First NAS Advice

[DezUk]

So its been years since I even looked at hardware solutions having been on a Mac since 2009, as you can imagine I a way out of touch with what is going on. Rather than try and read up I thought it would easier to post in here (hope this the right section) to ask recommendations for my needs.

I am looking for a simple home NAS that I will be using to store all my media, mostly mp3's and movie files. I would ideally like to able to stream from th NAS in real time as I Dj a lot and would have my Dj equipment connected to my Mac and scanning through Rekorbix files that are on my NAS.

At present I use Western Digital external drives, have an ancient 2TB, a portable 4TB and an external 8TB that are permanently connected to an old MBP that sits under the TV as a Plex media server. Takes ages for the drives to spin up and transferring files across to them can be slow at times.

I would also like something that is fail safe to an extent, last time I worked on anything like this RAID 5 was a thing and you would use one HDD with parity bits to try and salvage the other drives if they happen to fail.

Oh and finally the idea of being able to setup FTP and web server capabilities easily would be a nice addition.

My budget would be between £400 to £500 and looking to get as much storage and reliability fir that money as possible. Do I go rebuilt QNAP type thing or build something from scratch?

Sorry for the lack of knowledge but I just thought it would be best to ask in here to get some ideas of whats going on these days

Thanks

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Its such a minefield, and there really is no one-fits-all solution. In terms of performance, i'd say that you should expect a NAS to realise you performance similar to a single external usb HDD drive. A lot of off the shelf NAS setups also seem to spin down drives to reduce power ... so you may still have the spin up time on occasions. Thats just my experience.

Simple 2bay setups will most often be set up as a mirrored array ... so a pair of drives in equal size ... both storing the same data. Lose one drive, you have the other as redundancy.

I dont have experience of QNAP/Synology devices, others will do. They do seem to offer features such as FTP and internet access, and are quite mature with plenty of utilities and add ons. They are much more plug and play as well to setup.

I had an older Western Digital EX2 which was ok, but couldn't recommend that model in hindsight. Personally, I now have a big old Dell rack server running ubuntu server. I went that route because it offered 8 bays of storage for future expansion at a fraction of the price of an 8 bay synology type unit. I went ubuntu server as it was console based only which saves power compared to a graphical interface such as windows, it allowed me to setup drives and sharing to suit my needs. It runs my cctv system, so is designed to run 24/7. So in it, I have 2 paired drives as my archive space. A drive for CCTV footage, a drive as a generic shared working space for stuff and an a small SSD to run the OS. That leaves me 4 drive bays of expansion further down the line. The server chassis cost in the region of £200 and has dual Xeon CPU's and 32Gb Ram - i couldn't have built my own PC for the same price with the same features. I used hard drives I already had. Overall, its performance has been significantly better than the EX2 device I had before. but...

The downside to it is its size, and its power draw. Its telling me its running at 70Watts and it runs 24/7 (Dell servers have no sleep mode). That adds up over time compared to he 2bay WD EX2 I had ran which ran at a total of 18W when awake and probably less than 4W on standby. So a lot cheaper to run an off the shelf NAS long term. But then again, its also running my CCTV, which used to be a seperate device running 24/7 also, so running costs are offset a little.

 

[jaybee]

It's best answered with these questions being answered first I feel:

1: Where will the hardware live?

2: What size and noise limitations are there based on answer to question 1?

If the answer is that it needs to be able to live under your desk at which you want to be able to get work done/game etc, then this affects purchasing as it will need to be:
A) Quiet (or quiet enough)
B) Suitably sized for its environment, which rules out cheap old rack servers
If it can live in a cupboard or loft or shed/out building or garage etc, then you have more options.

3: Do you have any existing hardware or spare parts which could be utilized to help build something?

4: You mention streaming of mp3s and storing movies. Do you want to be able to stream and play movies held on this NAS? If so, which clients will you use to do that? i.e. TV using built in Plex app, or directly played from laptop etc. This is important to understand whether your client devices can direct play or whether they will require the server to do any form of transcoding in order for playback to happen. Transcoding of modern codecs like H265 is computationally expensive. As a worst case, if you had to transcode a 4K rip into a 1080p one that was H265, that would put the server under a lot of stress and would steer hardware choices towards either requiring a more capable CPU or GPU to offload hardware transcoding too. (Intel Quicksync and/or Nvidia NVENC).

5: How much storage do you currently need and do you predict you will need in the future?

6: Have you heard of freenas and unraid?

7: Do you want to run Virtual machines, dockers, plugins and have flexibility to do other things like host services/servers etc?

 

[BigT]

Answering @jaybee ’s questions will yield better suggestions but from the off I’d say you’re probably going to need up your budget a little. If I consider you’re using 14TB of storage currently then on hard drives alone if you’re going to want a protected array you’ll be looking at 3x 8TB drives on something like UnRaid (maybe reusing your existing 8TB) or 2x 14TB drives in a two bay Synology/QNap. That’s a minimum of £300 on drives before we consider SSD cache and the actual NAS hardware. And if you go for an off-the-shelf solution you’ll either need an expensive four bay one for smaller drives or going two bay will need the more expensive larger drives.

 

[pp111]

You could easily spend your budget on just the bare NAS! Failsafe is fine but it doubles the cost of the drives. In passing the drive speed is not important, since the network will be slower than any drive you can buy, but with streaming your CPU will be heavily loaded so you might like to choose a NAS model with a higher spec CPU. Something like a + variety for Synology. I would be tempted to go for a two bay + Synology, then buy one ( no failsafe ) or two ( failsafe ) drives for that. Raid five you are talking about a four bay NAS and four drives which is getting way over your budget. You could always get a four bay with two drives then upgrade to four drives later?

 

[COYS]

I would advise, if you think you need a 2 bay NAS then get a 4 bay. Once you start storing stuff (with backup) then you will quickly run out of space.

 

[AyeAyeAhoy!]

You can probably save by building something using UnRAID or FreeNAS, but it covers at the expense of ease of setup. I have an UnRAID and 2 Qnaps, and the Qnaps are boring - they just work!