Educate me regarding NAS options

[Destination]

I wish to consolidate our media, files, pictures and documents, to a network based device.
There is a growing amount, and I would expect this amount to increase over the years.
Circa 10TB currently if all is totalled.
The NAS device or equivalent would mainly be a backup and access hub, with everything being stored on another device/computer/tablet as well.

I don't mind updating the system manually, I also don't mind if these things are software capable of maintain copies/duplicates of certain folders on the various PCs and phones.
I'd quite like to be able to access it from the TV in the house to play movies, recordings, photobooks etc.
I plan to situate the device beside our BT home hub and network connect it to the hub.

There is such a variation in pricing of the barebones of these devices.
What would folks recommend, to allow for storage now with future expansion options?

 

[MissChief]

I always think NAS boxes are overpriced. A small amount of ram, older dual core CPU usually and a bare chassis. And some want £200+ for them. Without hard drives!

 

[Destination]

Anyone own specific NAS boxes, would you recommend them, good points bad points etc?

 

[Jay85]

Following this, would also like to know what NAS systems are good for home storage.

 

[Avalon]

Without knowing the actual anticipated workloads, it’s going to be vague. Personally I would go self build or microserver + UnRAID depending, free options such as FreeNAS etc. are also available. The problem with an off the shelf NAS is you pay a premium for what is in effect a small PC and are dependant on the OEM for parts vs standard items and ongoing software support, Synology for example have a chequered history in terms of planned obsolescence for the sake of it.

 

[Buffalo2102]

Without knowing the actual anticipated workloads, it’s going to be vague. Personally I would go self build or microserver + UnRAID depending, free options such as FreeNAS etc. are also available. The problem with an off the shelf NAS is you pay a premium for what is in effect a small PC and are dependant on the OEM for parts vs standard items and ongoing software support, Synology for example have a chequered history in terms of planned obsolescence for the sake of it.

+1

The usual suspects are Synology and QNAP but you are paying a premium for a proprietary solution. If you must have a small, discrete, out-of-the-box solution then they are the ones to look at.

I started with a Synology NAS but soon found it was too small, too slow and too limited for my growing needs so replaced it with a microserver. I have since replaced that with a larger server that I can configure, upgrade and expand according to my needs. It's obviously more work to initially set up but not really any great trouble to maintain. Plus it's fun if you like that sort of thing.

 

[peige]

I used to have loads of external drives on my main pc network shared for all to access in the house and then windows 8 came along and just stopped it working well so I ended up buying a Synology and haven't for a moment looked back.
They just do the job well. Mine handles the shares for all the films I have, music and photos. That and running 3 cctv cameras, torrant, nzbget and cloud backups to google for my most important stuff.

I have the knowledge to get a mini server up and running but when you have had a Synology with a really usable browser based interface, updates that work ether automatically or when you choose you really struggle to want to deal with anything else.

 

[Destination]

I used to have loads of external drives on my main pc network shared for all to access in the house and then windows 8 came along and just stopped it working well so I ended up buying a Synology and haven't for a moment looked back.
They just do the job well. Mine handles the shares for all the films I have, music and photos. That and running 3 cctv cameras, torrant, nzbget and cloud backups to google for my most important stuff.

I have the knowledge to get a mini server up and running but when you have had a Synology with a really usable browser based interface, updates that work ether automatically or when you choose you really struggle to want to deal with anything else.

Which specific model do you use, how many disks in what sort of array and would you recommend your particular unit? or have they updated?

 

[peige]

I have a DS916+ which is a 4 bay one with a INTEL Pentium N3710 chip, its a few years old now. Running 4 x 8tb drives, used to be 4 x 4tb drives but I was growing out of it as UHD films came along and I wanted my cctv storage to be longer.

Not sure what they do now. Deff go with synologys own file system, its an expandable version of one of the raids, if a drive fails or you want to upgrade you litrally swap it out and let it rebuild and expand.

 

[Destination]

Thanks and what CCTV do you integrate it with? hubs, controller cards or direct?

 

[Armageus]

I always think NAS boxes are overpriced. A small amount of ram, older dual core CPU usually and a bare chassis. And some want £200+ for them. Without hard drives!

They do seem expensive, but then again so is building a dedicated "NAS" box - Unraid isn't free, and quiet, low power hardware has a premium.
Whilst the G7 and G8 Microservers bucked this trend somewhat, HP equally realised this and the newer ones are back to being underperformers and overpriced.

Without knowing the actual anticipated workloads, it’s going to be vague. Personally I would go self build or microserver + UnRAID depending, free options such as FreeNAS etc. are also available. The problem with an off the shelf NAS is you pay a premium for what is in effect a small PC and are dependant on the OEM for parts vs standard items and ongoing software support, Synology for example have a chequered history in terms of planned obsolescence for the sake of it.

Equally though if you use UnRAID (or even any of the Free software solutions), you are still dependent on them for support.

Anyone own specific NAS boxes, would you recommend them, good points bad points etc?

I've had a Synology 1813+ at work for the last 6 years - it took 5 minutes to set up and has took no more than 5 minutes to manage over those 6 years:
It just works.

 

[Destination]

Thx

 

[bigtrak]

Following this, would also like to know what NAS systems are good for home storage.

just asked for ideas for my dad so will follow this also.

 

[AFK_Matrix]

I have had an old netgear NAS that's near 10 years old so an upgrade is definitely needed!

My brother has just bought the Synology DS918+ which is a 4 bay and from what he showed me it is very impressive and a massive upgrade to what I have. I was looking at the Synology DS418play which isn't quite as good and thus less money. But if you have a Google you will find the 918+ for not a lot more than the 418. Hope that helps a little.

 

[peige]

Thanks and what CCTV do you integrate it with? hubs, controller cards or direct?

Network cameras work directly with it, I have three Hikvision network cameras. The unit will run two camaeras out of the box, more need a licence for additional.
The surveillance software is very good and has a matching app so you can watch your cameras and look back over history.

 

[jaybee]

I've never been able to bring myself to pay for an off the shelf NAS. They are typically just inferior to self builds. They still sell NAS's today with 100mb NICs in them for example.

 

[Rroff]

I've never been able to bring myself to pay for an off the shelf NAS. They are typically just inferior to self builds. They still sell NAS's today with 100mb NICs in them for example.

Depends what you want to do with them - for robust but not enterprise/bigger business level user management of file sharing, middle of the road CCTV setup and so on then they are hard to beat in terms of minimal configuration time, minimum maintenance required and a good feature set.

I spent a good amount of time and money trying to first do it cheap and then going with self build options and in the end ended up with a QNAP 419 which has just done what I needed for years now. A lot of the alternative NASes especially the cheaper ones always seemed to have some compromise or bugs and a self-build to get the same kind of (or better) feature level was a lot of initial work.

The only factor that slightly changes my opinion now is that the premium on the typical Synology and QNAP units has gone a bit LOL - back when I bought it was a bit of a premium but kind of justifiable for what you got.

As an aside I've also implemented several Synology units for smaller businesses where I'm friends with the owner, etc. and so far beyond the initial deployment I've had no other involvement and they've just done the job for years.

 

[Destination]

Thank you for all the info guys.

 

[Avalon]

They do seem expensive, but then again so is building a dedicated "NAS" box - Unraid isn't free, and quiet, low power hardware has a premium.
Whilst the G7 and G8 Microservers bucked this trend somewhat, HP equally realised this and the newer ones are back to being underperformers and overpriced.


Equally though if you use UnRAID (or even any of the Free software solutions), you are still dependent on them for support.


I've had a Synology 1813+ at work for the last 6 years - it took 5 minutes to set up and has took no more than 5 minutes to manage over those 6 years:
It just works.

It’s all relative, a DS418 Play is the lowest intel based NAS and it’s £499 as of today on OCUK for a J3355 with 2GB of RAM (you have to laugh). So for comparison I priced up the following:

Asus H110I Plus Intel H110 (Socket 1151) £64.99
Team Group Vulcan T-Force 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 £28.99
Kolink Core Series 300W 80 Plus Certified £23.99
Intel Pentium Gold G5400 3.70GHz (Coffee Lake) £52.99
Goods total £170.96

Now obviously I left the case out, let’s imagine somewhere on planet Earth exists that has the InWin-MS04 for £139.99 which is a 4 bay hot-swap case with PSU (which would save the £23.99 I included one for) and other places sell similar cases for half the money. That means £286.96 buys a new small, silent build with 4x the RAM, 4.5x the CPU (the J3355 has a CPU Mark of 1160, a used £40 N45 N54L has a CPU Mark of 1357 and the G5400 is 5226), a GPU that’s capable of transcoding duties, can easily be upgraded and idles in the mid 30w range and leaves £212.04 for storage and/or an UnRAID licence. If you really want to spend the full budget, that 12 bay Silverstone that elsewhere has in stock and an SFX PSU could be added and you’d still save money and have a much more capable system.

If something goes wrong out of warranty with a Synology, it’s painful. The quickest solution is often to buy an identical NAS as it’s proprietary, if something goes wrong with UnRAID or FreeNAS etc. it’ll run on any hardware that meets the minimum requirements and can interface with the drives.

As to the software point, my first UnRAID licences were purchased around the v3 time, they still get support. Care to guess how many Synology products still retain mainline support from that period? Synology have only relatively recently (in the last 2? years) stopped fixed term support for consumer hardware, that they actually thought it was OK to sell people hardware and then tell them a few years later that even though they would sell them almost identical new hardware with a different model number (they had a habit of trickling it down the range) and it would be supported, they wouldn’t provide new DSM versions to what they had because they weren’t willing to devote the time to certifying DSM for old (yet still sold as new) hardware. People actually had to resort to cross flashing firmwares from newer models to stay in main support. Remember this wasn’t sold to them as a fixed term rental or service contract, this is retail sales to consumers, it sucked.

 

[MissChief]

It’s all relative, a DS418 Play is the lowest intel based NAS and it’s £499 as of today on OCUK for a J3355 with 2GB of RAM (you have to laugh). So for comparison I priced up the following:

Asus H110I Plus Intel H110 (Socket 1151) £64.99
Team Group Vulcan T-Force 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 £28.99
Kolink Core Series 300W 80 Plus Certified £23.99
Intel Pentium Gold G5400 3.70GHz (Coffee Lake) £52.99
Goods total £170.96

Now obviously I left the case out, let’s imagine somewhere on planet Earth exists that has the InWin-MS04 for £139.99 which is a 4 bay hot-swap case with PSU (which would save the £23.99 I included one for) and other places sell similar cases for half the money. That means £286.96 buys a new small, silent build with 4x the RAM, 4.5x the CPU (the J3355 has a CPU Mark of 1160, a used £40 N45 N54L has a CPU Mark of 1357 and the G5400 is 5226), a GPU that’s capable of transcoding duties, can easily be upgraded and idles in the mid 30w range and leaves £212.04 for storage and/or an UnRAID licence. If you really want to spend the full budget, that 12 bay Silverstone that elsewhere has in stock and an SFX PSU could be added and you’d still save money and have a much more capable system.

If something goes wrong out of warranty with a Synology, it’s painful. The quickest solution is often to buy an identical NAS as it’s proprietary, if something goes wrong with UnRAID or FreeNAS etc. it’ll run on any hardware that meets the minimum requirements and can interface with the drives.

As to the software point, my first UnRAID licences were purchased around the v3 time, they still get support. Care to guess how many Synology products still retain mainline support from that period? Synology have only relatively recently (in the last 2? years) stopped fixed term support for consumer hardware, that they actually thought it was OK to sell people hardware and then tell them a few years later that even though they would sell them almost identical new hardware with a different model number (they had a habit of trickling it down the range) and it would be supported, they wouldn’t provide new DSM versions to what they had because they weren’t willing to devote the time to certifying DSM for old (yet still sold as new) hardware. People actually had to resort to cross flashing firmwares from newer models to stay in main support. Remember this wasn’t sold to them as a fixed term rental or service contract, this is retail sales to consumers, it sucked.

Thanks, made my point exactly.