You’re asking great questions. Photography was the main reason I bought into Synology because other cloud providers are way too expensive once you get over 2-3 TB.
First I’ll say your use case does not fall into the light duty if you want to meet all your requirements. Likely you will want a 4 bay NAS with NVMe cache drives. That will most likely be the 923+ or even better the 1821+.
You’ll want to use raid over SHR as it is more performant. RAID 5 for 4 disks. RAID 6 for more than that.
If you don’t have 10GbE networking at home don’t worry about NVMe. Hard drives can easily saturate a 1GbE network. Though if you have it, it’s really nice and NVMe storage is per cheap right now. 2 1TB sticks will work great for photos. I doubt you’ll run over using Lightroom if you’re working with a single photo set. Also keep in mind your internal network speed vs your outbound network speed. I have 10GbE at home, but if I’m somewhere else, Comcast kills me at 35mbps upload.
That said, you’re looking at probably $1200 bucks.
To make it safe with a backup add another Synology with more drives. A backup should be on another device, though it doesn’t need to be fast.
As far as accessing things from anywhere, that’s more a question of your home network. You can set up a VPN or tailscale and accessing your NAS as if you were at home. That can be set up regardless of what device you choose.
You’re asking great questions. Photography was the main reason I bought into Synology because other cloud providers are way too expensive once you get over 2-3 TB.
First I’ll say your use case does not fall into the light duty if you want to meet all your requirements. Likely you will want a 4 bay NAS with NVMe cache drives. That will most likely be the 923+ or even better the 1821+.
You’ll want to use raid over SHR as it is more performant. RAID 5 for 4 disks. RAID 6 for more than that.
If you don’t have 10GbE networking at home don’t worry about NVMe. Hard drives can easily saturate a 1GbE network. Though if you have it, it’s really nice and NVMe storage is per cheap right now. 2 1TB sticks will work great for photos. I doubt you’ll run over using Lightroom if you’re working with a single photo set. Also keep in mind your internal network speed vs your outbound network speed. I have 10GbE at home, but if I’m somewhere else, Comcast kills me at 35mbps upload.
That said, you’re looking at probably $1200 bucks.
To make it safe with a backup add another Synology with more drives. A backup should be on another device, though it doesn’t need to be fast.
As far as accessing things from anywhere, that’s more a question of your home network. You can set up a VPN or tailscale and accessing your NAS as if you were at home. That can be set up regardless of what device you choose.