NAS Recommendation

[The_Rural_Juror]

I am looking for a NAS to centralize our files. Will be used mostly for light video and photo editing plus some programming. Probably 12tb max. Any suggestions on what to look for?

[JfuckinC]

Ive used a QNAP setup for 5/6 years, just bought another one to replace it. We CADD off it, about 5 guys at a time. You can set it up on “myqnapcloud” and access the files from anywhere. Also you can access off your iPhone with the Qfile app. You can set it up to backup to the cloud as well. It’s honestly worked amazing. The one I just bought was defective right off the hop so it’s being replaced by MemEx free, or else QNAP offered to replace it. I’m a simpleton when it comes to this kind of stuff but it has been very user friendly, and the technical support the one time I needed it was awesome.

[The_Rural_Juror]

Thanks.

I found out this morning that Lightroom catalogs cannot be stored on a central server for some reason. I will have to figure out how to sync the local drives of each computer through the NAS.

[colsankey]

Symbolic Links
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-take-advantage-of-symbolic-links-in-window-10/

Unless it has to be local.. then robocopy?

[FixedGear]

bump!

This thread is about a year old and we need a new NAS. Any recommendations on the latest and greatest? Don't need anything huge, 4-6 tb maybe?

[Asian_defender]

Synology DS918+ if you don't need more than 4 drives
It transcodes 4k as well in case you wanted a plex server

[JfuckinC]

My QNAp's are still both running strong.

[revelations]

Synology has a far better UI, but QNAP offers hardware level encryption. That is your first decision.

2 bay systems are just fine for home use/SOHO

[FixedGear]

Thanks everyone! Yeah, I'll probably just go with a 2 bay. revelations, how would I know if I need hardware level encryption? This is just a home network, and will be used for storing and serving photos, music, video, etc. It's just my partner and I, so I don't think we need to worry about encryption (?)

thanks!

[revelations]

Thanks everyone! Yeah, I'll probably just go with a 2 bay. revelations, how would I know if I need hardware level encryption? This is just a home network, and will be used for storing and serving photos, music, video, etc. It's just my partner and I, so I don't think we need to worry about encryption (?)

thanks!

Just stick to Synology. Also dont cheap out on the drives. Every NAS I configure has WD Gold series (or equivalent) drives. Inert gas filled and intended to last decades (technically, over 200 years MTBF) under normal use (24/7)

[FixedGear]

Thanks everyone, appreciate the help. Thanks also revelations for the tip on the drives - the reason I'm replacing by previous NAS (DNS-232 haha) it because a drive failed. So I'll go with something like WD Gold series.

[FixedGear]

The Synology NAS Selector has suggested the DiskStation DS218j as a 2 bay NAS, is that a good unit?

Also, for a 4 tb drive, there seem to be two options for the gold series:

Western Digital Gold 4TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5" - WD4002FYYZ (https://www.amazon.ca/Western-Digital-Enterprise-Class-Drive/dp/B01AV1697A/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=WD+Gold+4TB+Enterprise+Class+Hard+Disk+Drive+-+7200+RPM+Class+SATA+6+Gb%2Fs+128MB+Cache+3.5+Inch+-+WD4002FYYZ&qid=1567191320&s=gateway&sr=8-1)

Western Digital 4TB Ultrastar DC HC310 SATA HDD - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256MB Cache, 3.5" - HUS726T4TALA6L4 (https://www.amazon.ca/HITACHI-GLOBAL-STORAGE-TECH-HUS726T4TALA6L4/dp/B07D3YH466/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=wd+gold+series&qid=1567191180&s=gateway&sr=8-7)

there's only like a $20 price difference between these, but do the differences in specs matter for a NAS?

[revelations]

I would go with the 218+, its essentially at a low PC level in terms of hardware and what it can do for you.

512 MB ram is on the low end for a NAS (218j)

As far as the drives, the 128MB cache should be fine in a home NAS setup.

[Asian_defender]

WD digital gold might be extreme for just file storage.
Try the WD Red instead. I've yet to have one fail on me in 7 years

[realazy]

I have the ds218+, it’s more than adequate for the things you listed. I run WD purples in mine as I have two IPcams recording 24/7.

[FixedGear]

thanks everyone! the WD gold digital might be extreme, but if it's jsut a couple hundred bucks more, I might just do it anyway since I had a HDD failure on my last NAS

[FixedGear]

WD digital gold might be extreme for just file storage.
Try the WD Red instead. I've yet to have one fail on me in 7 years

I checked out the Red out of curiosity, and yea, it would be a couple of hundred bucks cheaper. It's 64MB cache though, does that make a difference on a home environment?

[Asian_defender]

I checked out the Red out of curiosity, and yea, it would be a couple of hundred bucks cheaper. It's 64MB cache though, does that make a difference on a home environment?

It's not going to make a difference in your home environment. For your purposes it should be fine
I have 6 x 4TB WD reds, haven't had any problems accessing my media and I use mine primarily as a plex server with some photo and rom storage

Spend your money on the NAS instead of the disks. CPU/Network is going to be your main bottleneck, even with the reds its 5400rpm and my CPU is still the bottleneck

[ExtraSlow]

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but would you have data loss with a drive failure? If so, you have RAID options other than buying better drives. I don't know where the value-to-reliability curves cross over for you though.

[FixedGear]

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but would you have data loss with a drive failure? If so, you have RAID options other than buying better drives. I don't know where the value-to-reliability curves cross over for you though.

I was just going to purchase two identical drives and mirror them in a RAID, I guess. Just whatever is easiest and provides redundancy in case of a disk failure

[ExtraSlow]

I'm no expert but that seems like a fine idea for basic use.
A question for the experts, if you do have a drive failure, the NAS gives you some kind of alert, right?

[Asian_defender]

Both QNAP and Synology will do alerts for failed hard drives. I would steer the OP more towards a 4 bay, you'll probably want to expand in the future. That seems to be the biggest regret in my work group, myself included

[FixedGear]

Both QNAP and Synology will do alerts for failed hard drives. I would steer the OP more towards a 4 bay, you'll probably want to expand in the future. That seems to be the biggest regret in my work group, myself included

why would I need a 4 bay, I had a 2 bay for years (2TB) and it worked fine. Can't I just like double the drive size to 4tb, have extra room, and stay with 2 bays? I guess I don't understand why 4 bays is better than 2

[revelations]

I've deployed, literally hundreds of drives and the WD ones that fail are the reds, purples, greens, blues etc. Gold (about 12 deployed) has never failed on me in 4 years.

No, in a RAID1 scenario a loss of one drive is not the end - although some will fail shortly after another.

[Asian_defender]

why would I need a 4 bay, I had a 2 bay for years (2TB) and it worked fine. Can't I just like double the drive size to 4tb, have extra room, and stay with 2 bays? I guess I don't understand why 4 bays is better than 2

Migration process is a pain in the ass, it's much easier to just plug in another HDD then it is to migrate all that data to a fresh drive.
If you do a RAID 1 you would remove 1 hard drive, put in the new one, let the RAID rebuild then repeat. I'd rather just plug in a new drive into an unused bay and walk away

**edit, spelling error lol

[FixedGear]

thanks guys

[FixedGear]

So if I wanted to get a larger unit with expansion capability, what would be the step up from the DS218+? Is the DS718+ the next step up? That one is expandable to 7 bays with the DX517 expansion unit. Otherwise there is the DS918+, which has 4 bays off the bat.

[Asian_defender]

It depends on your budget, I'd do the 918+ personally but it is also double the price of a DS218+. If you can double your budget for the NAS I'd do the 918+ and select the RAID that suits you best.
Also look at the other things a NAS can do for you like Pihole, VPN server, SONAR etc.

[FixedGear]

Budget isn't an issue, but I don't think I'll use Pihole, VPN server, SONAR, and also we live in a condo so space is at a premium. I'm not sure I want to buy a bigger box unless needed, so I might just go with the DS218+ and possibly get some bigger disks (6GB?). I mean, the old disks were 2 TB, and while they were getting close to full, I think tripling the capacity would work for the next handful of years at least.

[Asian_defender]

Budget isn't an issue, but I don't think I'll use Pihole, VPN server, SONAR, and also we live in a condo so space is at a premium. I'm not sure I want to buy a bigger box unless needed, so I might just go with the DS218+ and possibly get some bigger disks (6GB?). I mean, the old disks were 2 TB, and while they were getting close to full, I think tripling the capacity would work for the next handful of years at least.

I remember reading the backblaze reports and for some reason the 3TB increments (3TB and 6TB) had the most failures at 3-5%. Go with a 4TB variants, Try finding the backblaze reports for 2015/2016

[Xtrema]

why would I need a 4 bay, I had a 2 bay for years (2TB) and it worked fine. Can't I just like double the drive size to 4tb, have extra room, and stay with 2 bays? I guess I don't understand why 4 bays is better than 2

4 Bay let you do RAID5 or in Synology term, RAID-SHR.

RAID 1 will yield only 50% usable (2 4TB only gives you 4TB)

RAID SHR/5 will give you min 66% usable (4 4TB will give you 12TB, or 75% usable)

So you are getting better bang for $. And when we start going into 10/12TB drives, you may want to start doing double parity with your RAID set because rebuild time during a failure is getting longer. The longer the rebuild time, the higher chance you will lose everything. So more bays and bigger RAID set will buys you more security.

Also, WD Red tends to run less hot and less noisy than Gold if noise is a concern in small space.

As NAS are getting a bit more expensive, if you think a RAID 1 4TB is enough for your need, then it's fine although you never provided what your use cases are. There is no point future proofing unless you deal with large 4K videos all the time. You will just buy another NAS and more drives in 5-7 years anyway. You don't want a drive to be running forever.

[Mitsu3000gt]

The 10 TB WD Reds seem to go on sale for $289-299 all the time now if anyone is shopping.

[FixedGear]

Thanks everyone. I ended up going with the 2 bay option with 8TB gold disks. I just got tired of debating the options so just did it haha. I'm sure it will work great for what I'm looking for.

[revelations]

RAID 1 it, but also get an Amazon Glacier account to upload direct from NAS, for pennies a day.

[Mitsu3000gt]

I have a 2-bay Synology but to be honest I rarely use it anymore. Blackblaze is absurdly cheap ($3.99 USD/mo for unlimited data) and makes it so that there is really no need to have expensive on-site backup solutions if that is the reason you're getting a NAS. If your household needs constant access to local cloud data or something like that, then they make more sense.

[94CoRd]

RAID 1 it, but also get an Amazon Glacier account to upload direct from NAS, for pennies a day.

I've been looking in to this (along with something to replace my aging QNAP - 219PII). It's so hard to make sense of Amazon's pricing with glacier. From what I understand, All data in to glacier is free, it's $0.0045/GB/Month to store, and if i want my data back, I pay x amount, depending how fast I want my data, and then x amount per 1000 requests. Is each request a file? In the pricing calculator (https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html), it says UPLOAD requests. Is that the same as data in?

Back to the NAS H/W though - not sure I'm entirely happy with QTS. I know my hardware is a bit old (6 ish years) - but it's come to the point where I can't have any apps installed, and more recently have had to turn off the logging service, otherwise, my CPU is pinned, so much so, I can't even SSH in to the device, let alone access the admin page. It only has a single core 1.2GHz processor, and 512MB RAM, so it doesn't take much to use up all resources. Anything in the two bay world that would be worth moving up to?

[revelations]

^ try the Syn 218+ (again), seems to be a good choice - or even check if you can upgraded the RAM on the existing unit?

The Glacier pricing model is based on that you get charged up the ass for DOWNLOADING BACK your data (presumably, disaster recovery).

[FixedGear]

Hey guys, I just got my DS218+ set up! I've not got to transfer about 2TB of files to it... can anyone recommend the best way to do that? I imagine I don't want to just CTRL-C and CTRL-P from my laptop. Is there some software that will check the transferred files to make sure they transferred properly and without errors? Thanks!

EDIT: Also we really only plan to use this as a media server. I'd like to turn it off when we're not using it - is it OK to turn it on/off frequently, or will that damage the disks? (I've read some opinions that you should leave it running all the time)

[The_Penguin]

Hey guys, I just got my DS218+ set up! I've not got to transfer about 2TB of files to it... can anyone recommend the best way to do that? I imagine I don't want to just CTRL-C and CTRL-P from my laptop. Is there some software that will check the transferred files to make sure they transferred properly and without errors? Thanks!

robocopy.

[suntan]

Why turn off? It uses almost no electricity.

[colsankey]

Turning on and off mechanical hard drives isnt great, why cant you leave it running?

[FixedGear]

Yeah I guess I can leave it running, it just seems wasteful and possibly an increased security risk?

[jacky4566]

robocopy.

Just to clarify. Robocopy is a built in windows tool to copy, paste and clone stuff. Works great. You can also try Teracopy if you want a more GUI approach.

Also most NAS will spin down the drives with inactivity, idling with a few watts. That'll cost you pennies over the year so just leave it running. You could shut it down properly but its really unnecessary savings.

For others shopping around the DS918+ is awesome, no HDMI for media but otherwise is a perfect little box. Software is very easy to use.

[Xtrema]

Yeah I guess I can leave it running, it just seems wasteful and possibly an increased security risk?

Synology has built is power options that you can enable to spin down the drive when not in use. But you need data, expect a 5-20s wait for it to spin up. But really, it's only 2 drives and probably 20-30w draw at most.

As for security issue, it's just like any electronics. Pick a good admin password and keep it on automatic OS update to stay at latest version to make sure there isn't any vulnerability.

And who else is going to be on your home network hacking your NAS?

[FixedGear]

Synology has built is power options that you can enable to spin down the drive when not in use. But you need data, expect a 5-20s wait for it to spin up. But really, it's only 2 drives and probably 20-30w draw at most.

As for security issue, it's just like any electronics. Pick a good admin password and keep it on automatic OS update to stay at latest version to make sure there isn't any vulnerability.

And who else is going to be on your home network hacking your NAS?

I don't think anyone will be hacking from within my home network, but can people hack in from outside? (sorry if that sounds silly, I'm an idiot!)

[revelations]

Your biggest threat to ANY storage device on a network, in 2019, is loss of data due to: flood, fire, theft or ransomware. I dealt with the last 2 just recently. Offsite backups are absolutely crucial.

A state sponsored hacker, or script kiddies, should not even register for the average home user.

Also, disable spin down on all NAS' Thats why you have gold series drives - designed to run for 200 years, but not with 10,000 s/s cycles.

[Mitsu3000gt]

If you're just using the NAS for pure storage, you might consider just getting a Blackblaze subscription and be done with it. Then you have nothing to worry about, and you don't even have to remember to back up your stuff - it's all completely automatic.

[FixedGear]

If you're just using the NAS for pure storage, you might consider just getting a Blackblaze subscription and be done with it. Then you have nothing to worry about, and you don't even have to remember to back up your stuff - it's all completely automatic.

I've had a Backblaze subscription for years, but it's just for my laptop and I didn't think you could get it to backup network drives? (I read that you used to be able to mount the drive in Windows and Backblaze would see it as an attached drive, but apparently MS disallowed that with a patch, so it no longer works).

If you mean just storing things on Backlaze, yeah I don't think that would work for us, since we're using this mainly to stream media

- - - Updated - - -


Your biggest threat to ANY storage device on a network, in 2019, is loss of data due to: flood, fire, theft or ransomware. I dealt with the last 2 just recently. Offsite backups are absolutely crucial.

A state sponsored hacker, or script kiddies, should not even register for the average home user.

Also, disable spin down on all NAS' Thats why you have gold series drives - designed to run for 200 years, but not with 10,000 s/s cycles.

thanks

[FixedGear]

Also, disable spin down on all NAS' Thats why you have gold series drives - designed to run for 200 years, but not with 10,000 s/s cycles.

How do I disable the spin down? I can't seem to find that option in the online command centre thingie

EDIT: I found an option to "Enable advanced HDD hibernation...", does unchecking that box disable the spin down?

[revelations]

How do I disable the spin down? I can't seem to find that option in the online command centre thingie

EDIT: I found an option to "Enable advanced HDD hibernation...", does unchecking that box disable the spin down?

It should under the POWER settings - disable all modes of power saving, including that one.

[FixedGear]

It should under the POWER settings - disable all modes of power saving, including that one.

Thanks, I turned that one off, but didn't see any other power options that I could turn off.

[FixedGear]

I've noticed a few times that my drives seem to be spinning down randomly, then spin back up when we try to access it. I've turned off everything I can see in the power options. Anyone know of any instructions for DS218+ o turning off spin down? I can't figure it out!