Which brand of NAS is the best?

Which brand of NAS is the best?

Build your own.

QNAP imo
synology is close behind

DIY is fine too, but it depends on how much you want to tinker with shit

I'd lean on QNAP since Synology has too many Intel Atom based products (Atoms have a "bug" where they self destruct).

Illmatic

hyperconverged with a attached filer

FreeNAS

QNAP.

But if you are looking at 4+ drives or you want enough processing power to run, say, ceph or some kind of deduplication, I think it's a good idea to build your own.

Same if you want to use it directly as media PC.

Synology is good enough for people with more money than time, QNAP even more so.

However, if you want >1Gb speeds (even just for an empty PCIe slot) you'll be paying a shitload.

Anything with a C2000 atom (C2***) has the self destruct bug where after ~18months it will never turn on again hard death. The fix they've offered on synology is extending warranty and soldering on a resistor to the motherboard that delays the problem to ~5years apparently. None of this has made me happy as my work has two affected NAS.

Plus the also have really really shit encryption speeds (30MB/s)

There is a new atom D3 stepping which has fixed it and the next generation C3*** which is also a lot better performing and doesn't have a self destruct in it.

But the software is idiot proof and otherwise just works maxing out the 4x Gbe connections on 6+ hard drives.

This, it's expensive though, but I've been looking around and getting competitive pricing on a homebuild is actualy quite hard if you don't go second hand and nearly impossible if you try in the same form factors.

Had to configure basic 2-bay QNAP for a client last month, surprisingly many features for the price. You can install apps like vpn or owncloud if you need them.

this, the synology DSM system is pretty amazing, no wonder people are trying to use it on other/self-built machines.
also their expandable 'hybrid'-raid thingy is pretty neat and fast, I just went from 6 to 8x4TB drives and it rewrote the parity in 9 hours, while still being able to work on the volume with about 2/3 of the usual performance

Synology

I've had a QNAP for a few years, been working great. I use it for automated downloads, cache proxy, personal cloud server, and using a pfSense VM, my main firewall/router/DHCP/VPN/QoS box.
Worth every penny.

On my ones at work it was taking 30hours per drive to expand the arrays, mixtures of 3/4/6TB drives at the time totaling 30TB and 40TB, slow as balls.

But I do know the default settings only allow the drives to use 10% of their i/o so you can increase the build speed but does affect it's performance in a hot environment.

I don't have much experience with self built but the open dsm seems like a tiny bit more of a liability than freenas, especially since freenas has had a nice gui update it brings it into idiot territory which is nice for me.

>also their expandable 'hybrid'-raid thingy is pretty neat and fast,
I'm going to point out that it's still backed on Linux mdadm. It does some extra work so it can have 500GB chunks over drives, but it's nothing terribly complex.

> I just went from 6 to 8x4TB drives and it rewrote the parity in 9 hours, while still being able to work on the volume with about 2/3 of the usual performance
Ya, that's Linux mdadm. Always nice.

If you needed something even more crazy, you could build a machine for Ceph, but that is not as simple as doing mdadm.

Build your own. Half the cost easily.
What you save you can spend on more data capacity.

All drobo family

HP Microserver Gen7 (N54L)
Run FreeNAS, or if you can handle some sysadmin run FreeBSD directly.

>needing an lcd readout of your IP address
>Not having a home diagram for your network

2 drive bays are shit cause you can't even raid 5. What's the point with no redundancy?

I avoid network attached like the plague.
Fucking invites ransomware and intrusions.
Prefer docks and then stashing into plastic containers, or enclosures.