NAS Suggestions
Looking for some suggestions for a new home NAS, I have a lot of media that is old and really hard to get these days so want to protect from having to find it again.
I was thinking of a new 4 bay enclosure, RAID10, probably 4x16TB drives. Not going to be cheap but would see me covered for a few years I would hope.
From reviews, it would seem this is a good option.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+
Fast, decent reviews and easy to set up, operate and so on. Will only ever be used by my own family.
Any other suggestions based on experience or other options I could consider?
Looking at £2k for that one with drives which is not ideal but if I have to then so be it.
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I have the previous model to that, the ds918+ with 2 cache drives.
Works great for my needs, I use SHR and have 2 x14Tb and 2 X 8Tb drives installed with a usable 26.2Tb. I've also upgraded the RAM to 16GB.
Runs my Plex server and many dockers including pihole. Worth the investment, for years I used Ubuntu with mergerfs, this setup is very much setup and forget and I like that
Yes, I do like the way SHR works, I have two 8TB spare right now and I was thinking about just getting a couple of larger drives and using the two I have which will give me plenty for now and I can upgrade later. Just wasn't sure how reliable SHR was so this is useful info. Thanks.
I highly recommend a Synology NAS as well. I have the same one as @retrotech , a DS918+ indeed with 2 cache drives.
However, make sure you buy one with an Intel CPU in order to run Docker properly. Yes you can hack Docker on an ARM Synology, but I don't recommend it since docker-compose won't work (and ARM is slow...).
@retrotech I switched from Plex to Jellyfin. Jellyfin is fully open-source and as such hardware transcoding is free. Hardware transcoding with Plex requires a paid pass.
If your comfortable - build your own and run unraid on it.
2K budget would give you a pretty powerful beast
I have Plex Pass, I've had it since 2013
I have been considering switching to jellyfin but their mobile app doesn't feel as polished so think it might fail the wife test.
I have found SHR to be very reliable, I've been using it for 18+ months with no issues at all. When I started off, I had 4 X 3TB WD Red drives, I upgraded 2 to 8TB and then later upgraded the last 2 drives to 14TB shucked WD element drives.
Actually, that was my other question, how easy it was to upgrade drives in place, so fairly simple if I use 2x 8tb and 2x14tb then decide to upgrade the two 8tb later?
I would probably do this if there was a decent cost-saving, but the drives are the killer so it would be a lot more hassle to DIY it than just buy something that does the job. With the DS920 you are getting 2x NVMe drives and more. Doesn't appear to make sense to build a NAS these days.
Their mobile app doesn't work well (yet) indeed, but their Android TV app is quite okay. It passed the WAF test here
+1 for Synology
Usually, always prefer a self-build, but I got a Synology around a year ago and I'm super happy with it.
https://v6node.com
Yeah very simple. You replace one drive at a time and it rebuilds the array. Going from 3TB to 8TB took about 24 hours to rebuild the array, going from 3TB to 14TB took around 2 days per drive. So a couple of days to upgrade 2 drives later down the line for you.
I'm waiting on the 14TB WD elements to drop again on Amazon so I can upgrade the 2 8TB drives and have around 36TB usable. I'm in no rush though, I've got about 19TB free from my existing 26TB so the price drop has to be good
Excellent, I think that confirms my purchase then.
Done deal, ordered the enclosure and 2x 14TB drives plus extra ram and 2 NVMe for caching. Along with my existing 2 8TB drives this should keep me going on only cost £1200 for now instead of £2k.
would love to watch it again :=)
~ utube
Spectreman. That bring back memories ;-)
yeah ... i iused to jump with excitement when it starts and volume all way up..
good old days .-- kids these days don't know these things.
I run my own system that is custom built, but I am gradually moving all my stuff to rackmount at home, so I am planning on picking up a 2U server to move the drives to. Never actually used any of the consumer prebuilt NASes, hope Synology works well for you.
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.
+1 for Synology, I’ve been very happy with mine.
One thing I wish they’d improve is a way to more easily monitor disk activity. Ghost r/w are really hard to track down.
It don’t be like it is until it do.
That looks like an utterly wank, very nearly copyright-infringing version of Ultraman.
All the best with Syno; I can empathise with wanting set-and-forget usability, especially for your NAS. SHR is basically just btrfs on mdadm.
I second the Unraid suggestion; there's a free trial, and it really is very easy to use. Complete flexibility on drive upgrades. It's essentially a fancy UI on Slackware, with a unionfs/parity scheme similar to snapraid+mergerfs.
LGA1155 is plenty for a basic NAS, and dirt cheap (at least on this side of the pond): NAS Killer 4
Right now I use a pair of Mediasonic Proraid boxes to a Lenovo M900 Tiny as my 8-bay 32TB raw NAS. However, I'm looking at the ODROID-HC4, though it's just a toaster form factor 2-bay device. Still intriguing.
back in early 80's (83-85) we had only tv.2 channels .- we can only watch what they had.
but thanks for the mention. i will have a look.
Guy, if men in rubber suits fighting is what floats your boat, you’re going to have a real good time. Take a look at the Japanese version of Spider-Man...
I do like Amazon for speed.
Also, thanks to those that helped me decide @retrotech and others. All up and running and now starting the looooong process of transferring the 1st lot of media. This thing is blazing fast though
Nice
Enjoy your new toy!