I’ve been amassing a small city of external hard drives on my desktop to house my RAW photographs and processed photographs. But it occurred to me recently, that
- They need better organization
- These back up hard drives don’t need to be running all the time
- I should be storing a backup drive in my fire proof safe or in another location
Right now I have back ups but not if the house burns down or floods.
So I decided to get a couple of these small passport drives. These Western Digital drives are available in sizes up to 5TB and are very small and portable.
Next Level Back Up
The next step is to install a NAS or Network Assessable Storage. Basically a small computer running hard drives that will not only provide storage but automatic RAID backup and serve as a Jellyfin media server.
I did my research and settled on a two bay (for future expansion) NAS by Asustor AS5402T.
These middle range NAS devices are so much more than a hard drive holder. They are basically computers with processors, memory and an OS to run apps for managing and serving files.
- Quad-Core 10 nm Intel Celeron N5105 CPU
- 4x M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs
- 4 GB of DDR4-2933 RAM
- Dual 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet ports
- 3x USB 3.2 Gen 2 at 10 Gbps
- Aesthetically pleasing M.2 SSD heat dissipation thermal vents
- Supports Wake on LAN and Wake on WAN
A two-bay back up drive can be set to RAID 1 in which one hard drive will automatically mirror on to the second drive.
These NAS drives typically come diskless, so you have to buy SSD or HDD hard drives for them.
I need at least 8 terrabytes currently to house all of my RAW photos as well as processed versions and video clips. I found some Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 12 terrabyte hard drives on sale so I figured I might was well plan for future expansion.
The Seagate Iron Wolf Pros are available in sizes from 3 terrabyes to 20 terrabyes. IronWolf internal hard drives are the ideal solution for up to 24 bay, multi user NAS server environments that demand powerhouse performance and provide a NAS hard drive that provides ultra high capacity 14TB and speeds up to 250MB/s.
