I did technical support for Iomega's NAS boxes in a previous life. And yes, they found ways to destroy your data outside of ZIP drives. Budget NAS appliances seem like a good idea until they warranty bomb, but generally they do what's on the tin and are a great way to store and serve up data on your local network. If you're going with one appliance and 2 4 TB drives, I'd recommend to set it up as RAID 1 and backup the NAS elsewhere. You're only getting 4TB of space that way, but at least there's internal redundancy in the device in case a drive fails and you can move the drives to a new appliance in case that fails.
I don't use a NAS at work (IT would murder me) but I do use a RAID 1'd USB 3.0 device that's locally connected to a PC, and sync that with AWS Glacier.
R.C. Miessler | Digital Initiatives Librarian
Gettysburg College | Musselman Library
300 North Washington Street | Gettysburg, PA 17325
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-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries <CODE4LIB_at_LISTS.CLIR.ORG> On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2026 11:35 AM
To: CODE4LIB_at_LISTS.CLIR.ORG
Subject: [CODE4LIB] nas -- network-accessible storage
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As I may have alluded to previously, this is the time of year when I routinely curate the past year's data/files. This process almost always includes applying the same process to the previous years' data/files.
This year's solution to my curation issues is/was "cold block storage". I have been playing with Digital Ocean's implementation. So far I have only uploaded 400 GB of data, and the estimated costs will be about a $1/month Wow!? In the end though, I may have about 4TB of data, and to some degree, I will want to access/churn it, which is not amenable to cold storage. What's more, when it comes to cold cloud storage, I do not really own my own data/files because they are "over there".
I am now very serousluy considering NAS -- network-accessible storage. A NAS is essentically an appliance. It is a set of hard drives literally wrapped in hardware with proproetary operating system used to do I/O, provide access control, implement file transfer protocols, and to some degree, analyze the saved data. I could build my own, but then there is the convenience factor.
In the end, I think I will buy a UGreen DH2300 and two 4TB drives for a total cost of about $400. This ought to be plenty of storage space and allow me to own my own data. I will probably continue to put stuff into cold storage, just in case.
Do you have experience with NAS? Seems like a very good idea for library archivists.
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Eric Morgan <emorgan_at_nd.edu>
Received on Fri Jan 23 2026 - 11:51:54 EST