You are right, but just recalculate with 8 TB drives (more modern, quite cost effective) and 3 disks at minimum (RAID5) and you reach $600 for ~ 14 TB usable and safe storage. Add a CPU, MB, RAM and you reach $1000.
Can't you just plug an external HD into your existing wifi router's USB port to make it into NAS and invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures?
A dedicated NAS is useful, if only for keeping hard drives together. Any good NAS build will be primarily hard drives for your cost.
5TB to 8TB hard drives are cost-efficient in my experience. 6x 8TB Hard Drives for 24TB of storage (RAID1 like redundancy. Use ZFS btw) is $1200 (~$200 per 8TB hard drive).
> invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures
What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives.
Having 1Gbps or even 10Gbps (local "fiber" with Direct Attached Copper) connections locally is relatively cheap. And it seems like 10Gbps is getting cheaper.
Accessing a hard drive, even a sped-up RAID set of drives, over 10Gbps is going to have the same bandwidth as a local SATA connection. (SATA is only 6Gbps). Your NAS is practically a "local drive" at that point.
> What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives.
It's a media archive. As long as you can recover specific files on demand, it doesn't really matter if it takes two months to download the entire thing.
