Need advice on setting up new home NAS

English General
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been looking into getting a home NAS to serve as data backup and have all my media files in one place, ie: pictures, home movies, phone-recorded videos, music and so on.

I know I want to start with a four bay NAS system, running the QuTS Hero OS with a raid5, (or RAID-Z2?). However, I also want to make sure it is also running something I read about called checksums, scrubbing and whatever else needed to protect against bit rot. With all that, I want to keep the data organized by each family member, ie: myself, wife, children, my parents and so on.

Here are my questions:

  1. Is there some kind of easy to follow guide that can help me with setting up a new NAS to allow for everything I mentioned above?

  2. I’ve read that QuTS Hero OS is based on ZFS, but does it bit rot protection built in the same way it does raid?

  3. I’m planning on buying a Qnap NAS that can hold four drives to start with, and I want to set up with one drive as hot swappable, which type of raid should I use? RAID-5 or RAIDZ2? Something else?

  4. what about regularly monitoring drive health with something called S.M.A.R.T. tests? Is that part of Qnap’s OS or will I need a separate app for that?

  5. I’ll need suggestions on setting up security such as antivirus, firewall, data encryption and so on. Will I need to find separate apps for all of that? Or does some of those come bundled in with QuTS Hero OS??

  6. With regards to setup of data backups, protection and security, is there anything I missed?

Thank you ahead of time for all of your help people!

-Terry

2
  1. Scrubbing is described in the manual
  2. Tons of different opinions on the net about it
  3. Not sure what you mean ? All drives will be hotswappable up to the point your max parity is reached and your RAID collapses (RAIDz can have up to one drive swapped at a time, RAIDz2 up to two drives)
  4. Yes
  5. No need to sacrifice resources for that, simple rule: Never ever ever expoose your NAS to WAN. No need for antivirus and malware scans on the NAS (resource waste)
  6. Well, you need backups, a RAID is not a backup
3

@dolbyman’s answers are good. The biggest question is do you NEED QuTS. Some people feel bit rot is a real problem. QuTS has some self-healing features.

RAID5 allows you to have one drive fail. It’s what I use on both my NAS units. RAID and ZFS are two different things. ZFS is the drive format, RAID is the physical array of drives.

QNAP OS does a lot of monitoring and will alert you to issues.

As @dolbyman said - NEVER expose your NAS directly to the WAN. If there is some app that requires exposure, then do it in a container or pay $4 a month to run it on a VPS.

Backup, Backup, Backup - To another location locally as well as to the cloud. Have copies of your data in multiple places.

I would highly recommend an X86 based NAS. IMHO, get a NAS with as good a CPU as you can afford. I have 3 QNAPs. One has been upgraded to an i7. The NAS with the i7 is remarkably faster and easier to use than the other two. Only you can decide how large your budget is. But I would say away from ARM units and not buy the bottom end X86 unit.

Also, I would get as much RAM as you can afford. Don’t buy QNAP RAM. They say you need that. Bull-$*%@. You don’t. Just buy good RAM of the right speed and format from a name brand place (ie: Kingston, etc.). Don’t buy the cheap RAM.