The Ugreen DXP2800 will be located in every bedroom to give every member of the family a personal NAS system for them. While I could go with a single NAS for everyone, it might make more sense to offer a larger capacity with their LAN drive even if they reduce the amount of backup storage they will have. Also, the specs are lower, but it also comes with a better price in the long run. The system will be a 2 bay NAS, but will also have 2NVME slots for their drive. With that said, there will be 8 NAS systems 4 for the members of the family, and the other 4 will function as a backup to the primary NAS. This will increase the redundancy even if price goes up. Each system will cost about $6,000 which while high for the specs, it will be enough to serve the needs of the family member. The specs are as follows:
- CPU: Intel N100 quad core CPU
- RAM: 16GB
- OS Drive: 32GB eMMC running UGOS Pro
- NVME: 2×8TB (RAID-1)
- Backup: 2×32TB (RAID-1)
- SD Card: Yes
- Ports: 1 USB3 Gen2, 1 USB-C3 Gen 2, 1 USB3 Gen 1, 2 USB2, HDMI (4K, 60hz), 2.5GB RJ45.
I am not a fan of Intel, but the CPU will hopefully be sufficient enough for a NAS that is just for one person. Each member of the family will receive a DXP2800. This will make the systems more personal and more included with the needs of the family member. Since this is intended for 1 person, the 16GB of memory should also be sufficient. The 32GB OS drive is pretty small, and limiting in what it would be able to do, but if the member was to do what I would do, then they will have the 8TB drive as their virtual drive, and the 32TB drive as the backup drive, so they won’t need to worry as much with the lower RAM.
The fact that there is an SD card reader, the member of the family could have a digital camera, and store the photos taken onto an SD card, then SD card will then import their photos to the system. This could be an alternative from needing an external SD card reader on their computer. And since the files will import to the 8TB drive, they will have a much faster speed when editing the photos or videos. The various USB ports will allow for adding of external drives, but this will add to the complexity as well. They could also choose to use it as a personal media server if they should wish to do that. The HDMI port will allow for viewing of content. This might be a reason to using a USB3 port.
Role
The role is simple, and that is to provide as nearly complete LAN NAS solution as possible. With a software install, the 8TB storage can function as an online drive much like you would find from Dropbox, iCloud, or OneDrive. 8TB might even be larger than the drive inside of the computer which is still fine. This will allow you to offset files that you don’t need to access all of the time, and increase the virtual capacity of your computer’s drive. The 32TB hard drive will function as the back-up drive. This in turn will allow you to back your computer up, and make sure that your system can be recovered if something was to happen to your computer. You will likely need to keep the current OS for everything to work properly, but this shouldn’t be a problem if the failure was unexpected.
In my instance, the computer I would have bought will have an 8TB SSD installed into the PC. The 8TB drive that I would have in the NAS will be used to offload files that I would not need immediate access to. This will include the letters I wrote to other people. This will also allow me to have a second drive that the computer can access and use. With that in mind, I might also use this drive for storing files that I have downloaded from the internet. This will assure that I would have multiple instances of my files, and resources. The 32TB drive will become my Time Machine backup. This is more than sufficient as the Time Machine drive will be 4 times the capacity of my computer’s drive. Yes, I know 4 times the capacity of the drive is over-kill, but it would still be used exclusively as a Time Machine drive. Apple recommends that the Time Machine drive should be used exclusively for backups and nothing else. I would imagine that I would be able to split the drive into 2 pools, but this will only be a slower drive when compared to the 8TB NVME drive that is in the NAS.
For Linux, a premium backup software is Time Shift. MacOS, it will be Time Machine. In Windows, it is Windows File History. In all three instances, assume that they backup your personal files, and not your entire drive. For that to work, you would need to clone your system. Still, there are sufficient options, and since every family member will have their own 32GB backup drive, they should be able to assure that their personal files is always safe, and backed up.