NAS for photographer/creative professional- cheapest 10gbe NAS

Hi. I am a photographer/creative professional who works primarily with Adobe Lightroom on a late 2013 iMac. I also dabble in video (little bit of 4K video editing). I am new to the NAS game, and have recently put together the following setup: Synology DS218+ with 2x Western Digital Gold 4TB hard drives (setup in synology hybrid raid configuration). I backup my local files and current projects to the Synology via Time Machine, and then backup the Synology with an offsite HDD and also into the cloud with BackBlaze.

I really like this setup, but the biggest problem I have is that Adobe Lightroom is not able to edit photos from the network drive. I think I may need a 10 Gbe connection (which I don’t even know if my mac has) or a thunderbolt setup. But I really don’t want to pay >$1000 just for the NAS device. Do you have a good solution for me, or a couple tips?

The very cheapest option is TS-251B (or TS-253Be if you have more budget) which features the same CPU as DS218+ but has two LAN ports for multi-user environments. But most importantly – it has PCIe slot for 10GBE. This will mean so much faster bandwidth. You can get a cheap 10gbe adapter for Thunderbolt port and connect it directly.

It will also do any other task you need, like easy offsite backups, cloud backups, and local folder synchronization, and much much more.

  For backing up your NAS do consider BackBlaze. You can try it for 15 days free if you don't believe its good. But the main reason is unlimited backup size. Everyone else like Dropbox, Amazon, and others charge per gigabyte. But  with this one there is no price difference either you backup 2 bay or 8 bay NAS. The other great feature is version control. So even if you get hit by ransomware type of virus or simply deleted or mistakenly changed few files. You can restore your data from historical backup versions and get all data back.
You can get it for free here and try:
Home: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9rgr
Business: https://www.backblaze.com/business-backup.html#af9rgr
Comparison with other service providers: https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html#af9rgr

 

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Home: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9rgr Business: https://www.backblaze.com/business-backup.html#af9rgr Comparison with other service providers: https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html#af9rgr