What is the recommended number of LAN ports for NAS? Is one sufficiently good enough?
Is it better to choose NAS with SSD or hard drives for NAS are robust enough compared with those made over 10 years ago?
I'd say the answer is impossible without more information. What is your current home network setup? One "big" network? VLans for segregation of management or users? How much data will you store? How much read/write performance do you need?
As above, need more information.
My experience with Time Machine Backups on QNAP and Synology is not good. They run for a while, then get corrupted and have to be restarted from scratch. They are also very, very slow, even for incremental. Be careful with the backup solution you choose.
The number of ports you need is dependent upon your network bandwidth, network capabilities, amount of data that you will be transferring, etc. Note that 1 GbE at its best will only give you around 800 Mbps transfer rates. This is probably close to the write capacity of NAS with a few disks, but considerably less than a NAS with more (say 4 or over) drives in a RAID configuration. Port aggregation (if your NAS is connected to a switch and the switch supports it) will allow give you greater throughput, but won't increase your transfer speed. Once a transfer is started it is usually bound to a specific port and is limited by that ports speed. However a 2nd user can start a transfer and if it is bound to the 2nd port then they will limited by that specific ports speed. Without aggregation the bandwidth from one port would be split between the two transfers, cutting them in half (theoretically).
If you get a NAS with say, 10 GbE, then you don't get this problem until you get a lot of users since there is a ton of bandwidth available to be shared. This does, however, require upgrading your network which can be expensive. There have been a number of posts about using 2.5 or 5.0 Gbe ports, but I don't see much future in them. Maybe more cost effective now, but my guess is that 10 GbE will be the standard in X number of years.
For NAS type stuff (bulk storage of non-hot data) spinning disks are fine and much cheaper to get the capacity with.
SSDs actually fail in a nastier manner than hard drives (at least hard drives start failing, making noise, etc. before totally dying - SSDs effectively just disappear if they fail - there's often no warning), and hard drives are cheap enough that getting 2 in a mirror is not cost prohibitive.
Agree. I have lost count of the hard drives that have failed on me, but it doesn't bother me. There are utilities can give you a picture of drive health so you can be warned of potential problems. If you look at the BlackBlaze drive statistic reports drives have gotten a lot more reliable, especially in the last couple of years. SSDs can have an estimated lifetime that is 1/10 of a hard drive (extreme case). Not worth the expense for this use, particularly since their speed is no advantage due to the bottleneck of your network speed.
