NAS advice needed

And big (relatively). I'm looking for something less than 25% of that form factor.

 

Ham, how are you liking your WD My Cloud? If you've been successful, I might just follow your lead.

 

It has been working well. I've had it in and out of the system as I figure out how best to deal with it. I've been trying various things. Still experimenting with how I'll organize files on it and experimenting with how I'll back it up. I need to be comfortable with how I'll be managing it before I commit to it. I also need to experiment with what it will be like to do a full restore from backup before committing to it as something that will hold all of my real data. So I'm taking my time.

File management and transfers do need a gigabit wired connection to get speed that I consider good. 5 GHz wireless is only like slow USB 2 speed. Lesser wi-fi is even slower. So make sure you can do wired gigabit for any serious file transfers (like copying files to the NAS and for backups and such).

 

I set up a FreeNAS box last year. It's not as easy to set up and administer than the NAS units aimed at consumer markets, but none of the consumer grade NAS devices that I know of support ZFS. If you value data integrity, ZFS is the way to go.