Quick Answer:There’s no right answer as it depends on what you need to store, but two 2TB drives is a good place to start with NAS. Always consider having at least one extra drive for redundancy.
Building a storage server at home, be it your DIY server or using one of thebest NASenclosures, is a great way to save on monthly subscription costs and bring all your data under one roof without relying on third-party companies.
Most enclosures don’t come with any storage drives unless specified at purchase. This means it’s down to you to work out how much storage capacity will be required and populate the available drive bays accordingly.
How much storage space do you need?
Do you only have some photos and documents to save on a NAS? You’ll be able to get away with smaller drives than if you planned to catalog and stream hundreds of purchased 4K movies.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s good to start with 2TB drives (two at the very least for RAID) as a minimum to provide plenty of space. Hard drives can hit capacities of 24TB for NAS enclosures, and the way RAID works with NAS operating systems means it’s always better to buy drives that are too large.
Take theSynology DiskStation DS224+as an example. This is a two-bay NAS with support for drives of up to 24TB in size. Installing two 8TB drives inside the enclosure and using Synology’s hybrid RAID solution for redundancy will provide 8TB of storage space (one drive reserved as a backup). This is ample space for a busy home with photos and documents, as well as setting up a media streaming platform such as Plex with countless shows and movies.
Music files can take up to 10MB per track, while 4K movies can range anywhere between 5GB to 20GB each. 8TB would allow you to save 10,000 music tracks (40GB or 0.04TB) and 100 4K movies (2,000GB or 2TB) with more than 5TB to spare. Surveillance footage from security cameras connected to NAS enclosures can take up a fair amount of disk space depending on how many hours are saved and the quality of the recordings.
It’s worth looking through the apps you’ll be running on the NAS server to see just how much space will be taken up by data. If in doubt, go bigger to avoid needing to replace drives sooner. The same 10,000 music tracks and 100 4K movies would fill up the 2TB drives we’d recommend starting with.
Which drives can be used with NAS?
You could technically use any supported 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drive with most NAS enclosures, though we’d recommend relying on thosedesigned specifically for NASor server deployment. The reason for this is desktop (and laptop) class drives aren’t designed with the necessary protection and features that are almost required for saving important data on a NAS. Seagate’s IronWolf series of hard drives are built for 24x7 operation with better balancing and RAID performance compared to its desktop HDDS.
The same goes for Western Digital and other manufacturers. When choosing between hard drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD), it depends on your available budget. SSDs are faster than HDDs, use less power, and don’t emit any noise, but cost considerably more per GB of capacity. I’d go with hard drives to get started, especially if you have a lot of data to store. Hard drives offer a better selection of capacities whereas SSDs usually top out at around 4TB.
Performance isn’t a huge issue with the drive as the processors and network connections used inside NAS enclosures aren’t powerful enough for multi-drive setups with PCIe levels of bandwidth. I’ve been relying on hard drives for almost a decade for storing and streaming content on my home media server. I’ve still yet to experience a need to move my catalog of media to flash storage. If you’re buying your very first NAS, I’d go with the Synology DiskStation DS224+. Pick up two 2TB drives and you’ll be good to go!
Synology DiskStation DS224+
TheSynology DiskStation DS224+is the direct successor to the popular DS220+, which was praised for the value it offered to consumers looking to buy their first enclosure. The DS224+ has an Intel Celeron processor, 2GB of DDR4 RAM, and support for Synology’s excellent DSM operating system and catalog of apps.
Seagate IronWolf 2TB
Seagate’s IronWolf 2TB drive is designed for use inside NAS enclosures. 2TB is plenty of space to get started with for photos, music, movies, shows, and much more.
