New
#1
Recommendations for personal NAS?
So, soon I'll be looking to buy a NAS box with RAID. First off, I have no experience with RAID and exceedingly little with NAS, so some pre-assembled thing would be good rather than having to set it up myself.
Currently, I have one powerful desktop Windows 7 machine, and Android phone, a WP7 device, and an iPod touch. In the near-ish future, the situation will be the same powerful desktop PC, a different Android phone, an iPhone 5, and a MacBook Air (I'll buy the MBA when it's updated, likely within a few months). So it would be useful to be able to access media files on all those devices, but most crucially the two computers.
What I need is to be able to store around 4TB of data in one area, with a backup. To my understanding, this means I'd need an 8TB NAS box with a certain RAID configuration? Basically I seem to have bad luck with HDDs, so I want my stuff backed up (and dislike online backup solutions). In the desktop PC I'll be putting in an SSD as the C drive, which will contain Windows and Program Files (including Steam and iTunes library), but nothing else. On the NAS box I would like to put all my TV shows, movies etc., basically all of my video content. The box would be for my personal use and I don't particularly need to access the videos when out of the house, so really I want a quiet and easy to configure NAS solution. I think I've seen some 6TB ones around online, but 6TB isn't really future-proof, considering it'd work out at 3TB total space. Also, I'm not made of money, so as nice as those shiny LaCie business solutions would be, they're not really cost-effective in my case.
(one query, how would it work? Like, would it show up in Windows Explorer as a 4TB HDD, and whenever I put something on it it duplicates it onto two of the drives?)