I’m considering building a NAS (Network Attached Storage), primarily for photo backup.
Over the last few years, I’ve gotten into photography, but I’ve been stalled in my progress.
The root issue is that while I enjoy taking pictures – composing and framing them – I don’t enjoy editing them nearly as much.
It’s ultimately a problem of organization; I simply don’t have enough storage space.
Once I get going on culling my photos, it’s not so bad, but I’m not quick about it. So the problem recurs.
Effectively, I need to be more ruthless in getting the pictures off the SD cards and onto one of my computers’ hard drives. But I don’t delete the bad photos quickly enough, which causes them to accumulate on the active hard drives.
This issue came to a head on the 2024 JoCoCruise. I once again took far too many photos, and they filled up my hard drive, which meant I couldn’t transfer any more pictures from the SD cards.
I then became concerned about losing pictures, both those I’d culled and edited, and those I hadn’t looked at yet.
Eventually, I lost track of what I had processed and what I hadn’t.
So, I need a better system.
But I can’t implement that without more storage space.
Hence, the NAS.
I could buy an off-the-shelf unit, but I wasn’t thrilled with their price points, despite the advanced organization features they offer. I’ve never been great at adhering to someone else’s organizational principles, and it would require a bunch of additional research to get started.
So, I’m building one myself and will likely install TrueNAS or HexOS.
I just want something that I can expand if needed, without having to rely primarily on the cloud. Ultimately, anything truly worth keeping will also be archived in the cloud, but I hope to keep that dataset minimal.
I’d be more tempted to buy something pre-made, but I’ve heard that they often don’t include powerful CPUs. I happen to have a 3700X just lying around since I upgraded my gaming PC.
Overall, I’m looking at some refurbished 20TB drives and the JONSBO N4 case. That will provide plenty of space for additional drive upgrades while still being compact. It shouldn’t be too tough a build; without a GPU, the power and airflow needs should be minimal. I’ll need a different low-profile CPU cooler, but everything else is dwarfed by the drive costs anyway, so that’s fine.
I’m planning to use a double-parity setup for the drives. With four drives, much of the capacity will be used for overhead, but each additional drive should provide nearly its full capacity. I don’t anticipate needing that anytime soon, at least.
Considering each RAW + Fine JPG pair takes up around 120MB, it will take me a long time to reach that capacity, so I’m feeling pretty confident about having minimal rebuild risks.
With this setup, I should be able to unblock myself from clearing out my existing SD cards and establish a proper workflow to finally process my photos.