Do I really need a Nas?

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A few years ago I bought a Nas to store my music and photos.
I recently bought a new one but.... Do I really need it?

These days I stream music and have a ssd with my music on it plugged into my streamer, and have my photos on my pc with a copy on an external hd.
I am wondering about selling the Nas and the 2 WD reds and putting a little of the spare cash into a second external hd for extra security.
No one else needs to access anything on the Nas, so is there a good reason to keep it?
Thanks for any thoughts!
 
Having just had one fail, I'd say that backing up to 2 separate external drives is better than a NAS with 2 mirrored drives inside.
 
I have 2 x Synology NAS boxes and I run RAID 1 on both,
I have a back up of my 1080p and 4K movies, tv progs, music, photos (music creation tools (soft synths ect).
So in my case they are a worthwhile purchase and I couldn't live without them.
I also stream to them via an Nvidia Shield Pro which is a fantastic piece of kit.
Before I bought the second one it a was as above except for the 4K movies.
I use to run RAID 1 on a desktop for years which proved it's worth when a HDD failed.
What if your SSD failed, do you have a back of your music?
Personally I would get rid of the external HDD and store the photos on a NAS running RAID 1.
I know having a redundant HDD is expensive but having had one previously fail on me, without it I would have lost all my music collection which would be hard to replicate.
 
Having just had one fail, I'd say that backing up to 2 separate external drives is better than a NAS with 2 mirrored drives inside.

I've never come across anyone who has 2 HDD's fail in a RAID 1 at the same time but I guess there is a chance of this happening albeit very slim.
HDDs made specifically for use in a NAS are far better than standard ones fitted to a computer.
 
Having just bought a QNAP TS230 mainly for security camera use I'd say a USB drive couldn't do that.

So for me it was a worthwhile purchase. (Even if I haven't bought any IP cameras yet).
 
I've never come across anyone who has 2 HDD's fail in a RAID 1 at the same time but I guess there is a chance of this happening albeit very slim.
HDDs made specifically for use in a NAS are far better than standard ones fitted to a computer.
It can happen, especially drives in the same manufacturing batch. I always check HDD serial numbers and tend not to buy multiple HDDs from the same vendor at the same time.

It has happened even with the quality Enterprise grade storage controllers with high end SAS drives. I speak from experience, a few years ago where I worked we had a couple of incidents with RAID 5 arrays, fortunately the arrays were backed up and were soon recovered. We used to have 'hot' spares running, this would automatically handle a single drive failure & initiate a rebuild but it couldn't handle another drive going down at the same time.

Even at home I always maintain at least three copies of my data, on different devices. I don't count a RAID 1 device as more than one copy.
 
Thanks for all the replies.
I do have my music backed up on my pc and then also on my Nas (in raid mirror) and obviously my photos too.
It seems to me, from what I understand of what you've all said that if I used the Nas's capabilities more it might be different, but that I don't really need one as long as I keep enough copies of all my data. Might be putting it up for sale soon!
 
Even at home I always maintain at least three copies of my data, on different devices. I don't count a RAID 1 device as more than one copy.

I take the same approach.

I do have two NAS in-house, but I have three different backup drives for all the data on them.

I've had RAID-1 and RAID-5 systems in the past; there are two problems with them:
a) spotting that a drive has dropped out, for whatever reason
b) relying on the degraded system to hold "live" data whilst the system is re-built.

There are ways to mitigate the risks with RAID-1--such as having 3 drives, all mirrored. A RAID-5 array can be moved to RAID-6, which offers extra protection by adding another disk.

Eventually I decided to go for single drives in the NAS units, but initiate a rigorous data backup policy onto external HDDs. My online data is split into logical drives, which are segregated by the importance and frequency of change to the data on them. The really vital stuff is backed up daily, rotating between backup media. The backup frequency for large but changed often data is weekly, again rotating. The rest is backed up monthly.
 
I have 2x 8tb mirrored this has all my music, movies and photos on.
Three NAS is also a Plex server and records CCTV.
I then have a 3tb drive in it that once a week runs a backup of my photos and any other non replaceable stuff.
Photos are also synced on my pc so plenty of copies.
 
I've never come across anyone who has 2 HDD's fail in a RAID 1 at the same time but I guess there is a chance of this happening albeit very slim.
HDDs made specifically for use in a NAS are far better than standard ones fitted to a computer.
1 drive failed, but for some reason the other could not be read while they were both in the unit. They were different makes.
 
I take the same approach.

I do have two NAS in-house, but I have three different backup drives for all the data on them.

I've had RAID-1 and RAID-5 systems in the past; there are two problems with them:
a) spotting that a drive has dropped out, for whatever reason
b) relying on the degraded system to hold "live" data whilst the system is re-built.

There are ways to mitigate the risks with RAID-1--such as having 3 drives, all mirrored. A RAID-5 array can be moved to RAID-6, which offers extra protection by adding another disk.

Eventually I decided to go for single drives in the NAS units, but initiate a rigorous data backup policy onto external HDDs. My online data is split into logical drives, which are segregated by the importance and frequency of change to the data on them. The really vital stuff is backed up daily, rotating between backup media. The backup frequency for large but changed often data is weekly, again rotating. The rest is backed up monthly.
I abandoned RAID at home some years ago. I use a couple of PCs running Windows 10 Pro as servers to host backups taken with VEEAM running on client PCs and laptops in our house.
 
I abandoned RAID at home some years ago. I use a couple of PCs running Windows 10 Pro as servers to host backups taken with VEEAM running on client PCs and laptops in our house.

Is that over gigabit ethernet? I have a couple of Linux boxes I'm thinking about repurposing for network backup, but don't want 20Mb/s.
 
Is that over gigabit ethernet? I have a couple of Linux boxes I'm thinking about repurposing for network backup, but don't want 20Mb/s.
Yes, apart from my CCTV cameras (which are 100mbit) all my PCs use gigabit ethernet adapters & all my switches are gigabit.
 
Is that over gigabit ethernet?

I can 't speak for ISP's as I never use their routers but I expect they all support gigabit lan by now.
Gigabit switches are as cheap as chips nowadays and ethernet cables started supporting gigabit when Cat 5e cable hit the market so chances you'd be ok just to put a new switch in line.
 
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