Looking to pick up a QNAP NAS - Lots o' questions
Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2024 2:57 pm
First off I have a 12 bay rack mounted Synology NAS currently that holds most of my stuff. I'm very familiar with their products and interfaces. I've also have heard good things about QNAP so that's why I'm here. I have my eyes on either a 4 or 8 bay unit, rack mounted that has 10gbe and nvme support. I have a few models in mind but that doesn't matter right now.
My wife and I do a lot of photo and video work on the side and need something speedy to edit off of. I was thinking of going two routes, a 4 bay with two 2TB NVME's as cache (already have these on hand) with four 4TB SATA SSD's (will need to buy these) -or- a 8 bay with the same 2TB cache NVMEs but with eight 2TB 7200 HHDs (already have these on hand)
I like the 8 bay idea since it's easier and cheaper to upgrade and I would gain a little bit of speed, but not much off of the additional drives, but still limited to the 10gbe link, not a big deal since most of our work is 1080 anyway.
So my questions are, what would be the better option? Are QNAP RAIDs expandable without creating a new RAID array? Could I stick a single or multiple 4TB or 8TB drives in there in the future and have it add to the array? Whatever unit I choose will be directly connected to the computer via a 10gbe network, any positives or negatives on choosing a NAS that has a USB 3.2 port and using that and not the SFP+?
My wife and I do a lot of photo and video work on the side and need something speedy to edit off of. I was thinking of going two routes, a 4 bay with two 2TB NVME's as cache (already have these on hand) with four 4TB SATA SSD's (will need to buy these) -or- a 8 bay with the same 2TB cache NVMEs but with eight 2TB 7200 HHDs (already have these on hand)
I like the 8 bay idea since it's easier and cheaper to upgrade and I would gain a little bit of speed, but not much off of the additional drives, but still limited to the 10gbe link, not a big deal since most of our work is 1080 anyway.
So my questions are, what would be the better option? Are QNAP RAIDs expandable without creating a new RAID array? Could I stick a single or multiple 4TB or 8TB drives in there in the future and have it add to the array? Whatever unit I choose will be directly connected to the computer via a 10gbe network, any positives or negatives on choosing a NAS that has a USB 3.2 port and using that and not the SFP+?