I Built a NAS: One Year Later. EVERYTHING I Learned and the Mistakes

last year I put together a Nas that besides camera equipment and computers became the single biggest upgrade to how I handled my entire digital existence it changed how I approached external hard drives cloud storage like Google drive and how I interact with my home and now I think it's turned me into a bit of a data hoarder catch me on the next episode of Hoarders on Hulu they're just like me for real so I want to talk about how it's all been integrating into my life and the upgrades I've made since then let's just say the system that I had after publishing that video wasn't perfect and hopefully after this video it gets a whole lot closer to what I envisioned in my mind if you want to learn more about starting with your first Nas and the amount of effort it took I laid out my experiences pretty well in the video I made over a year ago this video will more focus on the issues I've encountered after that initial setup let's start with some quick background info I have a Synology ds1821 plus this is an 8-bay Nas that supports 10 gigabit Ethernet NASA's are pretty pricey but provide a level robustness that beefy external hard drive or cloud storage just doesn't provide it does require being a bit techy to get up and running but it's super useful once it is in an S 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 a drive as redundancy so that if one of the drives fail the whole thing just doesn't go out of thin air and disappear kind of like when you see a bunch of ants working together to accomplish something greater so if we have more Drive Bays we can consolidate more Drives together to make an even faster storage here's an example of a foreign numbers between a single hard drive versus the six hard drives I have running in my Nas in shr now here's the kicker most of the electronic devices you own probably only have gigabit Ethernet it's basically the standard for most modern devices that have an ethernet port but gigabit isn't the same as gigabyte a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes a second which is fast but a gigabit is 1 8th of that speed at only 125 megabytes per second that's about as fast as a single hard drive so all this extra speed that I've been touting from combining your drives on a Nas is useless right well that's where this handy little 10 gigabit card comes into play some nasas have multi-gigabit ethernet out of the box but with our Synology box we have to install this 10 gigabit Ethernet card giving us up to 1250 megabytes per second of data 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 NASA is connected to has to have a 10 gigabit Ethernet port and support those speeds too it's like if you try to use the bathroom but your undesirable stinky waste just won't go down the toilet and if the toilet bowl was just expanded it would still clog the hole you just have more stuff in the bowl your pipes themselves need to be 10 times bigger to support it all then it would all go down the toilet super fast with these giant gaping pipes that analogy was a little crap so I'll try to keep the rest of this video clean 10 gigabit Ethernet 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 four to five ports and getting a 10 gigabit pcie card for your PC costs around 100 and if you have a Mac instead you've got to have it selected when you order the Mac or pay 300 for a bulky dongle after the fact yeah yikes luckily most people including myself can get by with a mixture of 10 5 and 2.5 gigabit Ethernet dongles and switches for more reasonable prices that way you only use these faster speeds for devices that you actually need the faster speeds for so the Philip Hue bridge that you're using to control your smart lights definitely does not need 10 gigabit speeds so that's what I'm using myself a mixture of 10 gigabits some places and 2.5 gigabit for other places that's more than enough for my own use cases and it's honestly fine for most people too I talked about how fast the storage and the connection to the storage device says but what do I actually use it for this thing has become a central part of my everyday workflow and in my home life it controls a lot of different things I store all my old Youtube footage and completed videos in it just in case something ever happens to my YouTube channel or if I need to reuse old footage it saves a lot of time to just look through the nas for shots that I've done instead of preparing the camera setting up lighting and reshooting an item because I've referenced it in a video imagine if I had to well reshoot myself work on my laptop the Smart Home Tech that I installed or my current desk setup it'll be a pain I also use this Nas as a giant drive to edit my photos for thumbnails and videos for this YouTube channel my wife actually helps me edit some of my videos and the fact that we don't have to pass back and forth a drive is great she can work on the video on her computer and when she's done with it she can just close the application then I can open it up on my computer with all of it being served by the nas at 10 gigabit speed even when I'm not connected to it via Ethernet I can treat it like a cloud storage device I can access View edit and upload new files to the NAS from my laptop or phone it makes it easy to share files between computers instead of finding an external drive plugging it in copying the file over ejecting the drive plugging it into the computer that I need then moving the file over it feels like the storage was built right into the computer it's faster than cloud storage and it's accessible from all the computers we need at once for quick file sharing I also use the nas to store all the pictures I've taken over the years for things like major life events vacations and the random pictures of our dog that we have here and there but the nice thing about NASA's is that despite being called network attached storages it's in its name inside it's technically just a computer running a special operating system and a bunch of cloud spinning hard drives so it's just a computer in a boring black box but because it is just the computer you can use it for more than just storing things I do use it to store most of my media but I also use it as a household Plex server and to run home assistant and home bridge for my smart home in Docker containers you can even run virtual machines off of it if you wanted to so what I like about it is that you can consolidate all of these different Smart Home applications servers and mass storage and have it hosted on a single device instead of it being spread apart across a bunch of different devices with just one device it makes it easier to keep things up to date and running smoothly you can even plug in external drives right into the USB ports of the Nas If you want to transfer files that way directly onto it so I wasn't kidding when I said that this thing became the center of my digital hoarding life but that being said it hasn't been 100 smooth sailing a single NASA loan is not a backup solution especially if it's the only place I have my precious files on because if this Nas decides to crap out on me all of my data would be lost and I would probably be crying on the floor about my life's work for that you'd want to follow the three to one rule of data backup having three different copies across two different types of devices and one copy stored off-site also for my YouTube video editing I thought running a bunch of hard drives together in the nas would get me close to the 10 gigabit speeds I want in the nas and so I bought smaller four to six terabyte drives and I'll be honest it's more than plenty enough space for me but they've taken up most of my drive Bays with little room for future expansion and believe it or not they aren't that great for video editing hard drives when paired together in that super drive mode right together in raid and when they're all working together increase the read and write speed significantly but a Nas does not remove the hard drive's latency and poor random read and write performance this is how long it takes to execute an action and find random files across a storage device imagine latency like how quickly someone takes to start a job and random reads and writes us how fast someone can complete the tasks associated with that job even a single SATA SSD is faster than six hard drives working together when it comes to random reads and writes and my primary use case for the nas video editing relies on a mixture of good sequential speeds and good random speeds so what does that mean with six hard drives in shr opening large folders and video project files took a moment longer than if they were running directly off of my PC and when a video project was open scrolling through the timeline was a bit more sluggish video clip thumbnails took longer to load in and trying to play the timeline would cause Final Cut Pro to spin for a second before playing so while the handoff of files between the computer was now easier and more efficient than ever I basically introduced a point of delay into everything I do in Final Cut Pro which over time adds up to a lot of wasted time during video editing just waiting for things to load we did not want to trade a problem for another problem okay great but Jimmy I'm not a video editor how does this apply to me a great question so like if you wanted to load your Steam games on your Nas install Nas applications on there do photo or video editing or basically anything that relies on accessing a bunch of different files at once you're gonna experience some of the slowdowns and negatives that come with using a hard drive versus an SSD which was a big reason why I wanted a Nas in the first place to have fast yet big storage and this just wasn't working for my use case so really with this Nas I had three major issues with it I'm not really following the best practices of three two one data backups I'm kind of running out of Drive Bays for more hard drives and video editing off of it I introduced some annoying lag and here's what I did to resolve each of these issues the first solution I thought of was to just cut my losses buy big jumbo sized hard drives consolidate all 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 would solve all my issues all at once but Cloud shorts can get expensive really fast if you're trying to store more than a few terabytes you better be ready to Fork up some dough then I thought of another solution 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 then use my curtain ads more as an archive and store all my old footage there and that's what I ended up doing but funnily enough it was like the world was listening to me and I actually got an email one day from well Synology and they sent over this ds-1423 plus and 10 gigabit Ethernet card quick disclaimer so that you're aware this video is not sponsored by them and everything you've heard about my experiences about all their Nash products have been 100 my own personal opinion and they don't get to see this video before it's live they're seeing it for the first time when you are so say hi prior to them sending over this ds1423 plus Nas I've had no interaction with them and the first Synology Nas I mentioned at the beginning of this video was one that I purchased with my own money at retail price based on my own research and needs at the time and I was considering options from other manufacturers as well and there are other viable options besides Synology like building your own Nas or using other pre-built Nas providers I'm also not saying just throw money at the problem and buy a new Nas to solve your issues I'll talk more about what I would have done if I was just starting fresh with the nas knowing all the things and all the pitfalls that I know now you'll just see that a little bit further into this video with this ds-1423 plus I installed a four terabyte Samsung Evo SATA SSD which gives me plenty of space for editing video projects the other Bays on this Nas are currently empty but 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 like if 8K 120 frames per second video editing becomes a thing I sure hope not because that sounds like we need crazy powerful computers or if I'm desperate I can actually put more hard drives in here for larger but slower storage so now I have a single small Nas for my current projects a bigger Nas for archiving purposes and some external hard drives I had laying around connected to them just so that I have another backup while I keep these nasas in separate rooms technically we're not following the three two one backup strategy since we still need off-site backup and that's really the only issue I haven't personally sorted out for myself the solution might be to remotely store my big bulkyness at a family or friend's house and offer some free storage space on it as a monthly rent that I pay them or I could work with a friend who has a Synology Nas to set up hyper backup this would let us use each other's NASA's as off-site backup locations but I think that complicates things and I don't know if I trust my non-seki friends or family with an expensive box of spinning hard drives that always need to be on when I'm Already There tech support when things are broken I like to be responsible for my own data so that leaves two solutions then one I could occasionally back up the files from my Nas onto a big beefy external hard drive box it up and keep it at a family member's house and tell them to not touch it and then occasionally update it every few weeks or months or number two I could pay for an online backup service like backblaze that can connect to my Nas and handle that for me automatically the solution I'm thinking I'm going with is really a mixture of the two the really important stuff gets backed up to backblaze while less commonly touched files with lesser importance gets updated on an external hard drive that'll store away that way I can sort of get the best of both worlds and save the recurring storage costs plus these off-site backups are really in case of well knock on wood if the house burns down by fire or some other major catastrophic event happens where all my nasas are removed from the face of the planet which I think is highly unlikely but still it's possible and I'd like to have some kind of backup even if it's not 100 up to date at all times okay so now that that's solved with everything that I know now with all the problems I've had what would I recommend for someone who's looking at starting their own Nas journey and slowly turning into a data hoarder like me I'd start with the smaller Nas like this ds923 Plus or even the cheaper Synology Di s423 if 10 gigabit isn't important to you other Nas providers like qnap also offer comparable nasas for different feature sets if you're interested in that but really your biggest focus should be on prioritizing buying the biggest drive that you can at the time 16 to 20 terabyte hard drives are expensive but NASA's with more Drive bays are also more expensive than NASA's with less Drive Bays like with Synology on average it costs around 125 dollars for each additional Bay which means a more powerful Nas but it will be more expensive physically heavier run louder and emit more heat with more spinning drives which could be annoying in a home or small office if you don't have a good secluded place to store it I use a hallway closet for my 8-bay Nast and it gets warm in there and the drives are audible when the door is open so really I don't like it being anywhere else but that secluded closet so my recommendation here would be to get a good four or six Bay Nas which are typically cheaper than 8 bay masses and splurge on two 20 terabyte drives to run an shr are or Raid for redundancy and add more 20 terabyte drives as you go you could start off with just one single 20 terabyte drive but you'll need a good backup solution in case that drive fails then in a single slot at a large capacity SSD or use an nvme SSD if your Nas supports it this gives you fast low latency storage that can be used as a game Drive editing video projects or for other applications that require a lot of mixed file sizes and locations but if you don't do those things then you can skip adding the SSD then just fill in the remaining slots with more 20 terabyte drives as needed the cost per terabyte on a hard drive has been dropping over the last 10 years and if that continues in a few years when you need a new 20 terabyte drive there may be even bigger drives or cheaper 20 terabyte Nas ready drives this gives you a ton of future proofing since files are just gonna get bigger then you wouldn't end up in a situation like me where you have six slots filled out with only 20 terabytes of usable space and even then the total cost of all these drives would cost me around the price of 220 terabyte NAS Drives along with paying the price for a larger beefier Nas for these extra Bays so I'd really consider thinking ahead there and prioritizing hard drive size over big nases it really was my biggest regret there was really no good way to test Nas setups in your local Best Buy like it's a laptop on display I really wish there was but there wasn't and it really would have helped me prevent some of these costume mistakes I made so I hope you learned from me so after that how's my current two NAS solution working it's been great one Nas only has ssds and it's used for video projects meaning everything is smooth Snappy at all times during editing and I can add more ssds as needed when files get bigger it's quiet and emits so little heat that I don't have to keep it in my makeshift Home Server closet it's actually in the media room for easy access and then I used a bigger battery mass for everything else Plex Docker containers for home assistant home Bridge the video archive and as my personal cloud storage it's still in our hallway closet keeping all of our jackets and Winter Wear warm and now that it does everything I expected to do and and the way I expect it to do it I just hope that it's going to continue going that way I learned a lot from this experience and made quite a few mistakes along the way so I hope that all the things that I learned help you in some way too please don't make the same mistakes I did anyway what do you personally think do you have your own Nas how far would you personally go with your own Nas where some of the struggles that I struggled with some that you experienced as well was there anything that I missed that I should have mentioned leave off in comment section below and if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and well don't forget to subscribe I'll see you all next time bye

Channel: Jimmy Tries World

Views: 217,688

Keywords: NAS, NAS 2023, DIY NAS, How to build a NAS, NAS Problems, NAS Hard Drives, NAS SSDs, Synology NAS, Synology NAS 2023, NAS Build 2023, Pre-Built NAS, Pre-Built NAS Synology, NAS Synology, NAS Synology 2022, Synology DiskStation DS1821+, Building a NAS, How to Build a NAS, NAS Options, Do I need a NAS?, Network Attached Storage, Network Attatched, Why do I need a NAS?, What does a NAS do?, Why is a NAS important?, Best NAS, Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS

Id: Ap8QrMao0No

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023