I am looking into setting up a home storage server as I am getting tired of grabbing my external HDD and having to plug it in and connect to my laptop and the case I have it in seems to be a POS but anyway I am looking for some advice on how to set it up. I have a few products in mind but am not familiar with raid system setup or what is the best setup for my needs. If anyone could give me your advice that would be great. It will be very difficult for me to purchase anything more expensive that what I have found so far, I am already pushing it but if you have any advice on something that may be better in the same price range please let me know.
I am looking in the following products:
Synology DS413j Diskless System DiskStation
Seagate Desktop HDD.15 ST4000DM000 4TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
I plan to put (4) 4TB drives in the NAS for 16TB of storage. The NAS will be used for storing music, movies, TV, etc. This will be my media center storage. I plan to store my media on it and stream it to my 70" LED TV and my surround sound through my Apple TV 3. The NAS will most likely not run 24/7. I don't really plan on accessing it outside of my home as there are many apps I can watch video on, I don't need to access what I have at home. It will probably only be used when streaming music or movies at home and seeing how I work 10hrs a day that isnt much. I plan to use Itunes Match for my music streaming. I plan to rip Blu-Ray Discs and store them on this system. I am also new to ripping blu-rays, so I'm not sure how much space they take up or how many I could put on here, anyone? I also may store downloaded HD movies from Itunes. They will most likely be ripped in .mp4 format to be added into Itunes and played through Apple TV, I have a converter that I am currently using to encode all my previously downloaded avi files into mp4 so I can play in apple tv and it has an HD apple tv preset that comes out to about 3 or 4 gigs a movie. At 16 TB, that's 4000 movies which seems to be plenty. This will be the majority of media on it. I am concerned about backing up my data because I have experienced a failed drive before with years worth of tv and movies on it that was lost, although I am not sure how to set it up. I know one RAID setup basically mirrors and backs it up on another drive but that will cut my space down to 8TB and could this even be done on this 4 drive setup? What others options do I have? I have researched RAID setups and I cannot understand any of them except for the mirror setup. Maybe I should just not worry about backing it up since my music will be in Itunes match and I could always redownload it if the drive fails and the plan is to have a physical copy of each blu-ray that is ripped, also the HDD's will not be getting used that much and will not run 24/7. What do you think? Unless the prices of digital HD movies go down in the future then I may not have physical disc backup... I do have about 250 movies on my HDD currently that I do not have backups of though. What do you think about the products I have chosen and do you have any ideas on what would be the best setup for my storage needs as well as protection of my data?
Thanks in advance.