How many bays do I need?
We strongly advise you to steer clear of single-disk NAS systems. If a single disk holds the only copy of your irreplaceable data and it fails, you’re in trouble. It’s much safer to go for a two-bay system and configure it with two hard disks in a RAID1 array.
In this configuration, your data is mirrored between both drives. If one fails, you’ll still have the copy on the other one. Just be sure to replace the broken disk promptly so the NAS can rebuild your array and restore your protection. Don’t be tempted by other two-disk configurations such as JBOD or RAID0: these offer more capacity and can be faster, but they lack the fault tolerance of RAID1.
A four-bay NAS drive is more versatile. With three or four disks you can set up a RAID5 array, which offers a better balance of capacity and data security. For example, if you install four 1TB drives, you can
