Choosing between a portable hard drive and a dedicated NAS setup is one of those decisions that quietly shapes how much friction you deal with every single day of your creative work. If you've ever moved files between computers by unplugging a drive and carrying it across the room, there's a better way to handle it.
Coming to you from Anthony Gugliotta, this detailed video walks through exactly how a NAS (network-attached storage) works and why it might change how you manage years of photos, video, and raw files. Unlike direct-attached storage, where an external drive plugs into one machine at a time, a NAS connects to your router. That means your desktop, laptop, and phone can all see the same files without you touching a single cable. Gugliotta demonstrates this live in Lightroom, showing raw files being read directly from the NAS in real time, which is a pretty convincing proof of concept. He's been running his Lightroom catalog this way for years, and the workflow holds up.
One of the more practical takeaways early in the video is how Gugliotta handles RAID. He explains that RAID 1, the minimum recommended setup, mirrors two identical drives so that if one fails, your data survives intact. He's using Seagate IronWolf NAS-specific drives, which are optimized for the constant read/write cycles a NAS demands. Synology's Hybrid RAID takes this further, letting you start with two drives and add more over time without rebuilding the whole volume. That flexibility matters if you're not ready to commit to a fully loaded setup from day one. He also makes a point worth repeating: RAID is not a backup. It protects against hardware failure, not against accidentally deleting something or a ransomware attack. You still need a second copy somewhere else.
Gugliotta's own solution to offsite backup is creative and worth understanding. Rather than paying a cloud service, he's setting up his older Synology 6-bay NAS at his sister's house, where it will sync over the internet with his new 8-bay unit at home. He was previously using a cloud service, and after doing the math, realized that money was better spent building a second NAS. The new unit is a Synology DS1823xs+ (or similar 8-bay model) running around $1,100, and he recommends a rough 50/50 budget split between the unit and the drives. He also flags a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) as a near-essential add-on, not optional, since it protects the NAS from power surges and can safely shut it down and restart it during an outage when no one is home. For a lot of setups, that alone saves you from a very bad day.
The video goes deeper from there, covering RAM upgrades, NVMe SSD caching, and 10 GB Ethernet cards for demanding video editing workflows. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Gugliotta.
3 Comments
The person in the video getting a second separate NAS unit, shows the core issue of getting those types of NAS. Compared to a regular PC, a NAS appliance has an astronomical price markup. For example, that 8 bay NAS without any hard drives included, costs over $2000. The CPU is the AMD Ryzen V1780B, which is the AMD equivalent of an Intel Atom style CPU in terms of performance, but with a better GPU, and for its release date, it is slower than the slowest and cheapest available consumer retail CPU available from AMD (though in the case of a NAS, you do not need a super high end CPU to saturate a 10GbE network).
It comes with 8GB of RAM
With that in mind, $2000 if you do not need a separate PCIe video card, is essentially a high end PC, and without the DRAM price fixing issue currently going on, a few months ago, such a build would have 64GB+ of RAM.
Many motherboards will come with 6 or so SATA ports, and 3-4 m.2 slots.
While that may seem rather limiting, it is important to keep in mind that SATA expansion cards exist. If your case has many drive bays, then when you use up your 6 onboard SATA slots, you can get a 8x16, or even 32 port SATA card, and insert it into one of your PCIe slots, and now you have a bunch of extra SATA ports for more storage. and if you use up all of the ports on that SATA card, you can insert another card, or if your storage needs really skyrocket, you can grab an HBA card, and then look for a used server disk shelf (they tend to be pretty cheap since datacenters upgrade pretty quickly), and then easily get an additional 32-64 drive bays, and if your needs continue to grow, you can add more HBA cards and more disk shelves.
The only real benefit that NAS appliances offer, is a more user friendly setup, as synology has a more user friendly UI and setup wizard than TrueNAS scale.
Having the ability to add a large number of drives, has a wide range of benefits. You can gradually expand your storage pool little by little, e.g., every time there is a good HDD sale, you can grab an extra drive, and a PC makes that more viable as there is less pressure to delve deep into diminishing returns with trying to make due with limited ports by spending a massive amount of things like 28TB drives in 2026. You can have a vdev of a bunch of 8TB drives, and as pricing becomes less insane, you make another that is made up of 12TB drives, and you gradually expand each whenever there is a good sale, and just expand each and rebalance as needed.
Overall, you will have a far lower upfront cost, and over time, expanding will be cheaper, since for example, if you start with 8 drives, and you want to move to 16, then toy are essentially buying a $20 8 port SATA expansion card for the system, and then adding 8 more drives.
With Synology, their higher end model can use an expansion module which is effectively a mini disk shelf that can add 5 more drives, but it costs well over $500 which is insane, as they kind of money will get you a 48 extra drive bays if you go with used disk shelf or 2, and likely still have enough left over for a decent HBA card..
I've used Network Attached Storage at home for many years to ensure that my data - including all my digital photos - is safely backed up. After my first unit, a Synology DS 210J failed and lost all my data, my replacement Synology unit, a DS 220J, has also just catastrophically failed. Both contained two mirrored disk drives configured as RAID 1 but, in both cases, I've been unable to recover any of my data. Fortunately I have always used an external hard drive as an emergency back up and It's only that which has enabled me to recover what was meant to be safe on the Synology NAS.
So now I've had to buy a whole new setup, costing £600 (including a pair of NAS-specific Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB disks) and I'm in the process of setting this up. This time I've switched to an Asustor Drivestor 2 Gen 2 AS1202T, which has been well reviewed and has proved to be incredibly simple to setup and use, compared to Synology units which seem to assume that everyone is a computer and network nerd.
I acknowledge, of course, that this is only my experience and I've yet to see how well my new NAS would handle a drive failure but it feels like I've moved from the 20th century into the 21st.
If possible, avoid the the 2 bay NAS units. They are pretty much never worth the money, even from a convenience standpoint, All you can really do with them for redundancy is RAID 1, and it is hard to get much storage. Depending on the year and, you will often see a range of drives with different costs per TB, for example, for the last few years, the cost per GB was higher on 6TB and lower drives, with the lowest being on the 8TB drives (especially since those drives also went on sale most often), and a small increase at 12TB. The main exceptions are external drives that you can shuck to get out a larger capacity drive for cheap, but that carries risk since those drives often carry a 1 year warranty, Usually people who will use many of the external drives, will often do a bare minimum of a 2 drive redundancy since there is a higher chance of a drive failing.