4 bay Nas advice

liamcrane

liamcrane

liamcrane

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Evening all

I currently have a home made server that I am looking to sell off mainly because it's quite a large unit and I'm looking to downsize. It currently has 4 x2tb drives of data, I'm looking for a decent 4 bay Nas to store these in and I plan on using a Mac mini as the main server to push out media via plex as well as other things. I had considered maybe a nuc as the server but I'm not 100% sure if I want to go down that route.

Didn't really want to spend much more than £250 on the Nas unit.

Appreciate any advice as always

Cheers guys
 
The king of NAS imo is Synology, but the good 4 bay ones are more expensive than £250.

Cheaper alternatives like QNAP, Thecus and Asustor exist but I've not used any of theirs.

For the budget conscious you could look at the HP Microservers, much cheaper but I'd imagine you'd need to spend more time fiddling around with it.

I am a fan of just getting on with things, so I went for Synology personally even though it cost more.
 
Thanks for the input mate much appreciated, like yourself I have owned a synology before just a 2 bay one and I must say it was a fab piece of kit. Have also owned a micro server as well and it served very well. Only thing I found with the micro servers was the cpu would hold back with things like plex transcodes. I know the gen 8's can be upgraded but as soon as you start getting into that it starts to get expensive. I have just seen on the rain Forrest one for £180 though...

I have been looking at the readynas which I have seen for around the £190 mark, not had any experience with the readynas models before so just reading some reviews on them now.
 
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liamcrane said:
Thanks for the input mate much appreciated, like yourself I have owned a synology before just a 2 bay one and I must say it was a fab piece of kit. Have also owned a micro server as well and it served very well. Only thing I found with the micro servers was the cpu would hold back with things like plex transcodes. I know the gen 8's can be upgraded but as soon as you start getting into that it starts to get expensive. I have just seen on the rain Forrest one for £180 though...

I have been looking at the readynas which I have seen for around the £190 mark, not had any experience with the readynas models before so just reading some reviews on them now.
Click to expand...

Any models in the Group 1 Type 1 category should be able to Transcode reasonably well, of course these are all probably more expensive (I have DS1815+). https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/faq/577. You can put drives in and upgrade them one by one if you use the SHR Raid Group type.

If you're just playing locally in your network, then with a decent wired network it would probably use Direct Play and not be Transcoding anything, so the lower powered ones would be OK for that.

If you do need to transcode then you could get a standard 4 bay NAS and just use it as dumb storage for a more powerful server, something like a NUC, which could deal with being the server but talking to the NAS storage for files.

I'd avoid ReadyNAS, my brother had one but the RG died when a disk failed, and he had to mess about attaching the drives to a PC and paying some cash to a company that makes Raid recovery software to get some photos and things back. Without really reading anything else I'd probably rather get almost anything except for Netgear NAS's.
 
I would disagree with the second post in it's ranking of QNAP. Actually Synology and QNAP are pretty much the same, I've used both, with the others being behind. I've used an older Netgear ReadyNAS, for instance, and whilst the hardware was ok the software was missing quite a few options compared with the equivalent generation QNAP.

Normally in these threads you will get a lot of people telling you to get a HP microserver, or now.a Dell T20. The former, at least ... I don't know much about the latter, will give you a minimum of four bays and the processing power of a significantly more expensive NAS at a cheap price point with more flexibility. The trade off though is that you'll have to install and maintain some sort of OS on there so will involve more tinkering. Don't get me wrong, they are great little boxes (I have a HP gen8 microserver) but they are not as plug and play as a NAS.

Of course with whatever option the biggest cost is normally filling it with large disks anyway.
 
Thanks for all the help guys much appreciated! Still undecided on the way to go as there are so many nas boxes out there. I think i just want a basic 4 bay nas i dont really need it to do that much apart from house the 4 drives. I dont really need raid as one of the 4 drives i have is a 3tb backup drive to the main 3 drives along with a usb backup drive of important files. Just need to decide also what server to go for to run along side the nas, im leaning towards the mac mini at the moment
 
If your using a mac mini as the front end why not use directly attached storage, using thunderbolt the disks will be the bottleneck rather than anything else.
 
The main reason for not wanting to use thunderbolt disks is i have only just recently bought 3x 2tb internal disks and think transfer speeds are always better when storage is mounted internally.

Thanks for the thought though
 
liamcrane said:
The main reason for not wanting to use thunderbolt disks is i have only just recently bought 3x 2tb internal disks and think transfer speeds are always better when storage is mounted internally.

Thanks for the thought though
Click to expand...

You can use internal disks in a thunderbolt enclosure. You won't see any difference in speeds between internal and external (theoretically thunderbolt should be faster).
 
The HP Micro server is seriously easy to setup and the last 5-6 updates the unit has done its self without needing to download them onto the USB pen. I would seriously consider going that way if you want a very fast synology unit. Is is the equivalent of a £1000+ synology box.
 
I am tempted by the microserver, i have a server 2012 license or a windows 7/10 license i could use for it. Setting it up would be easy done plenty of these before, i notice you have to buy a floppy to sata power cable if you want to run an ssd as the boot drive from the ODD bay and if im right it need to be set up in its on raid 1 array to be able to boot from it?
 
Personally i purchased a PCI Sata card 4 port that works a treat. Means i can chuck 4 more drives in including a SSD boot drive. However i done away with the SSD as i now run the synology OS on mine meaning the OS is spread across all the drives. Performance wise its amazing. I can get about 90-95 MB/s over my gigabit network and stream 5 HD sources at one time with no issues, I cant try more than 5 lol.

Can highly recommend running the synology software on the microserver :)
 
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