Recommendations: RAID array for work station and NAS for home office

Ok, thanks. That help clear things up a bit.

Let's start with the RAID for your Mac. In this case, of course, any enclosure would need to support RAID. With only two drives, you are limited to either RAID 0 (performance) or RAID 1 (redundancy.) Since you mentioned RAID 1, I assume you know that your two 2TB HDDs will only effectively be 1TB for storage.

I'm also assuming you are using something like Time Machine (or equivalent) for backups. With RAID 1, your Time Machine backups are automatically mirrored. If one drive in the enclosure fails, your backup data is still safe on the other drive. The key is that the drive enclosure must support hardware RAID. You do not want to use macOS's software RAID for this.

I would suggest a RAID drive enclosure from OWC would be a good place to start.

As far as NAS, I am quite familiar with Synology's NAS devices. Alternately, another good source would be QNAP. The Synology website has a 'NAS Selector" to help you decide on which of their offerings will best suite your needs. Here, since you also only have two drives (at least to start with), you can decide whether to go with their 2-bay or 4-bay offerings.

One thing to note that was brought to my attention recently. With Synology's latest models, they are suggesting that you outfit them with their Synology-branded drives for the best performance. However, I'm not aware that that is a hard requirement so that you can use any manufacturer's drives.

Finally, let's look at your current drives. A few things I would like to advise you on, when it comes to what drives you should or should not use with a NAS.

They are:

• Basic Consumer/Desktop Drives (e.g., WD Blue, Seagate Barracuda) - Why? These drives are not designed for 24/7 operation or the high-duty cycles typical in a NAS.
• SMR Drives (Shingled Magnetic Recording) - Why? These are especially problematic in RAID configurations due to slow random write performance and long rebuild times.
• Drives Without NAS Firmware Features (No TLER/ERC) - Why? Drives lacking TLER (WD) or ERC (Seagate) will retry failed reads too long, causing RAID controllers or NAS systems to think they’ve failed.

I’ve used various Promise Pegasus direct-attached arrays, and Synology NAS arrays with macOS and Time Machine.

I’m usually running enough HDDs for RAID-6, though do have a two-bay Synology that was originally used as a prototype. Most of the HDDs involved are 8 TB, though variously larger.

Synology has a list of supported HDDs available.

Pegasus usually includes supported HDDs.

Whatever NAS you pick, make certain it offers Time Machine server support.

How fast your NAS Ethernet network needs to be depends on how much data you’re transferring, and how short your schedule. These days, I’d pick 2.5 GbE, or faster, and for Wi-Fi 6E or faster, if you’re pushing a lot of data with a short schedule. If your schedule is more leisurely, GbE and Wi-Fi 5 and later works fine.

I’d probably look to run a faster network connection and a bigger pool of NAS shared storage rather than NAS and direct-attached, if the MacBook Air is used as a portable. This avoids needing to physically connect to the local storage array, shares a bigger pool of storage among all potential uses, and means backups on portable Macs can run whenever in range of the local Wi-Fi.

PS and FWIW, the last two digits of most Synology products is the year of initial release, so an indication of how relatively old or new the particular product might be.

Tesserax wrote:

Ok, thanks. That help clear things up a bit.

Let's start with the RAID for your Mac. In this case, of course, any enclosure would need to support RAID. With only two drives, you are limited to either RAID 0 (performance) or RAID 1 (redundancy.) Since you mentioned RAID 1, I assume you know that your two 2TB HDDs will only effectively be 1TB for storage.

Two 2 TB disks in RAID 1 is 2 TB.

For the Synology policy:

”For users, this means that starting with the Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology’s own hard drives and third-party hard drives certified according to Synology’s specifications will be compatible and offer the full range of functions and support.”

”The use of compatible and unlisted hard drives will be subject to certain restrictions in the future, such as pool creation and support for issues and failures caused by the use of incompatible storage media. Volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic hard drive firmware updates will only be available for Synology hard drives in the future.”

Buying the Synology HDDs is one less thing to deal with. (Apple does something similar with most Macs.)

To be able to assist you towards a solution, I do have a few questions if you don't mind:

• Just to be sure, are you planning on only using the HDDs that are available to you, or are you planning on getting additional ones to meet your overall goals?
• Also, just to be sure: Are you looking for two separate solutions: 1) A drive enclosure that supports RAID for your Mac laptop, and 2) A NAS for your overall network? Or a single solution for both?
• What is your price ceilings for both the RAID enclosure and the NAS?
• For both, what is the maximum amount of HDDs do you want them to support?
• Why are you interested in using a RAID configuration for either or both?
• For RAID, what RAID type are you most interested in setting up?
• What will be the primary use for each? Storage, backups, media server, etc.?

Based on your responses to these, we will have a better idea on what potentially could work for you.

I’ll 2nd the Synology option.

I recently purchased and setup a 5-HDD, RAID-6 unit; nominally to replace a failed Time Capsule. (My only MBP backup)

I urgently needed to re-backup my “work” MacBook prior to departing on an extended overseas trip; getting the NAS’ basic setup completed and “Time Machining” quickly was straightforward with only a few hours of studying beforehand. (Mostly to learn Synology’s terminology)

While FAR more capability than what was needed just for the Mac backups, I have a long-developing wish-list other uses for which the NAS will be used.

MrHoffman wrote:

Two 2 TB disks in RAID 1 is 2 TB.

Doh! You are absolutely correct! All that calculus in college gone to waste ...

Thank you for the correction.

Their videos are quite good at introducing the wide range of capabilities of their products.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/video?type=DSM