Thinking about getting a NAS

[mdredheadguy1979]

Hello everyone. Like I said, I'm thinking about getting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for my home.
What I'm hoping to accomplish:
1) one place to backup all my data, plus my android phone.
2) keep a clone copy of my laptops main drive.
3) eventually I want to copy my library of DVD movies onto the NAS, which I want to connect to my TV via HDMI, and be able to watch movies that way.
However, that's not my main goal right now.

Here is my problem, there are so many features and stats to consider for a NAS that my brain is on overload!
What features or hardware should I focus on, given my two main goals listed above?
Are there some nas manufacturers whose products I should avoid?
Is there anything else I need to know that I forgot to cover already??

Thank you for any help you can provide.

[DevaVictrix]

I do most if that with a little soc device (giada vm23) and a usb raid enclosure (though it’s jbod and I use rsync)…

OpenSUSE microos running cockpit and podman containers - Nextcloud, jellyfin, baikal, flatnotes, gitea and heimdall. If you want remote access use a cloudflare tunnel. It’s a couple of £ a year for a domain name.

I bought both items on eBay for £100 and it uses 6-8w of power. 1.5 - 2.5gb ram and the cpu barely does anything, btw. You don’t need anything powerful. I’m not sure if a raspberry pi could run everything because of arm, and micro sd cards fail so I didn’t look much into that option.

Nextcloud can do lots of things but I’ve stripped it down so it’s just files. My phone automatically backs photos up to it when I take one. It also integrates into my computer and phone so I don’t have any files on those devices, only the server.

[A&A]

DIY?
Embedded Silvermont processor on a motherboard or similar that will allow you to attach the required number of drives. Extention card might be needed.

[gwwak]

If you have an old PC around, you can repurpose it as a NAS. Set up Windows network sharing and you should be good. Main drawback of using an older PC and Windows is that if it is too old, you may be stuck on Windows 10 which is going end of life in October 2025.

[BurakZG]

For phones backup I use Nexcloud, for movies, music Plex. All installed on RaspberyPi with attached HDD. You can DIY or buy one of ready devices.
NAS devices that you can buy have tendency to loose support after the company gets bored with supporting them. I had that with Netgear Stora
I transformed it to Nextloud with RapberryPi.

[Zef]

First of all, start by letting us know which kind of implementation you would be willing to invest in.

DIY: setup your own server/NAS (fx. TrueNAS CORE )

Brand-name NAS: In general QNAP & Synology are most popular, but you have other brands like Asustor aswell.

When you are buying a brand-name NAS in general QNAP will give you more bang your buck while Synology has the better software integration, and (customer) support.

If it's your first time buying a NAS and you have the budget i would only recommend either QNAP or Synology.

And if you're not sure which disks to get, i can wholeheartedly recommend the WD Red Plus series (up to 12TB rn) which are some of the quietest NAS drives on the market. I know this won't be an issue for some people who have a little datacenter in a seperate room but if your thinking about placing a NAS somewhere in a living room area i would recommend taking the noise levels of the disk drives into account aswell.

[Pocahawtness]

Originally posted by mdredheadguy1979:

Hello everyone. Like I said, I'm thinking about getting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for my home.
What I'm hoping to accomplish:
1) one place to backup all my data, plus my android phone.
2) keep a clone copy of my laptops main drive.
3) eventually I want to copy my library of DVD movies onto the NAS, which I want to connect to my TV via HDMI, and be able to watch movies that way.
However, that's not my main goal right now.

Here is my problem, there are so many features and stats to consider for a NAS that my brain is on overload!
What features or hardware should I focus on, given my two main goals listed above?
Are there some nas manufacturers whose products I should avoid?
Is there anything else I need to know that I forgot to cover already??

Thank you for any help you can provide.

This is something I used to have and do.
Eventually, though, I replaced it with just a standard PC, albeit with a very low power processor. The PC has the advantage that it can be connected to a TV and can happily provide 4K video even though it doesn't have a graphics card. The PC was cheaper than a similar NAS and more powerful.
It's not that well known but Windows has Storage Spaces, which can be configured in a similar way to RAID and are very tolerant and flexible. I use several drives to form what looks like one large drive and (apparently) it is possible to replace or add drives very easily, without losing all the data on the rest of the drives.
I much prefer it to the NAS I used to own. It's familiar, more powerful, and can do anything a PC can do. Oh, and it's a lot less expensive.

[Pepe]

NAS Products

If you want something that runs out of the box with great UI and efficiency, then there are just a couple of vendors that have a very long good record of offering durable products to a wide range of people, from the home user to the enterprise: Synology and QNAP. I don't know about QNAP, but Synology did try to vendor lock some customers on upgrading system memory and extending some their more expensive NASs, but for the average user, the upgrades are either unavailable for the lower tiered products, or are not worth it. I have two old NASs from Synology, one with two bays, one with four, both are still running fine 10+ years later from the initial purchase. I know other colleagues and friends which have never had issues with Synology products. That being said, QNAP is a great alternative to Synology. They've created similar products to Synology, they offer similar user-friendly UI. Sometimes they offer more bung for the buck than Synology products on specific features, like expansion capabilities. Overall, between them, it's a matter of looks more than anything else. After you decide on what features you want from your NAS, I'd say just compare Synology and QNAP products that meet your needs and then decide on one or the other. You can't go wrong with either of them.

If you're more of a tinkerer, then you can also create your own NAS from scratch. On the hardware side, you can go from from Raspberry Pis to fully fledge server racks. It's a lot to cover on this subject and many options. When it comes to software, the most common names that pop up are unRAID (paid) and FreeNAS, now TrueNAS CORE. Now, if you're a sysadmin or a very enthusiastic advanced *nix user, you'd prolly go with your very own DIY custom server based on GNU/Linux or FreeBSD.



Features for a NAS

There are many functions a NAS can achieve, after all, it's a computer. But, if we're to go to the most basic functions, a NAS is a Storage on the Network. So, for storage, what we usually want is capacity and redundancy. For the network part, we want good throughput. Most NASs offer 1Gbps network at the base tier, which is more than enough, considering we'll use HDDs rather than SSDs for storage, and we won't be doing over the network intensive workloads, like creating network virtual disks that we attached locally and run software over them.

Even if it's not a priority right now, if your third goal is to watch videos over the network, that is an important factor in choosing your NAS. While running a movie through a HDMI cable is a simple and effective way to watch your movies collection on the TV, that may not be an option for a NAS. I'm not aware of Synology offering a HDMI output, while QNAP has some products with one output. Of course, if you go DIY, any PC has at least one GPU video output. That being said, most people don't go this route. Most people stream the content over the network to the TV using some kind of streaming software like Plex, QMedia or Jellyfin. Behind the scene, your NAS is doing what is known as transcoding, that is decoding your video file and encoding the content to the format is needed for you TV. That requires more powerful CPUs, but, most importantly, a GPU (either integrated or dedicated) that has certain hardware encoding and decoding capabilities, because this is the most efficient way to transcode a movie. With most brands you'll find they have some products "specially created" for this purpose, but, in many cases, you'll find alternative products not marketed specifically for that, which have more features and do have the same capabilities for transcoding. To look for the codec capabilities, first look on the product page if they list anything. Also, check the GPU specs, if any, then search on the web for that specific GPU hardware decoding features. If the GPU name is not specified, look for the CPU or System-on-the-Chip (SoC) names, and do a web search on their specs. Even though over the years there have been many upgrades on the base products, you may still find a few offering very low power consumption and storage capabilities, but not that great transcoding features, mostly ARM based rather than x86 CPUs. Jellyfin has a nice wiki page which contains info on hardware acceleration specs: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.

Going with a transcoding capable chip, usually, also means you'll have a fair CPU that would ensure better network speeds over encrypted file sharing protocols like Samba/SMB with encryption enabled, sFTP or scp.

To sum it up:
- for Storage redundancy, you need at least a 2-bay NAS;
- for Storage expansion, you'd want a NAS with 2-bay with at least one expansion port where you can connect an expansion unit (which may turn out to be more expensive on the long run), or (to keep it simple) a NAS with 4, 5, 6 bays;
- also for Storage expansion, get a NAS with 3.5" disk bays rather than 2.5". Most of them will also work with 2.5" drives, but it gives you more options when buying HDDs. At higher capacities, you'll find few or no 2.5" disks;
- for Network throughput, one 1Gbps Ethernet port is enough, but if you can get better network interfaces or more of them at similar price, go for that option. Some products offer 1 x 2.5Gbps port, some offer 2 x 1Gbps (which is nice to have for redundancy or balancing).
- for Transcoding you want a CPU/GPU/SoC that is the most capable for hardware encoding for your budget.

Other nice to have features, that might not be available on the base models:
- Hot-Plug or Hot-Swap on disks - this is one feature I like the most, because, in case of a disk failure, you won't have to shut down your NAS in order to change the failed drive. You can remove it and replace it as simple as changing a book on a shelf.
- Even though I think this is by now available on all Synology and QNAP NASs and any custom NAS software for DIY, I want to mention the TimeMachine service. If your laptop is a Mac, you can do TimeMachine backups with ease. As you mentioned clone copy of your drive, if you go the DIY way, and your laptop uses GNU/Linux or FreeBSD, you may find that ZFS can do on the fly snapshots over the network.

There are many other features that we can talk about, but I wanted to focus on what you want to achieve. For your needs, CPU over-the-top raw power and virtualisation features are not important, having a lot of RAM is not required, having NVMe SSD caching capabilities is not important. The list can go on and on. I hope my post just points you in the right direction.

[End0fDayz]

I bought a Synology NAS and haven't had any issues with it and has been going strong for ~2 years now. Can recommend.

[Zef]

Originally posted by Pepe:

NAS Products

If you want something that runs out of the box with great UI and efficiency, then there are just a couple of vendors that have a very long good record of offering durable products to a wide range of people, from the home user to the enterprise: Synology and QNAP. I don't know about QNAP, but Synology did try to vendor lock some customers on upgrading system memory and extending some their more expensive NASs, but for the average user, the upgrades are either unavailable for the lower tiered products, or are not worth it. I have two old NASs from Synology, one with two bays, one with four, both are still running fine 10+ years later from the initial purchase. I know other colleagues and friends which have never had issues with Synology products. That being said, QNAP is a great alternative to Synology. They've created similar products to Synology, they offer similar user-friendly UI. Sometimes they offer more bung for the buck than Synology products on specific features, like expansion capabilities. Overall, between them, it's a matter of looks more than anything else. After you decide on what features you want from your NAS, I'd say just compare Synology and QNAP products that meet your needs and then decide on one or the other. You can't go wrong with either of them.

If you're more of a tinkerer, then you can also create your own NAS from scratch. On the hardware side, you can go from from Raspberry Pis to fully fledge server racks. It's a lot to cover on this subject and many options. When it comes to software, the most common names that pop up are unRAID (paid) and FreeNAS, now TrueNAS CORE. Now, if you're a sysadmin or a very enthusiastic advanced *nix user, you'd prolly go with your very own DIY custom server based on GNU/Linux or FreeBSD.



Features for a NAS

There are many functions a NAS can achieve, after all, it's a computer. But, if we're to go to the most basic functions, a NAS is a Storage on the Network. So, for storage, what we usually want is capacity and redundancy. For the network part, we want good throughput. Most NASs offer 1Gbps network at the base tier, which is more than enough, considering we'll use HDDs rather than SSDs for storage, and we won't be doing over the network intensive workloads, like creating network virtual disks that we attached locally and run software over them.

Even if it's not a priority right now, if your third goal is to watch videos over the network, that is an important factor in choosing your NAS. While running a movie through a HDMI cable is a simple and effective way to watch your movies collection on the TV, that may not be an option for a NAS. I'm not aware of Synology offering a HDMI output, while QNAP has some products with one output. Of course, if you go DIY, any PC has at least one GPU video output. That being said, most people don't go this route. Most people stream the content over the network to the TV using some kind of streaming software like Plex, QMedia or Jellyfin. Behind the scene, your NAS is doing what is known as transcoding, that is decoding your video file and encoding the content to the format is needed for you TV. That requires more powerful CPUs, but, most importantly, a GPU (either integrated or dedicated) that has certain hardware encoding and decoding capabilities, because this is the most efficient way to transcode a movie. With most brands you'll find they have some products "specially created" for this purpose, but, in many cases, you'll find alternative products not marketed specifically for that, which have more features and do have the same capabilities for transcoding. To look for the codec capabilities, first look on the product page if they list anything. Also, check the GPU specs, if any, then search on the web for that specific GPU hardware decoding features. If the GPU name is not specified, look for the CPU or System-on-the-Chip (SoC) names, and do a web search on their specs. Even though over the years there have been many upgrades on the base products, you may still find a few offering very low power consumption and storage capabilities, but not that great transcoding features, mostly ARM based rather than x86 CPUs. Jellyfin has a nice wiki page which contains info on hardware acceleration specs: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.

Going with a transcoding capable chip, usually, also means you'll have a fair CPU that would ensure better network speeds over encrypted file sharing protocols like Samba/SMB with encryption enabled, sFTP or scp.

To sum it up:
- for Storage redundancy, you need at least a 2-bay NAS;
- for Storage expansion, you'd want a NAS with 2-bay with at least one expansion port where you can connect an expansion unit (which may turn out to be more expensive on the long run), or (to keep it simple) a NAS with 4, 5, 6 bays;
- also for Storage expansion, get a NAS with 3.5" disk bays rather than 2.5". Most of them will also work with 2.5" drives, but it gives you more options when buying HDDs. At higher capacities, you'll find few or no 2.5" disks;
- for Network throughput, one 1Gbps Ethernet port is enough, but if you can get better network interfaces or more of them at similar price, go for that option. Some products offer 1 x 2.5Gbps port, some offer 2 x 1Gbps (which is nice to have for redundancy or balancing).
- for Transcoding you want a CPU/GPU/SoC that is the most capable for hardware encoding for your budget.

Other nice to have features, that might not be available on the base models:
- Hot-Plug or Hot-Swap on disks - this is one feature I like the most, because, in case of a disk failure, you won't have to shut down your NAS in order to change the failed drive. You can remove it and replace it as simple as changing a book on a shelf.
- Even though I think this is by now available on all Synology and QNAP NASs and any custom NAS software for DIY, I want to mention the TimeMachine service. If your laptop is a Mac, you can do TimeMachine backups with ease. As you mentioned clone copy of your drive, if you go the DIY way, and your laptop uses GNU/Linux or FreeBSD, you may find that ZFS can do on the fly snapshots over the network.

There are many other features that we can talk about, but I wanted to focus on what you want to achieve. For your needs, CPU over-the-top raw power and virtualisation features are not important, having a lot of RAM is not required, having NVMe SSD caching capabilities is not important. The list can go on and on. I hope my post just points you in the right direction. :bigsmile:

Did you just ask chatgpt to write you a summary of the pro's and cons of the different types of NAS systems?

Because this reads like generic AI-slop.

[Pepe]

Originally posted by Zef:

Originally posted by Pepe:

NAS Products

If you want something that runs out of the box with great UI and efficiency, then there are just a couple of vendors that have a very long good record of offering durable products to a wide range of people, from the home user to the enterprise: Synology and QNAP. I don't know about QNAP, but Synology did try to vendor lock some customers on upgrading system memory and extending some their more expensive NASs, but for the average user, the upgrades are either unavailable for the lower tiered products, or are not worth it. I have two old NASs from Synology, one with two bays, one with four, both are still running fine 10+ years later from the initial purchase. I know other colleagues and friends which have never had issues with Synology products. That being said, QNAP is a great alternative to Synology. They've created similar products to Synology, they offer similar user-friendly UI. Sometimes they offer more bung for the buck than Synology products on specific features, like expansion capabilities. Overall, between them, it's a matter of looks more than anything else. After you decide on what features you want from your NAS, I'd say just compare Synology and QNAP products that meet your needs and then decide on one or the other. You can't go wrong with either of them.

If you're more of a tinkerer, then you can also create your own NAS from scratch. On the hardware side, you can go from from Raspberry Pis to fully fledge server racks. It's a lot to cover on this subject and many options. When it comes to software, the most common names that pop up are unRAID (paid) and FreeNAS, now TrueNAS CORE. Now, if you're a sysadmin or a very enthusiastic advanced *nix user, you'd prolly go with your very own DIY custom server based on GNU/Linux or FreeBSD.



Features for a NAS

There are many functions a NAS can achieve, after all, it's a computer. But, if we're to go to the most basic functions, a NAS is a Storage on the Network. So, for storage, what we usually want is capacity and redundancy. For the network part, we want good throughput. Most NASs offer 1Gbps network at the base tier, which is more than enough, considering we'll use HDDs rather than SSDs for storage, and we won't be doing over the network intensive workloads, like creating network virtual disks that we attached locally and run software over them.

Even if it's not a priority right now, if your third goal is to watch videos over the network, that is an important factor in choosing your NAS. While running a movie through a HDMI cable is a simple and effective way to watch your movies collection on the TV, that may not be an option for a NAS. I'm not aware of Synology offering a HDMI output, while QNAP has some products with one output. Of course, if you go DIY, any PC has at least one GPU video output. That being said, most people don't go this route. Most people stream the content over the network to the TV using some kind of streaming software like Plex, QMedia or Jellyfin. Behind the scene, your NAS is doing what is known as transcoding, that is decoding your video file and encoding the content to the format is needed for you TV. That requires more powerful CPUs, but, most importantly, a GPU (either integrated or dedicated) that has certain hardware encoding and decoding capabilities, because this is the most efficient way to transcode a movie. With most brands you'll find they have some products "specially created" for this purpose, but, in many cases, you'll find alternative products not marketed specifically for that, which have more features and do have the same capabilities for transcoding. To look for the codec capabilities, first look on the product page if they list anything. Also, check the GPU specs, if any, then search on the web for that specific GPU hardware decoding features. If the GPU name is not specified, look for the CPU or System-on-the-Chip (SoC) names, and do a web search on their specs. Even though over the years there have been many upgrades on the base products, you may still find a few offering very low power consumption and storage capabilities, but not that great transcoding features, mostly ARM based rather than x86 CPUs. Jellyfin has a nice wiki page which contains info on hardware acceleration specs: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.

Going with a transcoding capable chip, usually, also means you'll have a fair CPU that would ensure better network speeds over encrypted file sharing protocols like Samba/SMB with encryption enabled, sFTP or scp.

To sum it up:
- for Storage redundancy, you need at least a 2-bay NAS;
- for Storage expansion, you'd want a NAS with 2-bay with at least one expansion port where you can connect an expansion unit (which may turn out to be more expensive on the long run), or (to keep it simple) a NAS with 4, 5, 6 bays;
- also for Storage expansion, get a NAS with 3.5" disk bays rather than 2.5". Most of them will also work with 2.5" drives, but it gives you more options when buying HDDs. At higher capacities, you'll find few or no 2.5" disks;
- for Network throughput, one 1Gbps Ethernet port is enough, but if you can get better network interfaces or more of them at similar price, go for that option. Some products offer 1 x 2.5Gbps port, some offer 2 x 1Gbps (which is nice to have for redundancy or balancing).
- for Transcoding you want a CPU/GPU/SoC that is the most capable for hardware encoding for your budget.

Other nice to have features, that might not be available on the base models:
- Hot-Plug or Hot-Swap on disks - this is one feature I like the most, because, in case of a disk failure, you won't have to shut down your NAS in order to change the failed drive. You can remove it and replace it as simple as changing a book on a shelf.
- Even though I think this is by now available on all Synology and QNAP NASs and any custom NAS software for DIY, I want to mention the TimeMachine service. If your laptop is a Mac, you can do TimeMachine backups with ease. As you mentioned clone copy of your drive, if you go the DIY way, and your laptop uses GNU/Linux or FreeBSD, you may find that ZFS can do on the fly snapshots over the network.

There are many other features that we can talk about, but I wanted to focus on what you want to achieve. For your needs, CPU over-the-top raw power and virtualisation features are not important, having a lot of RAM is not required, having NVMe SSD caching capabilities is not important. The list can go on and on. I hope my post just points you in the right direction.

Did you just ask chatgpt to write you a summary of the pro's and cons of the different types of NAS systems?

Because this reads like generic AI-slop.

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

I'll take it as a compliment. No, I wrote it all by myself. If you read it through and through, you'll notice I've said I had two 10+ years old Synology NASs, so let's say I know a few things about NAS systems.

[HIVEmind]

i went another level. i went windows server 2022. instead of one job really well. to a swiss army knife of features and tasks. if you have too have a spare cimputer

[Zef]

Originally posted by HIVEmind:

i went another level. i went windows server 2022. instead of one job really well. to a swiss army knife of features and tasks. if you have too have a spare cimputer

Unless it's a low powered HTPC like those beelink mini pc's i wouldn't bother with it since you'll offset the money spent on setting up a proper NAS relatively fast compared to the electricity costs that you'll be spending on your DIY windows server computer.

[WarBucks]

Rockstor recently changed to opensuse based. I have been using it for over 7 years.

Its newest version is currently in RC like 12 where its added Tailscale. So using that for about 6 months now im able to access my stuff from anywhere.

I dont bother backing up my phone but i do have a program called foldersync to sync my CD Rips from the NAS to the phone. Can go the other way.

I mostly use the NAS for playing my Bluray and dvd rips on my fire stick or phone with Kodi

I just treat everything as an NFS and SMB share and for that its been flawless.

[Electric Cupcake]

You don't really need to get fancy with a standalone host system.
A lot of routers have a USB slot you can plug a storage device into for ad hoc FTP hosting. Though for remotely connecting to it over WAN, there's likely to be security and NAT issues to iron out.

[Lord Flashheart]

There are so many ways to do what you describe.

I just a more suitable forum - ltt for example.

When it comes to servers/NAS:

I have an old machine as a NAS i7-3770 32GB RAM & 16TB logical storage. It works perfectly well for my needs (truenas scale).
I do not consider the machine as a backup, even though it has redundancy.
There is another machine for that (trunas also) & externall hard drives also.



For everything else it is an upgraded tiny PC:
32GB RAM , 1TB storage & added 2.5Gb nic.
It has a hypervisor called proxmox. On there is a variety of virtual machines and containers:

My router (oponsense), lancache,, low spec windows machine to update games - netboot, download manager, reverse proxy, jellyfin for streaming.

I have a very old tiny PC, which I need to get round to using as a proxmox backup server.


I do not backup my laptops, as there is nothing there to backup. Just access to the NAS/streaming.

Oh I use zerotier to access everything remotely.


The useful part relevant to games:

The windows Virtual machine updates games slowly in the background to the copy of them on the NAS. So it has a 'backup' of my games - thoug steam is really the backup.

The real benefit is when updating/installing any game on my gaming machine, game updates can be my LAN speed of 2.5Gb.


There you go.

Like it/ do not like it - DO NOT CARE! - I just posted this due to boredom when waiting on a gaming server.