Hi! I have a NUC with 250GB SSD inside. It’s running everything from pihole through arr apps to 3d printing frontend. Since my family is starting to think “hey that’s a good idea can I use it too”, 250GB is starting to be not enough.
Do you have any recommendations? A NAS? A DAS? Something else?
For now, I’m downloading and deleting shows/movies cos I don’t have space obviously, but eventually I’d like to keep some that are cool. Or backup photos to it and stuff.
Thanks :)
There is one thing to watch out for called SMR and CMR technologies. CMR is the classic tech, SMR a recent one. SMR makes the tracks on the HDD platters overlap, allowing the manufacturer to pack more data on them, and to use fewer platters. But it comes at the cost of writing performance, basically SMR drives will take long pauses every once in a while when writing large amounts of data.
You don’t want a SMR drive for a 24/7, instant access drive so you’ll have to watch out for this spec. SMR is ok for a cold backup drive because it doesn’t matter, you leave the backup program to do its thing however long it takes and you disconnect when it’s done. But you don’t want to take a long break while you’re doing something with your main live drive.
Other than that anything from Seagate, WD or Toshiba will be ok. People will swear by one or other of these brands but it’s pretty much the same.
This page will tell you if a drive is SMR or CMR by the model number: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/
Awesome, thanks!