
As you want to use it outside home have a look at dropbox or other similar sites. If you do not require these then cheapest option is a Raspberry Pi 4 and an external HDD, but the data will only be fault tolerant if you use a raid setup (I have no idea if this can be done on a RPi4).
I think you can implement Software RAID in RPI. may be even in kernel level.
Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive?
outside home
At least you need to have a public dynamic IP + dynamic DNS + good security (may be firewall + VPN) (not a good solution in current day and age to open your private data directly to internet) or use a private VPN like Hamachi (works even with private IP). I used to use free version of Hamachi for sometime with a running on a RPI to connect remotely.
Second option is just to pay google cloud 2TB package yearly ($125/year though). With your $1000 budget and current plan pricing, you can use it for 8 years and no need to purchase or maintain any hardware (like no need to deal with power outages, faulty HDD, electricity bill other than recent 1 hour Google blackout :D). Who knows what would be the pricing and technology in 8 years.
What is the percentage of 2TB going to be photos? I have a simple plan for photos. 2 * 2TB USB HDD synced (2 brands & lifetimes, like manual RAID-1) and most valued photos are also in 25GB BD-R (Not M-DISC but Verbatim). So 3 sets of backups. Planning to upload 3MP resized images to google cloud as well with a 100GB package ($25/year). But still not feeling right to upload photos to clould lol.
Another best something thread.
I would suggest getting a router with a USB port, supporting VPN server functionality, and plug in a 2TB harddisk to the USB port.
Example: tplink routers listed on https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/faq/1527/ . The "Access the USB Device Remotely" is what will meet your requirement
It may not be the best way, but I reckon is a cheaper way.