Home NAS. Talk to me.

[V_R]

Ok, so This is something I've wanted to do for a while but never really got round to it...

Looking at setting up a proper NAS at home, along the lines of a 4 bay Synology and some WD reds. (4x4TB in RAID5 or SHR) giving me 12TB usable space according to this: https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator

Will be for media server, backups of PC, laptops etc. The usual I guess.

I'd rather do it right first time and spend a few quid more than go cheap now and end up forking out more for more/bigger drives or a bigger NAS later on down the line, is that the right way to look at it?

Synology are looking good at the mo, liking the look of DSM.


This is part plan part thinking out loud at the mo so nothing is set in stone, just looking for opinions.

 

[Anon_F]

What sort of budget £££ are you looking at?

I backed all PC's and Films to x2 External HDD's but then i dont game!!

 

[TriplexDread]

I've been wanting to do this for a long time. The issue for me is cost

WD reds would be my choice too

Synology do a slim version which allows for 2.5 drives. Quite limited to your capacity then though

 

[V_R]

Yeah I hear you TD, price is certainly a thing. Its starting to seem more and more logical now though. Especially given the amount of photos the OH takes which is quite frankly scary!!

Running Plex on it would also be great.

Nah 3.5" Reds is the only thing I'm certain on.....

......Unless 4TB SSD's fall in price soon.

 

[EvanDavis]

Is there no option to build your own NAS ?

 

[V_R]

Its certainly an option, like I said just looking for opinions at the moment.

 

[mcp-mario]

As it seems, Seagate for hdd would also be an excellent choice too.
Mentioned before is, what's the budget and what do you want to use it for?

I have Synology NAS myself, it's an older one but still good for testing all kind of things like networking, webdesign, audio/video share, vpn, etc.
Nice stuff to play with b.t w

 

[V_R]

Well, at the moment I haven't set a budget as such (within reason of course!), more looking to what it's likely to cost and if I can justify said cost.

Not going to be cheap if I go the DS415/415play + 4 WD reds though, that is for certain. Which is what I've been looking at.

The DS214Play + 2 Reds is cheaper but obviously only a two bay enclosure, meaning I'd likely go for bigger drives.

I just don't know....


Media server and backup of all devices from PC's and laptops to phones and tablets would be its core function, but knowing me I'd start finding other uses for it too once it were up and running.

I'm also eyeing up the HTPC route (rather than a NAS not as well as lol)

Have sacked off the build your own server route as it will be too big and too power hungry. Thats why the Synology boxes appeal, great form factor and very energy efficient.

 

[Ian]

I've got a 4-bay QNAP NAS and it's one of the best bits of tech that I own - you'll love having a NAS! I've played with Synology too and really liked their features.

Are you going to go down the route of RAID or encrypting volumes, as that may influence which model NAS to go for. I've done both, so a 4-bay was the only practical solution for my needs - but if you're happy to avoid RAID then 2-bay may be fine for a good number of years. FWIW, I've had a drive fail in my NAS, RAID worked fine and I lost no data.

 

[V_R]

Ah! I was hoping you would reply Ian! Thought you may have been away with Becky for her birthday.


Well. I will certainly be using some form of redundancy, SHR or RAID5 seems to be the best options. (I think)

Not given encryption a thought, its it something I should be doing?


Tbh its all new to me so It's a learning curve at the mo. Seems the more I read the more I need to read lol.

 

[Ian]

Yeah went away for the night to Liverpool and just got back .

If you're thinking about having redundancy then you may want to go for a 4bay NAS to make things a little more cost effective - you'll get more life out of it, it's probably more powerful and you'll be able to buy disks at cost effective prices (rather than opting for 2 huge ones initially, which cost more then 4 of the same total capacity). It'll be more £ upfront, but it'll last longer and mean you have much more flexibility.

Encryption depends on what you're storing I suppose - if it's media content then it may not be too important, but if it's personal docs and backups, then it may be worth considering. I've got it running, but there is a performance hit from enabling it on my NAS - as the CPU doesn't have AES-256 acceleration. Most newer NAS units will have AES acceleration if they've got a decent CPU - I'd definitely make sure that you check this if you want encryption as it will mean there isn't much of a performance hit.

DLNA streaming will work well from most NAS units, even cheap ones - but if you're likely to want transcoding, then make sure it's going to be powerful enough. My NAS must be about 5 years old now, so it can't handle on the fly transcoding for large files, but it'll happily chew through them at a decent pace in the background.

 

[TriplexDread]

Should have said Ian was over the water yesterday with my boy. Could have met up

 

[V_R]

Yeah went away for the night to Liverpool and just got back .

If you're thinking about having redundancy then you may want to go for a 4bay NAS to make things a little more cost effective - you'll get more life out of it, it's probably more powerful and you'll be able to buy disks at cost effective prices (rather than opting for 2 huge ones initially, which cost more then 4 of the same total capacity). It'll be more £ upfront, but it'll last longer and mean you have much more flexibility.

Encryption depends on what you're storing I suppose - if it's media content then it may not be too important, but if it's personal docs and backups, then it may be worth considering. I've got it running, but there is a performance hit from enabling it on my NAS - as the CPU doesn't have AES-256 acceleration. Most newer NAS units will have AES acceleration if they've got a decent CPU - I'd definitely make sure that you check this if you want encryption as it will mean there isn't much of a performance hit.

DLNA streaming will work well from most NAS units, even cheap ones - but if you're likely to want transcoding, then make sure it's going to be powerful enough. My NAS must be about 5 years old now, so it can't handle on the fly transcoding for large files, but it'll happily chew through them at a decent pace in the background.

Finally a chance to actually reply to this! lol.

Yeah I'm edging towards a 4 bay, 2 bay just won't cut it... Your first paragraph sums up my thoughts exactly.

Encryption is something I'll look into, cheers for the insight.

The model I'm looking at was the DS415play

However I came across this on Reddit this morning: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc/edit#gid=314388488

So I may change that now. Seems the DS415+ might be a better option due to the quad core CPU....


Hmmmm.

 

[Ian]

Oh, that's a nice spreadsheet @V_R - good find! That looks like a good option, the encryption speeds look fantastic too .

 

[TriplexDread]

About 20seconds into browsing that sheet I get a popup "error" that all it says

 

[V_R]

No such issues like that for me TD.

 

[floppybootstomp]

That spreadsheet must have taken some putting together, good find.

I have some very simple storage atm but eventually I want to set up some NAS, I'm hoping SSD prices will drop by the time I want to increase my storage.

For the moment I have a simple enclosure with a pair of 4Tb mechanical 3.5" drives in one of These in a RAID 0 config. I think I used Hitachi drives.

I figured RAID 0 as permanent backup as I have a lot of media stored in there. My machine sees it as a single 4Tb disk. USB 3 is nice and fast as well.

On there I have video, audio and pictures. Have only had it since winter and there's only 431Gb left (effectively only 68Gb). I'll either have to store some items on BD-R disks, get a pair of 5 or 6Tb disks or another identical setup (whole setup of enclosure and 2 x 4Tb disks is aprox £300).

I'll be watching your NAS progress with interest.

 

[Abarbarian]

The Hunt For the Ultimate Free Open Source NAS Distro

Top 10 Linux NAS Systems for a Small Office

 

[V_R]

No.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Strange as it may seem O Barbaric one, some folk care not for Linux

Cut through the all the crap and the greed and Windows isn't too bad, mostly on account of it works and it's easy to use.

Other folk, of course, prefer a machine run by Apple Macintosh.

Me, I like cup cakes