OK, for the third time this year, I’m outfitting someone’s home with enough of a backend that they should be relatively stable, here’s a guide to how to do this:

The right NAS

Synology DS216J. There are a host of models that Synology has, but even the most basic $170 computer gives you a RAID-1 configuration. And with a pair of 4TB drives, it is a great deal. I’m not sure if this is the perfect DS216 (they have a confusing list, but I picked the second from the bottom which is I’ve found usually a pretty cheap one). But it should saturate a gigabit Ethernet and it has a one disk redundancy.

The right hard drives are 4TB or 8TB

Seagate Enterprise Capacity. I’m really over provisioning here, but I’ve found that you really want a drive with a five year warranty because it will last longer as they use higher quality drives. Right now the best price/performance is the 6TB Drive. I normally buy these on Newegg.com as they have the best reviews and good prices. Make sure to sign up for their loyalty program and use cashbackmonitor.com to get a rebate. You really want three drives, two go in and one is a hot backup. So if a drive fails, you can plug the new one in and with RAID-1 it rapidly rebuilds. But with 4TB at $160 at Amazon, pricing is extremely linear at $40/TB all the way up to 10TB! ($420 at Amazon).
I normally get a drive that’s much bigger than I need because things always fill available demand. Right now the cheapest is 8TB at $39 or so if you can afford it, having a 10TB effective server isn’t such a bad thing for your home, it’s going to store a lot of videos! It will set you back nearly $1200 for the disks though, so if you don’t need that much, the $480 for 4TB may be more reasonable.
Even the 10TB is pretty reasonable at $42/TB and the density is incredible although if you think about with the 8TB at $316, you do pay a big premium for 10TB ($102 extra or $50/TB), so perhaps better wait.

I’m Rich & Co.

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