How I replaced my home NAS to "the ultimate NAS" for just $500 total including drives

My QNAP NAS experienced multiple HDD disconnected errors. Time for an upgrade! For under $500, I have a system with 4 hot-swap 3.5" bays, 64GB, 24 cores, dual power supplies and dual 12TB drives.

I was able to configure a NAS with 12TB of disk, power, and redundancy for just $500. It doesn’t look anything like this though!

As a professional misinformation superspreader, data is my lifeblood. So losing TBs of storage can be disconcerting.

I always keep 3 copies of my data at all time:

1. the original data,

2. a local backup on my NAS, and

3. a cloud backup of all key files.

Recently, my local backup (a QNAP NAS) revealed a glaring bug in the QNAP software: random software disconnects from the HDD.

Time for an upgrade to something more reliable and flexible than Synology or QNAP.

My new system has 4 hot swap 3.5" bays, 64GB RAM, 24 cores, dual power supplies, and 12 TB of disk (in a mirrored configuration). It fits in a 1U rack.

How did I do it for just $500 (including the software), especially when the list price on just the disk drives alone is $600!!

If you are a paying subscriber, I’m going to tell you how I performed this miracle and what software is running on it and what I use for inexpensive cloud backup of my data.

If you are not a paying subscriber, this article could save you a ton of money and your subscription helps to support our work exposing the corruption regarding the COVID response.

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