Hello,
I am a professional photographer managing roughly 40 TB of RAW files and video files. For the last 10 years I have been working with an OWC thunder bay 4 drive bay. I have 1 hd for my raw files and second drive that backs up that drive every night. I have the same set up for my video files. I have a separate 2 bay drive that my wife keeps at her offsite office. She brings that home every other week and I back up my raw files and video files and then it goes back offsite to her office. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for my automated back ups. This system has worked fine for me. I am about to invest in some larger hard drives and I’ve started researching setting up a NAS. The big reason is that I like the synology raid software and active data (bit rot) monitoring. The ability to have my files on a network would be nice but presently I wouldn’t need it more than once or twice a year. In the future if I start doing more video work I may start to use the network file sharing more. I am currently working on a 27" 5k iMac with 10gig ethernet built in. I could easily set up a 10gig ethernet line to my router and iMac. So my question is it worth going through the expense and time to set up a Sinology NAS if my priority for networked storage is low? Do the other features that a Synology system offer make it worth it? Thanks,
Nas would be the way to go. Mainly from the flexibility. Like Docker many photo labs use. And there is redundancy in NAS. DAS. Unless you have a spare drive/s around to make copies all the time. It pretty much just sits there as a plain old drive. From my customer base. Alot of photographers setup Docker with Synology. Or if you want to build your own system with like FreeNas. But in Docker you can setup a container that allows your clients to review pictures you have done. Like say a wedding you did recently. And they can have a login to view the ones they want to keep. PLEX also can do something like this for shares you can grant. Now. If anything crashes from the NAS side. Like hopefully not the full system. But a drive that goes bad. You can just replace it, and your data is still there always. Nothing wrong with DAS either. It really depends on what you want for flexibility for your clients. If this is just for you alone. DAS is not bad for that.