Does anyone have experience with home NAS boxes like Synology?
I'm trying to set up a foolproof network drive/media server and there are too many fucking options.
Size and noise matter so I'd rather pay for an all in one solution than hack one together myself.
if sound actually matters get one with replaceable fans but you will not get anything deemed "silent" that only is realistic in a selfbuild
also in regards of synology keep away from those containing the buggy Intel Atom C2538,
besides the cpu higher tier ones are pretty nice from my experience
Going to be buying one here soon myself. Probably a 2-bay due to price.
Purpose: Test out the NVR feature for my two IP cams and the other bay will be setup for private torrents. Looking to make the current setup more effective.
Get a used workstation or even better build one with cheap parts and server that shit
All models in my price range are ARM processors with some sort of mediocre hardware transcoding support.
For now my parents are using a usb hdd with their routers built-in media server, which has been working alright for photos. But now they want to stream videos to their tvs and phones.
I just want to set it and forget it, but they all have confusing feature lists considering media support.
Are there even other manufacturers than Synology and QNAP for home users?
Anything cheaper will not be simple enough for normies nor pack as many features.
They're ok and you can usually replace the fans on them with quieter stuff if its a problem. Checks the specs though if you need to do transcoding and shit as the low-end models have shittier cpus.
Obviously if you want something more extensible build your own box.
theyre a joke really. Over priced pieces of. You can probs use your pc as a nas anyway. Just buy an old computer and a bunch of hard drives. Make sure it has sata 6 or whatever on the mobo
But I care about the power efficiency. I'm thinking of a NAS too. A cheap QNAP 2 bay is somewhere around 100 €. Otherwise I could build it by myself. Is it worth it?
I might use a Celeron J1900 or something else that I can get within the 20 € range. I could also use a cheap T Ivy/Sandy bridge Celeron and some shitty H61 mainboard.
given how much these cost, you're generally better with a low-power Intel SBC like the J1900 and its successors along with a cheap ITX cube case and a couple of WD Reds.
Not always, but often.
>But I care about the power efficiency
why? an old computer isnt going to use that much power and can be used for other stuff + user servicable and gives you way more drives for your buck. your power bill wont change that much if at all.
I had a Phenom II in use, it draws more than 100 W in idle. A C2D or similar build consumes similar.
I'm from Europe btw. A kwh costs 27 cent here.
oh wow barely any different to me, a kwh is 23 cents. if its that much of a concern to you get a pi, pretty sure thats the lower power draw your gonna get
But a Pi does only have 100M LAN and its relatively expensive, it would be easier to buy a QNAP then. It should handle 4K video streaming.
I have the most cheapo synology NAS (the white one, can't remember the model) with 2 WD red in mirror. Pretty sweet actually, you can control the drive spinoff timeout and the fan speed policy (pic related).
I've deliberately avoided any pre-built NAS because I always found that I use my home servers fore more than one function. I used to have an Atom C2750 as a NAS, but that's now pulling SSH, OpenVPN, and UTM-proxy duty. Now I have an overkill Xeon D-1521 NAS that's also pulling duty as a seedbox and Bacula server
i forget the rest of the world has actual data speeds. However check your hard drive speed, youll not get much higher than 100mps. Consider a small matx build instead, buy a last gen second hand one or build with min specs. bit more expensive probs but will let you use more disks and can be used for other things
>not having free electricity
What kind of shithole country do you live in.
100 Mbits is 12.5 MB/s, a HDD like my 4 TB Seagate reads and writes over 100 MB/s
Germany
>having free electricity
What kind of glorious country do you in.
I have a Synology but prefer the QNAP these days for the virtualization support. For either, I really like Plex for media. Both are very easy to use relatively.
Had two drive Qnap NAS way back in the day. Upgraded to single drive Qnap TS-119 in 2009. Still running to this day with transmission and flexget. Would prefer to run Plex there as well, but don't think its powerful enough for that.
For those with NAS devices: how do you set up your drives? Simple mirroring or RAID 5 or what?
I remember Synology had their own type of RAID but I think it was basically RAID 5.
My concern is it makes it kind of difficult to add/upgrade drives over time but I guess you could also just set up separate volumes.
RAID5 is fine as long as the array is under 10TB, use a RAID 6 for arrays over 10TB or if you want the extra redundancy at the cost of 1 drive.
Assuming you are using consumer drives with a UER of 1x10^14
Also, you should be using NAS drives as the firmware has longer timeouts if the array is undergoing a rebuild. Plus there's a few other enhancements. In the server world, there are 200 differences between standalone and server drives.
I have a DS508, which is a 5 bay NAS.
what I did was install some software so that I could get SSH running nicely, then i closed off everything but SSH, put my laptops public keys in there, and set the NAS to only allow SSH with key identification.
Added some entries to my laptops' fstab, and i'm done.
So there is actually a benefit to using, say, WD Red drives?
Yes, there are many firmware enhancements to assist the drives if they encounter a UER. A UER would traditionally stop the array from rebuilding and you'd be done otherwise. Statistically you WILL encounter a UER with an array over 10.8TB in size.
I use the WD red's myself, but if you need I/O, look for faster spin rates or better, use SSD's or an SSD cache.
FYI, I believe you can download Synology's OS or QNAP's from somewhere and virtualize if you want to play around first.
just build your own and install freenas, you retard
>I'm trying to set up a foolproof network drive/media server and there are too many fucking options.
Then Synology is a good choice, high quality and piss easy to setup especially if you're going to just throw files on it.
If you are looking for efficiency then yes a stand alone NAS will get the job done.
a 2 Bay nas will consume roughly 20-25w in operation.
a 4 bay will go up to 40-50w operation
The main difference betwen most NAS besides the bays is what kind of CPU they use, they go anywhere from ARM stuff to Intel i7's.
If you just want some basic stuff out of your nas then ARM should be enough for it.
If you want to run plex on it and transcode in real time you need something beefier.
Plex provides a list of what NAS works well with their stuff and at which bitrate.
IIRC Plex recently announced that their new version will no longer support ARM
I am more familiar with QNAP stuff than synology, qnap seems to be the leader and has many many applications available for its 'OS'.