I’ve been upgrading my data storage

For a while now I’ve been thinking about upgrading my data storage option. For several years I’ve been using a Western Digital Home Cloud drive. Which when it first came out was quite an advanced option giving browser access internally to my data and app access externally essentially creating my own personal cloud.

The problems with this setup was only having access o my data via a browser which was at best clunky and only having a single HDD holding the data so in the event of that HDD failing all data was lost. Also, the unit did not really have any option to upgrade the amount of storage other than buying a completely new Western Digital system.

To negate the chance of loss of data I made a monthly backup to an external drive but obviously risked losing any newly added data between backups.

My only real upgrade path was to replace the old cloud drive with a proper full on Network Attached Storage (NAS) configuration.

In the end I opted for the Ugreen DXP2800 NAS box and into that I installed 2x4TB Toshiba hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration. This gives me the added protection of if one HDD fails I still have an exact copy on the other HDD and all I have to do is replace the failed HDD and the NAS will rebuild the data.

Additionally, the DXP2800 has 2 M.2 SSD slots which when populated can either be configured for fast storage or, as in my setup they can be set up for read/write caching. At the moment I’ve only added a single 1TB m.2 drive so it’s providing write caching.

Finally, to avoid the chance of scrambling the storage in the event of a power cut while writing data I chose to also add a small APC UPS.

It’s early days at the moment but overall I’m extremely happy the the Ugreen DXP2800 NAS. It was relatively easy to install and configure and addresses all the points that I didn’t like with the older Western Digital Cloud Drive.