I’ve been using a cloud hosting provider under sync.com, great for actively syncing my files between machines I might be using as well if I wished to have any employees’s later on as I was paying close to £30 a month I decided that it was best to self-host my files even if it was just by 10TB Hard Drives that only cost £200 each on Amazon (They are just USB External Ones).
I hope to be able to host my own NAS in the Future once my home office is complete (As we are currently painting and decorating the room) but well transferring all my files from my web-host I’ve been waiting over 7 days for the files to re-sync up to my PC for me to transfer each one into a new drive, it is painful and I can’t wait to be able to remove myself from the service in the near future.
Has anyone else had similar experiences with Cloud-hosting before?
Dude, all those cloud services are tough to get data out of. That’s why a lot of them charge an arm and a leg to have it mailed to you on physical media.
If those disks are the big plastic WD externals, they can be easily shucked and used in a NAS—much cheaper than buying the bare drives without the casing for reasons known only to WD. I have 80+ TB across 5 shucked drives, and the oldest has worked perfectly for over 6 years of heavy 24/7 use.
They’re cheaper because WD externals are usually bottom of the barrel drives that failed to pass muster for their other offerings. I would exercise caution when relying on them. Source: friend who works at WD doing drive validation.
That may be true, but I have had nothing but reliability from mine. Hell, there was one with a broken plastic SATA pin support and bent pins, and that thing still worked and tested fine for 3 more years.
As with all things, results may vary, but if you have a decent backup of your most important files, they are still the best bang for your buck to get a huge amount of storage, imo.
@Molecular0079 I’ll keep that in mind, I hope to more use them for Cold Storage Purposes for my old Video Edits. I hope to create a NAS in the future what I will most likely pay out for these more Pricy drives that are made for 24/7 use.
SSDs are coming down drastically in price so depending on when you create your NAS, you might want to consider NVMe SSDs instead of HDDs for the performance and power savings. I just bought 4x 4TB MSI Spatium’s and put them into a self-built NAS with ZFS raidz1 and I couldn’t be happier. It takes only 2 hrs to scrub 8TB worth of data.
HDDs are starting to become obsolete and I am honestly here for it. I think in the future SSDs will start to become much more economical. Currently they’re still 2x the price of an equivalent NAS grade HDD, but that’s better than the 4x just two years ago.
@Molecular0079 I will probably use SSDs for my working storage (As it helps to have speed) but when it comes to Cold Storage / Long Term Storage due to the price of an SSD compared to an HDD I think it would be easier HDD as well as there’s some statistic I saw before about how HDDs last longer than SSDs, this might have changed in recent years but unless SSDs get cheaper per TB than HDDs I’ll have to probably use a mix for speed and size.
@WeirdGoesPro Yeah it’s one of the reasons I hope to self-host, I’d rather know what my data is being used for but also it will be cheaper in the long run. I will have to look into the drive things you where saying about as I don’t know how to self-host on a NAS and really would love to move to a NAS in the future.
It’s so easy that you’ll never go back. There are options depending on what you want to do too. I primarily store entertainment media, so I ran a simple Ubuntu Server for years with cockpit installed so I could easily mount and manage drives and PLEX to serve the media. It got me hooked, and worked flawlessly.
I have since become more ambitious and run ProxMox with an Open Media Vault VM to serve the media through NFS to other VM’s. My experience with Open Media Vault has been that it is a bit more complicated than my previous setup, but has resulted in a lot more flexibility with how I can access the data from multiple computers.
I will warn you though that the collecting can get addicting. It’s always easy to justify adding just one more drive to the system, and they get cheaper and bigger every year.
@WeirdGoesPro Thanks, yeah I’m a video editor so I go through a lot of media files and will always need to call back to previous work this is why I need such large Drives as the average joe doesn’t really use more than 1TB as I can easily fill that up with only a few Projects. I have an old PC that I put Ubuntu on a year or so back to try out Linux, Personally have to use Windows due to using the Adobe Suite but if I can have my files stored on there and move/access them from my other PC that would be amazing.
Luckily I will be able to test the theory of this out shortly as I will have access to my home office soon with it almost finished being decorated, can’t wait to see what I can do and will probably put some updates on this Community.
Moving your files back and forth should be no problem, especially if you have a decent router. Local networks are freaky fast these days, and are often only limited by the read/write speed of your disk.