As an IT professional as well as a photographer, I believe every photographer should have a NAS (network attached storage). Whether it be a simple 2-bay device or a higher end 4+-bay device, they should be an essential part of your digital photography setup. Most will use them just as a form of backup. With multiple drives, they can be setup for redundancy, space, or a hybrid of both. This allows can allow for at the very least, a single drive failure without the loss of any data. Some NAS manufacturers have the ability to have a read/write cache – basically a separate set of solid state (very fast) NVMe drives that are used to be a first point of storage between the network interface and the slower spinning hard drives. This can allow you to actually work from the NAS, as opposed to an internal or USB attached external drive, with very little latency (lag). It can be especially useful when working with large files, such as RAW files from a Nikon Z9 for instance. While there are many companies that manufacture NAS’s out there, the best one, in my opinion is Synology. You can buy them as a barebones box with no drives or with all drives pre-installed; all you would need to do is configure it.
My setup is a Synology DS920+ 4-Bay NAS. I currently have 4x4TB drives installed in the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) to get the best speed, and storage out of the 4-drives while still having 1-drive fault protection. I also have 2x 480GB Synology NVMe drives configured for the read/write cache amd 8GB of RAM. With this setup I have 10.5TB of space and can actively work from it – opening large Photoshop PSD or even larger PSB files directly from the NAS. While I do work from in with basic documents or for things like Photoshop, I do not do any of my Lightroom work from it. For my photography, it’s strictly used as backup but in a pinch, I could access it securely off-site from my laptop with a good internet connection, and upload pictures to it if I needed to. From my NAS, if I wasn’t already uploading from to the Amazon cloud as part of my Amazon Prime subscription, I could also upload to other cloud storage services as another point of backup.
Synology truly has lots of features that can suit the needs of photographers, and not just for backup. They also have apps that can be installed on the device itself that allow you to share photo galleries to clients, or run a media server like Plex, run a Google Drive type sync (Synology Drive) between your NAS and desktop or laptop as well as make it a secure cloud device. Its proprietary RAID configurations makes drive swapping (for replacement or upgrade) very easy and they’re hot-swappable too (can be removed and replaced without shutting the device down).
So while I will certainly tote Synology as the best option, regardless of the model, any NAS is better than none. It can protect your data in a way that your computer may not be able to, especially if you use a laptop. Further, depending on how you access it, it may even protect you from certain forms of Ransomware should you be unlucky enough to get hit. There are options out there for every budget and I can assure you, even a high end model can be cheaper than sending a drive out for recovery – and that’s a sinking chest feeling you don’t want.
While I know that many may be hesitant to get one as they are afraid of getting the wrong device or don’t want to configure it improperly – that’s where I can help. If you have been considering getting a NAS as a photographer but don’t really possess the skills or have the time to learn how to set one up for you needs or even do the research to find the right one, feel free to contact me by going here or by emailing me at aaron(at)naturebytreadwell(dot)com. I can assist with the purchase and the setup of your new NAS going even so far as to set it up completely out of the back then ship it to you, plug and play ready.