I have suffered several catastrophic data losses, 2 of which were during university involving my 2013 Macbook Air and a Seagate external HDD - both led to me losing my notes just prior to fairly major exams. I also had some data loss on my phone Xiaomi Mi 6 when it exploded, probably from using 3rd-party cables of dubious origins. The loss of data on my phone resulted in loss of precious photographs and messages from my first year of work. These events all triggered me to read up more about data storage and how it can be safely backed up.
I like to do some DIY and have been tinkering with ThinkPad laptops, often stripping them and upgrading nearly every component within. After the Macbook Air disaster, I have come to find that ThinkPads are in general much more durable, upgradable, and offered a better typing experience. It was a passion project and it was often cheaper and more sensible to just buy a newer laptop.
I therefore naturally wanted to build my own Network Attached Storage (NAS), and had hung on to the idea of building one or a long time. I again trawled the interwebs to try and get ideas on which components to use, which operating system to use, what storage system and configuration etc. It felt like an endless pursuit in something that I have no experience in. Feeling like I was thrown into the deep end, I never found the time to do it. I am thankful that in late 2025, I made the decision to wise up and buy a pre-built NAS, along with some used hard drives and get things going.
I went with a new UGREEN DXP4800 Plus from Taobao, and 4 x 18TB Seagate Exos used drives from Ebay. They are running in a RAID 6 configuration. Keeping them spinning is also a dedicated Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), the UGREEN US3000. I also bought a 18TB WD Elements desktop HDD storage for external offline backup. For cloud storage, I went ahead with the Google 2TB premium plan as that also comes with the Gemini AI Plus included.
I am glad that I went ahead with my data storage plans just before the prices of hard drives shot up in late 2025/early 2026, driven by AI demand.