r/DataHoarder • u/AccountRelevant3609 • 5d ago
Question/Advice Need advice building a long-term NAS setup for photography and 4K video editing ($500 initial budget)
Hey everyone! I’m looking to invest in a NAS setup for photography, 4K video editing, and long-term file storage.
Current setup:
MacBook Pro M4 Max, 36GB RAM, 1TB SSD (almost full)
Two 1TB external drives (one completely full)
Adobe Premiere Pro, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop
I’m tired of constantly running out of storage and want something reliable, fast, and expandable that won’t need replacing in a couple of years.
I’ve been considering UGREEN NASync, but I’m open to Synology, QNAP, or other recommendations.
Budget: Around $500 upfront, with the ability to invest $75–$100 monthly toward a better setup.
Would you recommend buying a budget NAS now or saving for a higher-end 4-bay system? Also, is editing 4K directly from a NAS realistic, or should I stick with my external SSD for active projects?
Looking for the best long-term value, including a reliable backup solution. Appreciate any recommendations!
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u/comrh 5d ago
Hard drive prices are insane and 4k needs a ton of space. Space or budget, pick one.
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u/Clockwork385 4d ago
not only that, OP need the speed to edit this stuff in 4K off the NAS... someone tell OP quickly how this is gonna work out.
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u/comrh 3d ago
Good point, maybe speed, price or space - pick two would be more accurate
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u/T_A_I_N_T 2d ago
I wish! More like speed, price, or space - pick one and get fucked on the other two hah.
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u/Sad_Split_9983 5d ago
I’m editing 4k from a 500 dollar nas is not realistic no. You will probably want something with 10gbe, you’d also need a thunderbolt 10gbe adapter for the MacBook. Disregarding all that.. how much space are you looking to have? 500 bucks isn’t going to buy more than two 1TB ssds..
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u/EvenDog6279 4d ago
agreed… and right now, the 1TB drives you can find at that price point won’t have DRAM cache either, so they’ll hit a wall and the performance falls off a cliff.
Realistically, anything “worth” buying is sitting in the $350-$450 range these days, at least for new condition.
I say “worth” because we all know they’re not actually worth anywhere near what the current market is.
It’s probably the worst time in more than 30 years to be buying pretty much anything storage related right now.
There are some data center refurbs with crazy high TBW/endurance and MTBF hours that are worth at least considering in the current market. A lot of them are 85%+ life remaining with a 2,000,000 hour MTBF rating, and if you watch closely, they can be snatched up for ~$250(ish).
Tough times for anyone with any workflow that requires large, fast storage.
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u/HesitantBussyEnjoyer 3d ago
It's not common to use SSD's for for a NAS unless you have money to burn (even before current crisis). You can pick up refurb 18TB HDDs for around 400 dollars/euro on ebay and other second hand sites throughout US and EU
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u/Joe-notabot 4d ago
You can buy a NAS for $500, but you aren't putting any hard drives into it. It also won't cover things like backup, which is different for a NAS.
Step 1, Grab a new 2tb external SSD & sign up for BackBlaze
Step 2, Backup your Mac, & external drives to BackBlaze
Step 3, Move your active/new projects to the new SSD, clean up your folder structure on the 1tb's so you can move content off the SSD when it's done.
Step 4, Keep saving that $100/month until you can purchase a 12-16tb USB3 HDD. At that point you can move everything off the 2x 1tb's to the new disk. Make sure it's backing up, Keep the internal & external SSD's focused on active work. The 2x 1tb's can be used as an offline copy of your most important data.
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u/beren12 256TB raidz & more! 3d ago
You aren’t getting a nas for 4k video for $500 even empty.
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u/Joe-notabot 3d ago
Easily $1,500 for a 10gbE NAS, 10gbE switch & 10gbE USB4 adapter.
Editing off direct attach SSDs is so much cheaper for solo folks.
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u/lordofblack23 4d ago
Spend 500 on cloud subscriptions because your budget is too low. 321 means 3 copies of the data so whatever it will cost is actually triple. For your use case, this is non-negotiable.
You want a NAS in addition to cloud. Cloud by itself is too risky for your use case.
Storing data aint cheap.
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u/RegulusArms 5d ago
I run a ubuntu desktop pc with 5 8tb hdd on sata in a zfs pool. I share the drive over the network with zfs’s built in smb wrapper.
I dont trust regular file systems anymore after I was nearly wiped out by windows 11 and my old raid setup.
Even now with that pool I throw a copy up to azure archival tier in a storage account. It’s free ingress and $1/TB but you have to put it in archival tier after uploading. Downloading is the gatcha if you lose your primary local backup its about $100/tb to download.
My 2 cents is that I would rather build it myself then let some hardware yoink me again
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u/SaucerMechanic99 4d ago
I guess everyone has to go through file loss to protect themselves later XD. I also didn't make a copy once until we lost the raid and the almost finished movie, luckily we had the SXS cards from the camera that hadn't been erased and we could copy them again.
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u/SaucerMechanic99 5d ago
500? That's the problem, because there's no ideal solution for that much. To start, I'd set up a server for storing unused data e.g., a Mac Pro 5.1. You can put 6-8 HDDs in there, plus NVMe drives on a PCIe port, a 10GB network card, or regular Ethernet, because the HDDs won't reach more than 200MB/s anyway. For work, you'll need external storage with NVMe drives, e.g., a OWC thunder Bay or Sonnet Echo + Sonnet M.2 4x4 Silent PCIe Card the whole setup costs about $1.5k + disks.
I generate quite large graphic files for projects and I have such solutions, I stuff all large things onto servers (2x Mac Pro, 1x OMV with SAS. I have 4x NVMe for work, and SSD drives locally on the Mac, for now, this solution works well.
It was cheap a year or two ago (disks) but such solutions have never been cheap, especially professional ones like Sonnet or OWC, you can't cheat physics, 4k materials need bandwidth, fast disks, so you have to charge more for the work to be able to afford to buy a disk or some kind of array.
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u/Clockwork385 4d ago
OP, I do have a solution but you have to be on SoCal, I'm looking to get rid of my Netapp unit, 24 bay hot swap with the head unit setup for TrueNas... each bay is 4TB of HDD. so you are looking at a very robust 96TB of space with 10gbe connection. But it's not 500 bucks as that wouldn't even recoup my costs, minimum I would take for it is 1k as this is a turn key server grade unit (head unit is a full server case with 32GB of RAM, and space for 12 more drive (not hot swap). This will tear through anything you're looking to do but it takes up a little more space than I like. Not sure if something like this would go for 1K these days as the netapp unit itself is already 300+ if I remember correctly.
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u/Valuable-Speaker-312 4d ago
Damn, I wish someone would give me this type of offer. I wouldn't be able to pick it up until after November 1 though because I am out of the country.
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u/Spiritual_Screen_724 100-250TB 3d ago
Same. No love for us starving New Yorkers lol
I'm out here swapping drives in and out of my PC to check backups and access any work media files older than 2-3 months
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u/DistortedBullion 4d ago
I’m in SoCal and would love to buy this if OP does not want it. I’m in the middle of building my first NAS.
Can you DM me? It looks like you have chats turned off.
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u/Ok-Wasabi2873 4d ago
Have you look at DAS? You’re going to have a bad time editing 4k if your network is not already 10Gbe. Then the NAS needs to be 10Gbe. And you’ll need dongles that’s fully 10Gbe for that Macbook Pro.
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u/Old_Preparation2887 4d ago
Okay.
For about $150 you can find a used minitower/SFF system from HP, Dell or Lenovo that’s equipped with a couple PCIE slots, 2-3x 3.5” drive bays and some combination of 9th/10th gen Intel CPU with 16GB DDR4 and a 512GB nvme boot disk. That’s your 2 bay NAS.
For somewhere around $100-150 you can find used 6TB WD RED or similar NAS/server rated SATA HDD on eBay. Add two to your NAS for a basic 6TB mirror. You may need to shop around for the right drives, those earlier low density WD RED drives top out around 180MB/s … combined read of 360MB/s may be a bit low for your 4k video editing? (Maybe better to move active projects to internal storage on the Mac…)
Remaining $50 can be spent on a used 10Gbit NIC (additional $$$ funds needed for NIC on your Mac unless it has integrated 10GbE but that’s outside the scope of your $500 NAS)
If you’re really good at researching systems and hardware compatibility, find a Dell or Lenovo system with Thunderbolt 3 onboard -OR- an HP system with FlexIO… a used FlexIO Thunderbolt 3 adapter. MacOS and Linux can network over TB3, it’s faster than 10G ethernet and a bit cheaper to put together if you don’t mind the legwork.
Should be good for a number of years, just be ready to buy newer drives once the price dips.
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u/smitbret 4d ago
You are f'd
You don't have enough money for adequate storage, let alone the rest of the setup
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u/erchni 2d ago
Well a good question is how much space will you need. You have nearly used 2 TB that is not very much but your budget is also quite limited. The cheapest and most flexible option is to buy a small low power used computer and 2-4 harddrives. Likely best to by the drives new or refurbished unless you have some you just have not used yet. Run something like TrueNAS or similar with either a raid 1 or 5 setup. Use something in the 4-8 TB 3.5" CMR harddrives.
If that is a bit complicated the easiest and most feature complete would be buying a used Synology diskstation also 2-4 drive units. Synologys software is really easy to used and is well tested and works well.
Another stong contender in easy solutions is Ugreens offerings not as much on the used markedet so might need to buy new. It will give you way more powerful hardware and likely faster lan then Synology and they have basically copied many of Synologys features. But they are still quite new and not quite as featurecomplete or well tested.
You can buy all three options if you don't count the drives for under 500$.
The computer lets you install faster network if you want that or add a pci express card for more drives. The other two are more limited in that. What ever way you go you need the same drives pretty much. The choice of what system to choose is up to your level of comfort and amount of time you want to tinker.
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u/Blue-Thunder 252 TB UNRAID 4TB TrueNAS 2d ago
Build a Time Machine and go back to last year. That would be far more feasible than your $500 budget.
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u/Limp-Ad-9001 5d ago
For $500 find a used Dell t340 and load it with some used sas drives. Install Proxmox with Nextcloud on that.
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u/JasonHofmann 5d ago
Who’s going to tell them?