I am looking into getting a NAS setup at home, but have to consider wanting it to just work and work for my family who are not technically advanced. They use computers fine, but being asked to open a terminal would require letter by letter instructions.
So my question, what is the current recommendation for a simple home NAS for files and video (family trips, etc) storage?
Applying negative selection, QNAP has a terrible security track record and WD has terrible performance and security track record. So if you want something that’s mostly plug and play, Synology it is, consider a “+” model if there’s any chance that you may expand beyond the simple file sharing use case.
Disclaimer: I currently own three Synology boxes (718+, 220+, 216j) and a QNAP TS-453D running Proxmox (for fun and as an attempt to move towards a HW vendor-independent solution).
Since I can’t see any other reference to it, I want to mention I’m using openmediavault and export smb mounts for my windows computers and NFS for Linux. It is running in a VM in proxmox. Works well enough for me. It is my in house backup destination, and my Plex media files storage (plex is running in a container on the same proxmox host).
Like most and probably every other mentioned solution, accessing the nas/shared storage is not more difficult than just opening windows explorer on windows and selecting the network location, etc. I’m sure it is easy on Mac as well, but I don’t use apple products myself.
Last time I checked it was quite hard to get my hands on a DS920+. The more recent DS923+ does not have the same specs, the main drawback being that it’s not able to do hardware transcoding anymore (useful for multimedia server).
Simplest I’ve found personally is using an old Pc and getting a PCIE sas/SATA expansion card to allow more drives to be added if you need more than the normal data limit. Use windows server 2019 or 2022. The trial periods for these are 180 days that can be renewed another 5 times which gives a long time before you reinstall the OS. Then you share the folder/drive like normal. It’s simplest because it’s still a GUI and windows.
You can also pool drives so that multiple drives appear like a single drive, this is supported in windows itself (I forget the name in settings) or you can look at something like “drivepool”. I use this to have a “main pool” with a few large drives and then a “backup pool” which is mostly old 1tb or larger drives and use a program like “cobain reflector” to automate a backup of the main pool. Nice thing about “drive pool” is, if the server goes down for any reason, I can still pull each drive out and read whatever is on each drive without having to process them back into a “pool”. The files are just natively visible. Feel free to ask for extra info if anyone is interested.
Very true. It runs at good throttled speeds and the biggest power consumers are the hard drives themselves. Not to mention everyone else recommending different OS but no mention of hardware except people recommending synology boxes.
My users interface with my server via plex, smb and Nextcloud.
The guts are pretty complicated but from my users’ point of view it’s pretty simple.
You should think about what services you plan to offer and go from there.
Be aware that none of the off the shelf products have a good reputation for being secure when providing services outside your network which is when you may want stuff like Nextcloud.
Dude I’ve gone full circle on this one, and I currently am on the Synology train and life is easy.
It feels like I’ve had a bit of everything at some point. Clarkconnect, Windows Home Server, straight Ubuntu, Unraid, FreeNAS, some garbage on my router…
… Synology stuff is super well designed, easy to use, and widely supported. I spent some time chasing privacy options, but other than that it has been zero hassle and high reliability.
Not often, but often enough…I had some significant problems with version upgrades and would end up having to configure the whole system again from scratch;
My hardware was getting pretty old. While pricing out an upgrade for it, I was surprised to find a more capable Synology for less (DS1821+);
Remote backups. I have had a bazillion different solutions for off-site backups, and none of them have stood the test of time. The last one before Synology was a separate machine running Duplicati, pulling data from TrueNAS, and sending it off to an ODROID-HC2 running Minio. It worked sometimes. Hyper Backup on Synology is an entirely different world of ease and reliability–it has been flawless.
I kind of got tired of TrueNAS as a hobby. I ran into and waited for resolution on bugs, had a bunch of customizations done from the command line that I’d forget about before the next time a version upgrade wouldn’t work and I’d have to start over, and just in general had to keep up my knowledge managing the thing (cruising the forum and subreddit). Synology isn’t as flexible, but I never have to deal with it…and that has been pretty nice.
2 bays sound like a nice easy introduction to NAS until you pick raid 0 like a fucking animal.
I could have data redundancy or I could have DOUBLE the storage …
Also want to call out the importance of 4-bay vs. 2-bay. With 2-bay you get 1-drive fault tolerance in RAID mode, which is nice. With 4-bay, you can still opt for 1-drive fault tolerance and with SHR you can have 4 drives active (of varying sizes) giving you much more available space and making the upgrade path of storage significantly easier.
I bought an asustor a while back because I wanted my critical files protected by drive mirroring. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. Not just as a basic NAS, but it also has a really nice ecosystem of apps that can run on it, so for example if you want to run a local nextcloud, you can do that without doing anything on a terminal.
Regardless of what system you use, your family members will always only have to connect to the shared folders. If they just want to backup and browse files, they won’t have to touch a terminal, ever. That’s the whole point of NAS.
So it’s really a matter of your budget and how much time you’re willing to spend setting it up. For instance, a 5-bay hard drive enclosure and an old 7th gen i3 NUC will do most of what a Synology DS423+ will do and will save youa about US $250. But the synology will take you 2 hours to setup and a few hours of tinkering if you wish whereas the NUC will take many hours of tinkering and setup, depending on your skill level. You’ll also end up with a less polished interface on the NUC setup.
So if you’re the kind of person who loves playing around with custom built system, pickup whatever you like and set it up to your preference. If you just want to get something and have it work, go for Synology.
Oh, and also, Synology shares a lot of data with Synology servers. Mostly it’s not a concern, but if you worry about that kind of thing, you might want to know beforehand.
Another vote for Synology here. I previously had a DS418play for almost 8 years. Just picked up a DS423+ recently to upgrade and the process was literally as simple as removing the drives from the old NAS, chucking them in the new NAS, and booting up. All my Docker containers, all my credentials, all my licenses were all just there and working, despite being in a new shell.
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Applying negative selection, QNAP has a terrible security track record and WD has terrible performance and security track record. So if you want something that’s mostly plug and play, Synology it is, consider a “+” model if there’s any chance that you may expand beyond the simple file sharing use case.
Disclaimer: I currently own three Synology boxes (718+, 220+, 216j) and a QNAP TS-453D running Proxmox (for fun and as an attempt to move towards a HW vendor-independent solution).
Since I can’t see any other reference to it, I want to mention I’m using openmediavault and export smb mounts for my windows computers and NFS for Linux. It is running in a VM in proxmox. Works well enough for me. It is my in house backup destination, and my Plex media files storage (plex is running in a container on the same proxmox host).
Like most and probably every other mentioned solution, accessing the nas/shared storage is not more difficult than just opening windows explorer on windows and selecting the network location, etc. I’m sure it is easy on Mac as well, but I don’t use apple products myself.
Synology DS920+ or DS1520+, either one.
You’ll find each step of the process mostly handheld with great guides online for pretty much anything you would ever wanna do with a NAS.
Last time I checked it was quite hard to get my hands on a DS920+. The more recent DS923+ does not have the same specs, the main drawback being that it’s not able to do hardware transcoding anymore (useful for multimedia server).
TrueNas scale is still really beta, but cool as fuk
Syno ds920+ w/2 16’s & 2 6’s. Use: home docs, pics, and a Plex server.
QNAP ts233 with 2 6tb for “off-site” backup sitting on my desk at work connected to the guest wifi backing up the home docs and pics from the syno.
Simplest I’ve found personally is using an old Pc and getting a PCIE sas/SATA expansion card to allow more drives to be added if you need more than the normal data limit. Use windows server 2019 or 2022. The trial periods for these are 180 days that can be renewed another 5 times which gives a long time before you reinstall the OS. Then you share the folder/drive like normal. It’s simplest because it’s still a GUI and windows.
You can also pool drives so that multiple drives appear like a single drive, this is supported in windows itself (I forget the name in settings) or you can look at something like “drivepool”. I use this to have a “main pool” with a few large drives and then a “backup pool” which is mostly old 1tb or larger drives and use a program like “cobain reflector” to automate a backup of the main pool. Nice thing about “drive pool” is, if the server goes down for any reason, I can still pull each drive out and read whatever is on each drive without having to process them back into a “pool”. The files are just natively visible. Feel free to ask for extra info if anyone is interested.
Watch power consumption though. It matters for a device that runs potentially 24/7
Very true. It runs at good throttled speeds and the biggest power consumers are the hard drives themselves. Not to mention everyone else recommending different OS but no mention of hardware except people recommending synology boxes.
Oh I would recommend Synology too, but since many already did there’s no reason to do this again.
My users interface with my server via plex, smb and Nextcloud.
The guts are pretty complicated but from my users’ point of view it’s pretty simple.
You should think about what services you plan to offer and go from there.
Be aware that none of the off the shelf products have a good reputation for being secure when providing services outside your network which is when you may want stuff like Nextcloud.
I’ve got an older model WD 4 drive NAS. It works well and is easy to manage. What’s great is how little I need to think about it.
Dude I’ve gone full circle on this one, and I currently am on the Synology train and life is easy.
It feels like I’ve had a bit of everything at some point. Clarkconnect, Windows Home Server, straight Ubuntu, Unraid, FreeNAS, some garbage on my router…
… Synology stuff is super well designed, easy to use, and widely supported. I spent some time chasing privacy options, but other than that it has been zero hassle and high reliability.
What made you move away from FreeNAS?
It was a combination of factors, really:
You can’t go wrong with a 2-bay Synology 🤷🏻♂️ yes TrueNAS is more “selfhosted”, but the Synology is way easier.
Seconded for Synology. I have had zero complaints with mine.
Agree with the Synology recommendation for a simple starter. Though personally always recommend the 4 bay.
if I had my time again I would go 4 bay first.
2 bays sound like a nice easy introduction to NAS until you pick raid 0 like a fucking animal.
I could have data redundancy or I could have DOUBLE the storage …
Also want to call out the importance of 4-bay vs. 2-bay. With 2-bay you get 1-drive fault tolerance in RAID mode, which is nice. With 4-bay, you can still opt for 1-drive fault tolerance and with SHR you can have 4 drives active (of varying sizes) giving you much more available space and making the upgrade path of storage significantly easier.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #4 for this sub, first seen 19th Jul 2023, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
good bot
You missed QNAP
I bought an asustor a while back because I wanted my critical files protected by drive mirroring. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. Not just as a basic NAS, but it also has a really nice ecosystem of apps that can run on it, so for example if you want to run a local nextcloud, you can do that without doing anything on a terminal.
Regardless of what system you use, your family members will always only have to connect to the shared folders. If they just want to backup and browse files, they won’t have to touch a terminal, ever. That’s the whole point of NAS.
So it’s really a matter of your budget and how much time you’re willing to spend setting it up. For instance, a 5-bay hard drive enclosure and an old 7th gen i3 NUC will do most of what a Synology DS423+ will do and will save youa about US $250. But the synology will take you 2 hours to setup and a few hours of tinkering if you wish whereas the NUC will take many hours of tinkering and setup, depending on your skill level. You’ll also end up with a less polished interface on the NUC setup.
So if you’re the kind of person who loves playing around with custom built system, pickup whatever you like and set it up to your preference. If you just want to get something and have it work, go for Synology.
Oh, and also, Synology shares a lot of data with Synology servers. Mostly it’s not a concern, but if you worry about that kind of thing, you might want to know beforehand.
Simplest would be off an off the shelf NAS
Yeah it’ll cost more but there’s a support line other than you to call if something goes wrong
Which one specifically I don’t know, the Nas I have I built myself and installed TrueNAS Scale.
Another vote for Synology here. I previously had a DS418play for almost 8 years. Just picked up a DS423+ recently to upgrade and the process was literally as simple as removing the drives from the old NAS, chucking them in the new NAS, and booting up. All my Docker containers, all my credentials, all my licenses were all just there and working, despite being in a new shell.