What NAS for home use?
Discussion
Long post - TL;DR - I need to find a way to store 24-32TB of data at home and I'd like to find a cost-effective way of doing it without compromising reliability, speed and retention. 2-drive NAS and single PSU not an option. What do you do?
Longer version - I'm looking for a Network Attached Storage system for use at home. Prior to my mother's death last month, I bought a Sony A7RIII camera which is a 45MP full frame camera which was bought to record hours of video interviews (she had a fascinating life worthy of a film) and to take as many high quality photos of her as I could. Each raw photo is 40MB compressed and JPEGs aren't much smaller at 20-35MB. And 4K video is huge. So I now have a few TB of new data that I can no longer back up locally. This is in addition to the terabytes of photos, videos and virtual machines which I already had.
As an IT professional working on UNIX and Linux systems, I know how important it is to back up your data, and regular backups have saved me over the years on a few occasions. But they say that the cobbler always has the worst shoes, and it's very true in my case. I worked for many years for an American data storage software company and for me, reliable storage is via enterprise-grade SANs replicating between multiple sites, where each SAN LUN is backed by multiple physical disks in complex RAID configurations, where there are hot spare disks, as well as redundant fabrics, switches and PSUs. We also sold proprietary NAS software which could be installed on so-called commodity hardware, but this involved the use of multi-CPU servers with 256GB of memory and fibre interconnects attaching shelves of disks filling one or multiple racks.
And this is perhaps the source of my anxiety regarding this highly personal as well as irreplaceable data. Everything I can buy at a reasonable cost for a home or small business purposes seems woefully inadequate. I can't bring myself to spend money on a 2-bay home NAS, as if one of the disks fails, my data is immediately at risk. In addition, anything with a single PSU seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Not because I need 99.999% availability, but because if the PSU fails, it may or may not be possible to buy a replacement.
I haven't decided if I want to continue to store data locally inside my various machines, and just back up to the NAS, or if I want to use the NAS as primary storage. In the past I used to have an Iomega IX2-200 which constantly needed a disk resync, and was also so slow that there was no way you could use it as primary storage. But with the advent of higher speed processors, 10GB Ethernet and M2 SSD caching, perhaps that issue is no longer a problem.
In the absence of sufficient local storage, I'm spreading data across several machines as well as external USB hard drives, and then I'm trying to upload data to both Google drive storage and AWS S3 buckets for redundancy. But it's slow going and at the current rate, it's going to take a very long time to upload.
I currently have about 10TB of data and with capacity lost to RAID or erasure coding and at least one hot spare disk, I need 15TB of physical storage and that's without any room to grow. So I probably really need 24-32TB of physical disk space. I have a few ideas, all with pros and cons.
1. Stick with the cloud. Once the data is uploaded, my rate of generating new data will slow down and it won't take so long to upload new data.
2. Buy a dedicated Synology or QNAP NAS with at least four Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives, dual PSUs and maybe some M2 SSD cache.
3. Buy a used dual PSU enterprise-grade rackmount NAS made by the likes of Dell/EMC, NetApp, HPE or Netgear with a couple of spare PSUs and swallow the electricity bill and noise.
4. Build my own NAS from a storage server, some disks as above and some NAS software such as FreeNAS or some proprietary software I may happen to have sitting on disk, ironically using up space. If that ever fails, I am one of the best few people in the world who can fix it. But I still have to swallow the high cost of buying and running it as well as the noise.
So how do you store your irreplaceable data? Just on your computers, or do you back up to removable drives? A NAS? The cloud? I'm sure I'm overthinking things somewhat, but my decades of experience tell me that failing to prepare for disaster is the same as preparing to fail. Thanks for your thoughts!
Longer version - I'm looking for a Network Attached Storage system for use at home. Prior to my mother's death last month, I bought a Sony A7RIII camera which is a 45MP full frame camera which was bought to record hours of video interviews (she had a fascinating life worthy of a film) and to take as many high quality photos of her as I could. Each raw photo is 40MB compressed and JPEGs aren't much smaller at 20-35MB. And 4K video is huge. So I now have a few TB of new data that I can no longer back up locally. This is in addition to the terabytes of photos, videos and virtual machines which I already had.
As an IT professional working on UNIX and Linux systems, I know how important it is to back up your data, and regular backups have saved me over the years on a few occasions. But they say that the cobbler always has the worst shoes, and it's very true in my case. I worked for many years for an American data storage software company and for me, reliable storage is via enterprise-grade SANs replicating between multiple sites, where each SAN LUN is backed by multiple physical disks in complex RAID configurations, where there are hot spare disks, as well as redundant fabrics, switches and PSUs. We also sold proprietary NAS software which could be installed on so-called commodity hardware, but this involved the use of multi-CPU servers with 256GB of memory and fibre interconnects attaching shelves of disks filling one or multiple racks.
And this is perhaps the source of my anxiety regarding this highly personal as well as irreplaceable data. Everything I can buy at a reasonable cost for a home or small business purposes seems woefully inadequate. I can't bring myself to spend money on a 2-bay home NAS, as if one of the disks fails, my data is immediately at risk. In addition, anything with a single PSU seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Not because I need 99.999% availability, but because if the PSU fails, it may or may not be possible to buy a replacement.
I haven't decided if I want to continue to store data locally inside my various machines, and just back up to the NAS, or if I want to use the NAS as primary storage. In the past I used to have an Iomega IX2-200 which constantly needed a disk resync, and was also so slow that there was no way you could use it as primary storage. But with the advent of higher speed processors, 10GB Ethernet and M2 SSD caching, perhaps that issue is no longer a problem.
In the absence of sufficient local storage, I'm spreading data across several machines as well as external USB hard drives, and then I'm trying to upload data to both Google drive storage and AWS S3 buckets for redundancy. But it's slow going and at the current rate, it's going to take a very long time to upload.
I currently have about 10TB of data and with capacity lost to RAID or erasure coding and at least one hot spare disk, I need 15TB of physical storage and that's without any room to grow. So I probably really need 24-32TB of physical disk space. I have a few ideas, all with pros and cons.
1. Stick with the cloud. Once the data is uploaded, my rate of generating new data will slow down and it won't take so long to upload new data.
2. Buy a dedicated Synology or QNAP NAS with at least four Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives, dual PSUs and maybe some M2 SSD cache.
3. Buy a used dual PSU enterprise-grade rackmount NAS made by the likes of Dell/EMC, NetApp, HPE or Netgear with a couple of spare PSUs and swallow the electricity bill and noise.
4. Build my own NAS from a storage server, some disks as above and some NAS software such as FreeNAS or some proprietary software I may happen to have sitting on disk, ironically using up space. If that ever fails, I am one of the best few people in the world who can fix it. But I still have to swallow the high cost of buying and running it as well as the noise.
So how do you store your irreplaceable data? Just on your computers, or do you back up to removable drives? A NAS? The cloud? I'm sure I'm overthinking things somewhat, but my decades of experience tell me that failing to prepare for disaster is the same as preparing to fail. Thanks for your thoughts!
Lots of good independent advice on hardware and backup strategies on nascompares.com.
Synology usually do well in their tests.
Synology usually do well in their tests.
I use a 4 bay Synology at home. It currently replicates to a snapshotting (as a defence against cryptomalware) ZFS linux host at a friend's house and vice versa. Static material lives on encrypted USB external drives at work just in case.
I'd suggest going with a RAID level with a higher level of redundancy rather than a hot spare. With a hot spare and RAID 5 you have no redundancy until a hot spare rebuilds. With RAID 6 your disk consumption is the same as RAID 5 + hot spare, but there's no problem with no redundancy after a single drive failure.
Synology document migrating their drives to newer NASs (with fiddly requirements, read the documentation carefully before buying the first NAS), so I think your requirement for redundant PSUs isn't essential, and realistically you'd very likely be able to buy a replacement chassis on eBay.
I'd suggest going with a RAID level with a higher level of redundancy rather than a hot spare. With a hot spare and RAID 5 you have no redundancy until a hot spare rebuilds. With RAID 6 your disk consumption is the same as RAID 5 + hot spare, but there's no problem with no redundancy after a single drive failure.
Synology document migrating their drives to newer NASs (with fiddly requirements, read the documentation carefully before buying the first NAS), so I think your requirement for redundant PSUs isn't essential, and realistically you'd very likely be able to buy a replacement chassis on eBay.
For 'home' use, including your requirements, redundant PSU's for a NAS I'd say are somewhat OTT and massively limit your options.
I doubt you'll ever lose a power supply and if you do, replacements are easily available. I know for many generations they used the same one across each iteration of X-bay drive chassis.
Otherwise treat the appliance as 'disposable' and if/when the time comes, easy enough to migrate to a new device.
A 4-bay (or higher) Synology, set for SHR or SHR-2 (depending on your view on drive failures) with 'Cloud' backups going straight to BackBlaze, using their B2 Cloud Storage. You'll be hard pressed to beat them on cost and no requirements to lose the will to live with any AWS service!
I doubt you'll ever lose a power supply and if you do, replacements are easily available. I know for many generations they used the same one across each iteration of X-bay drive chassis.
Otherwise treat the appliance as 'disposable' and if/when the time comes, easy enough to migrate to a new device.
A 4-bay (or higher) Synology, set for SHR or SHR-2 (depending on your view on drive failures) with 'Cloud' backups going straight to BackBlaze, using their B2 Cloud Storage. You'll be hard pressed to beat them on cost and no requirements to lose the will to live with any AWS service!
I'm starting on a similar journey, need to get photos/videos etc somewhere safe. I went with the last option, on a budget as usual for me. Generic desktop PC, 5 off 2.5inch drives, quiet PSU and a fanless CPU cooler. Just got freenas installed and need to spend some time setting it all up. It's sat in the front room hidden behind the TV and isn't intrusive. If a drive fails I have a cold spare ready to go. If anything else fails then replacing with off the shelf pc parts shouldn't be a problem. Think I'm right in saying the data drives could be put into a different freenas machine if something happens to the motherboard. I have freenas on a small SSD separate to the data drives. I felt this would give me more flexibility to upgrade and replace parts than a dedicated NAS box, while not having the pricetag of the server/enterprise level hardware. I do recognise it probably has more risk of failing than the more expensive hardware.
For me the NAS is a convenient place to put everything, rather than backup. That is I'll probably end up moving data onto it from the phones/PC/tablet, rather than copying. Backup will be from the NAS onto a couple of USB hard drives, which I'll rotate. Will possibly also put some stuff onto a DVD as well. Isn't the guidance 3 copies, 2 different media's and 1 off site copy for backup? I'm trying to work towards that but not there yet.
For me the NAS is a convenient place to put everything, rather than backup. That is I'll probably end up moving data onto it from the phones/PC/tablet, rather than copying. Backup will be from the NAS onto a couple of USB hard drives, which I'll rotate. Will possibly also put some stuff onto a DVD as well. Isn't the guidance 3 copies, 2 different media's and 1 off site copy for backup? I'm trying to work towards that but not there yet.
If it's truly irreplaceable make sure you have lots of copies.
The best hardware redundancy in the world won't help you if you f
k up and press delete or if you get hit by ransomware and it all gets encrypted.
So assuming the priority is ensuring it always exists rather than ensuring that it is always available you could start off with a single NAS (Synology, QNAP, whatever) or maybe punch up to an entry level Enterprise server (Dell PowerEdge, whatever) with appropriate PSUs and RAID.
Then you have options around whether you want a replica in which case buy another one and have regular copy/sync jobs.
Look at options like AWS or Dropbox type storage for the "my house burned down and I lose both my highly redundant enterprise NAS boxes/servers" scenarios.
Maybe even tape or a couple of USB hard drives but those can be quite a time consuming manual process.
Ideally you want at least one copy on a shelf somewhere that literally can't be messed with unless you're in the room and physically do something with it.
Every so often I see people trying to do insane things like buy NAS boxes with RAID sets and "break" the RAID and keep one of the hard drives offsite thinking if the st hits the fan they can just plug it in and it'll be fine.
Don't do that
The best hardware redundancy in the world won't help you if you f
k up and press delete or if you get hit by ransomware and it all gets encrypted.So assuming the priority is ensuring it always exists rather than ensuring that it is always available you could start off with a single NAS (Synology, QNAP, whatever) or maybe punch up to an entry level Enterprise server (Dell PowerEdge, whatever) with appropriate PSUs and RAID.
Then you have options around whether you want a replica in which case buy another one and have regular copy/sync jobs.
Look at options like AWS or Dropbox type storage for the "my house burned down and I lose both my highly redundant enterprise NAS boxes/servers" scenarios.
Maybe even tape or a couple of USB hard drives but those can be quite a time consuming manual process.
Ideally you want at least one copy on a shelf somewhere that literally can't be messed with unless you're in the room and physically do something with it.
Every so often I see people trying to do insane things like buy NAS boxes with RAID sets and "break" the RAID and keep one of the hard drives offsite thinking if the s
t hits the fan they can just plug it in and it'll be fine.Don't do that
Firstly my condolences on the passing of your mother.
Strangely in another time I also worked in a US investment bank in the data storage field.
The first thing I would suggest is whatever nas solution you choose, choose one with solid integration with some off site backup storage like backblaze or aws, I belbackblaze is still significantly cheaper than the other competitors in this space.
Even the most redundant nas is a single point of failure in a fire, flood, theft situation.
Regarding the nas I suspect dual psu’s if backing up elsewhere isn’t need, as 24/7 availability isn’t critical in your situation.
I’d suggest it’s a choice between synology and truenas (freenas changed its name in 2019).
Recently synology started pushing its own branded drives, I believe this is currently only in its “enterprise” systems but it would be worth checking out any implications & restrictions before purchasing one.
I’d discount a four bay system as your data usage only has a 50% headroom with 16tb drives and raid5 and look at the 5-6bay options.
Or look at truenas core on domestic hardware which would be easy to repair in the event of psu/cpu/mb faults and I understand it is relatively easy to import drives into a new system if ever needed.
I wouldn’t worry about having hot swappable drives as drive replacement is a very infrequent occurrence which makes case choices wider.
Personally I wouldn’t go with a s/h server platform as it would likely use significantly more power, will definitely be significantly louder and be harder to accommodate physically.
Edit: given the resent press about qnap security breaches I’d not touch them with a barge pole.
Strangely in another time I also worked in a US investment bank in the data storage field.
The first thing I would suggest is whatever nas solution you choose, choose one with solid integration with some off site backup storage like backblaze or aws, I belbackblaze is still significantly cheaper than the other competitors in this space.
Even the most redundant nas is a single point of failure in a fire, flood, theft situation.
Regarding the nas I suspect dual psu’s if backing up elsewhere isn’t need, as 24/7 availability isn’t critical in your situation.
I’d suggest it’s a choice between synology and truenas (freenas changed its name in 2019).
Recently synology started pushing its own branded drives, I believe this is currently only in its “enterprise” systems but it would be worth checking out any implications & restrictions before purchasing one.
I’d discount a four bay system as your data usage only has a 50% headroom with 16tb drives and raid5 and look at the 5-6bay options.
Or look at truenas core on domestic hardware which would be easy to repair in the event of psu/cpu/mb faults and I understand it is relatively easy to import drives into a new system if ever needed.
I wouldn’t worry about having hot swappable drives as drive replacement is a very infrequent occurrence which makes case choices wider.
Personally I wouldn’t go with a s/h server platform as it would likely use significantly more power, will definitely be significantly louder and be harder to accommodate physically.
Edit: given the resent press about qnap security breaches I’d not touch them with a barge pole.
Edited by Captain_Morgan on Sunday 3rd April 11:56
bhstewie said:
hstewie said: So assuming the priority is ensuring it always exists rather than ensuring that it is always available you could start off with a single NAS
This all day long. It's always surprised me how many home users prioritise uptime with redundant disks, rather that multiple copies, in multiple formats, in multiple locations. This is far more important for personal memories.I would also suggest running all video through a tool like Handbrake, and pictures through something like ffmpeg to batch shrink them. You could store a lower quality version of everything in half a dozen places with very little effort.
alock said:
This all day long. It's always surprised me how many home users prioritise uptime with redundant disks, rather that multiple copies, in multiple formats, in multiple locations. This is far more important for personal memories.
I bother with at least one drive worth of redundancy simply because multi TB restores take a long time especially with lots of separate files, or if you're downloading from a remote service over say 100Mbit broadband.Thank you all SO MUCH for this information. I haven't come to any conclusions yet, but right now I'm tending towards the Synology DS1621+ for the following reasons:
6 Bays, expandable to 16 - 6 bays lets me run 6x 8TB Ironwolf or EXOS drives (4 for data, 2 for RAID6 parity data)
Ability to add 10GBE NIC - I don't have 10GBE yet at home but it could be useful in the future
Up to 32GB RAM - I imagine I'd stick with 4GB base RAM to begin with
Ability to add 2x NVMe SSDs - If I decide that I want to use it for primary storage in the future, this would be very handy
Ability to create iSCSI LUNs - VERY handy for my work
I'm not in a tearing hurry as I have two copies of everything somewhere now, but it's scattered over two old Thinkpad T420 laptops, a 2004-vintage self-built tower running Windows XP, a 2010-vintage self-built Windows 7 tower, my home daily driver, a 2008 Mac Pro tower, my old HP Z400 ESXi server, my work laptop, a 2021 Thinkpad X1 Carbon with 1TB SSD, various assorted external USB drives ranging from 400GB to 2TB, 5TB Google Drive and potentially limitless AWS S3. You can probably see why I'm keen to consolidate it. Much of it is static data which doesn't change, but all these old machines are bound to fail eventually. If not the drives, then the motherboards or the CPUs.
I don't burn things to DVDs or write to USB flash drives, as experience tells me that they can't be relied upon. Despite being mechanical, hard disks have proven to be my best bet - even the 320MB hard disk in my 30-year-old Amiga A4000 is still working fine, although admittedly it doesn't get a lot of use!
6 Bays, expandable to 16 - 6 bays lets me run 6x 8TB Ironwolf or EXOS drives (4 for data, 2 for RAID6 parity data)
Ability to add 10GBE NIC - I don't have 10GBE yet at home but it could be useful in the future
Up to 32GB RAM - I imagine I'd stick with 4GB base RAM to begin with
Ability to add 2x NVMe SSDs - If I decide that I want to use it for primary storage in the future, this would be very handy
Ability to create iSCSI LUNs - VERY handy for my work
I'm not in a tearing hurry as I have two copies of everything somewhere now, but it's scattered over two old Thinkpad T420 laptops, a 2004-vintage self-built tower running Windows XP, a 2010-vintage self-built Windows 7 tower, my home daily driver, a 2008 Mac Pro tower, my old HP Z400 ESXi server, my work laptop, a 2021 Thinkpad X1 Carbon with 1TB SSD, various assorted external USB drives ranging from 400GB to 2TB, 5TB Google Drive and potentially limitless AWS S3. You can probably see why I'm keen to consolidate it. Much of it is static data which doesn't change, but all these old machines are bound to fail eventually. If not the drives, then the motherboards or the CPUs.
I don't burn things to DVDs or write to USB flash drives, as experience tells me that they can't be relied upon. Despite being mechanical, hard disks have proven to be my best bet - even the 320MB hard disk in my 30-year-old Amiga A4000 is still working fine, although admittedly it doesn't get a lot of use!
I have a 4 bay Synology DS920+, currently with 2 WD Red drives in it, using Synology Hybrid Raid so I can add more disks later. Works well, the included Synology software is good, some reviews reckon the included software puts Synology ahead of QNAP.
I currently use it to backup 3 machines, have a house shared drive, mirror a folder from my PC, stream to Google TV via Plex, back the drive up to a portable USB drive, and have Home Assistant installed in a docker but haven't played with that much yet, Other than Plex and Home Assistant everything is using Synology's own software.
I currently use it to backup 3 machines, have a house shared drive, mirror a folder from my PC, stream to Google TV via Plex, back the drive up to a portable USB drive, and have Home Assistant installed in a docker but haven't played with that much yet, Other than Plex and Home Assistant everything is using Synology's own software.
I can't remember which now but I follow a photographer/videographer on YouTube who had this same problem - invest in something very expensive and power hungry (eg Dell PowerEdge 2U server with 8+ disks, RAID controller etc . . . and you'll need two of them, one in a remote location and a method to sync them) or think of something else !
He chose to use a standard NAS for every day things, so something like a Synology 6 or 8 bay system for day to day work, and for backups of customer data and things he can't lose, he uses a SATA disks in a disk dock, like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-10Gbps-Stand...
So he has an array of numbered 3.5" disks, varying in size based on what they need to backup (4TB to 8TB for example) but bare disks are quite cheap, even large ones. You have two or three or even four disks for each set of critical data and store them in different locations. So if your house burns, or is burgled, you still have multiple copies elsewhere. Just make sure if you encrypt the disks, you keep multiple copies of the encryption key in case your computer fails.
You only need high speed access to data locally that you plan editing and you can't edit the whole lot at the same time, so you ship in and out the data you need for the current month. You still have copies of everything stored either with your family, at work or in a bank safe or with a lawyers safe etc.
You can also if you like store a copy on AWS S3 glacier - it's not cheap but it is about as reliable as off-site backup gets and you will only ever recover it if all your other copies are destroyed, which is unlikely, so even though the cost of recovery is high, you'd be happy to pay it in that event.
And editing can be done on local SSD or if you have a PC/Mac with thunderbolt ports you can get very fast external NVMe SSD which will easily edit 4k video.
I do something similar with Lacie drives as I need less storage than he does, but again multiple Lacie d2 professional 10TB drives located on and off-site all labelled does the job with another backup on AWS of critical data.
He chose to use a standard NAS for every day things, so something like a Synology 6 or 8 bay system for day to day work, and for backups of customer data and things he can't lose, he uses a SATA disks in a disk dock, like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-10Gbps-Stand...
So he has an array of numbered 3.5" disks, varying in size based on what they need to backup (4TB to 8TB for example) but bare disks are quite cheap, even large ones. You have two or three or even four disks for each set of critical data and store them in different locations. So if your house burns, or is burgled, you still have multiple copies elsewhere. Just make sure if you encrypt the disks, you keep multiple copies of the encryption key in case your computer fails.
You only need high speed access to data locally that you plan editing and you can't edit the whole lot at the same time, so you ship in and out the data you need for the current month. You still have copies of everything stored either with your family, at work or in a bank safe or with a lawyers safe etc.
You can also if you like store a copy on AWS S3 glacier - it's not cheap but it is about as reliable as off-site backup gets and you will only ever recover it if all your other copies are destroyed, which is unlikely, so even though the cost of recovery is high, you'd be happy to pay it in that event.
And editing can be done on local SSD or if you have a PC/Mac with thunderbolt ports you can get very fast external NVMe SSD which will easily edit 4k video.
I do something similar with Lacie drives as I need less storage than he does, but again multiple Lacie d2 professional 10TB drives located on and off-site all labelled does the job with another backup on AWS of critical data.
I have a fair bit of data here now that I'd rather not lose. I use multiple 4-bay NAS devices (Netgear....would probably buy Synology if starting again) to give the volume I want.
I try and keep individual drive sizes down (currently have nothing bigger than 2Tb drives...bigger drives take longer to initialise when (not if) drives need replacing, and more and more eggs are being stuck in one basket with bigger drives). And I have (currently) one NAS unit in a different building for the *really* important stuff to be backed up to.
I therefore agree with those noting more bays/smaller drives. Think carefully about where and how you want to take copies/backups (NAS units do fail catastrophically...). And if cloud is working for you, factor it in (I'm not a fan personally, but that's an age thing
).
I try and keep individual drive sizes down (currently have nothing bigger than 2Tb drives...bigger drives take longer to initialise when (not if) drives need replacing, and more and more eggs are being stuck in one basket with bigger drives). And I have (currently) one NAS unit in a different building for the *really* important stuff to be backed up to.
I therefore agree with those noting more bays/smaller drives. Think carefully about where and how you want to take copies/backups (NAS units do fail catastrophically...). And if cloud is working for you, factor it in (I'm not a fan personally, but that's an age thing
).I'd also side with something containing proper CPUs - either that or something like 1-2 Drobos (like https://www.drobo.com/storage-products/b810n/) which in theory could support Syncthing across multiple locations.
Are you going to do processing over the network or are you looking for LUN targets or directly-attached storage?
Are you going to do processing over the network or are you looking for LUN targets or directly-attached storage?
Another Synology NAS user on a small home network. Then I use software on the NAS to replicate the more important files & folders to an S3 bucket in Backblaze that’s $4 per TB per month.
I ran a build your own NAS for a while but the sort of open source Xpenology software for it was far from perfect.
I ran a build your own NAS for a while but the sort of open source Xpenology software for it was far from perfect.
Tebbers said:
OP what’s your upload speed and are you in a town or countryside? What’s the likelihood of you getting full fibre soon? I got 200Mbps symmetric about 6 months ago and it’s been a game changer in terms of my backups and file storage. Likely more reliable and cheaper too.
Neither - I'm in that dreaded no-man's land known as Suburbia. I currently use Virgin's 200Mbps service, so that's basically 200Mbps down and 20Mbps up and in reality I get a 2.5MB/s upload speed. I could upgrade to their M500 product which would give me 500Mbps download and 35Mbps upload, which would give me around 4.0MB/s upload. But I already find M200 wildly overpriced, but my alternative is much slower FTTC from Openreach. Men did come round checking manholes and when I enquired who they were and what they were doing, they said that they would be installing full fibre in the next 6 months. I'll be moving in the next year or so, so it doesn't seem worth the bother.Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff