01-20-2021, 05:06 PM
A NAS is not necessarily a good option for doing restores fast, actually, unless you have a cacheing setup as well. The latter tends to be expensive, as these often work with an internal card and several NVMe devices. It all depends a bit on your needs, I guess.
As to the one you referred to, for what it is it appears to be very cheap, and therefore potentially an option you could try out regardless.
Fantec generally gets 4 out of 5 stars from a review PoV, basically because it works. Support is not optimal, and neither are the manuals, apparently.
The power supply unit appears to be one of the critical parts of these NASes. No idea how often failure happens, but normally within the warranty period as far as I can see.
Generally speaking, you do get what you pay for, however, you need to keep that into account.
If I would get a NAS-type device myself, I would very likely go for QNAP - they are outperforming Synology these days, and are generally speaking very good and relatively affordable, although more expensive than the Fantec devices, of course. 4-bay QNAP devices start at around 260 to 270 euros, over here, in the Netherlands.
As to RAID: IMO it is always important: I had it happen to me that I could only retrieve parts of a back-up from the third back-up I had available. In principle, with RAID, you make this just a bit more reliable and easier.
Do note that my own set-up currently is a double, decoupled back-up of my SSD bootdisk (image), RAID for all of my other drives, another RAID backup for all of my drives, an additonal backup, non-RAID, all of these linked to my workstation, and a few additional, decoupled individual backups for different types of work I do. That is currently a total of 37 TB in my workstation, another 12 TB SSDs externally, and 20 or so TB in spinning media, just in case .
I really only work with SSDs nowadays, because they are way more reliable than spinning media, as I have experienced regularly, BTW. They also consume much less energy, so are friendlier to the environment as well .
HTH, kind regards, Wim
As to the one you referred to, for what it is it appears to be very cheap, and therefore potentially an option you could try out regardless.
Fantec generally gets 4 out of 5 stars from a review PoV, basically because it works. Support is not optimal, and neither are the manuals, apparently.
The power supply unit appears to be one of the critical parts of these NASes. No idea how often failure happens, but normally within the warranty period as far as I can see.
Generally speaking, you do get what you pay for, however, you need to keep that into account.
If I would get a NAS-type device myself, I would very likely go for QNAP - they are outperforming Synology these days, and are generally speaking very good and relatively affordable, although more expensive than the Fantec devices, of course. 4-bay QNAP devices start at around 260 to 270 euros, over here, in the Netherlands.
As to RAID: IMO it is always important: I had it happen to me that I could only retrieve parts of a back-up from the third back-up I had available. In principle, with RAID, you make this just a bit more reliable and easier.
Do note that my own set-up currently is a double, decoupled back-up of my SSD bootdisk (image), RAID for all of my other drives, another RAID backup for all of my drives, an additonal backup, non-RAID, all of these linked to my workstation, and a few additional, decoupled individual backups for different types of work I do. That is currently a total of 37 TB in my workstation, another 12 TB SSDs externally, and 20 or so TB in spinning media, just in case .
I really only work with SSDs nowadays, because they are way more reliable than spinning media, as I have experienced regularly, BTW. They also consume much less energy, so are friendlier to the environment as well .
HTH, kind regards, Wim
Gear: Canon EOS R with 3 primes and 2 zooms, 4 EF-R adapters, Canon EOS 5 (analog), 9 Canon EF primes, a lone Canon EF zoom, 2 extenders, 2 converters, tubes; Olympus OM-D 1 Mk II & Pen F with 12 primes, 6 zooms, and 3 Metabones EF-MFT adapters ....