Advice On A Replacement NAS

[Valo]

I’m looking for some advice about replacing my current NAS.

I’m a Mac user and I currently have a Drobo 5N that I’ve owned for about 9yrs. It’s served me well and has saved my bacon on more than a few occasions.

My primary use is for storing Photos, Music and Video along with acting as my Time Machine backup for my Mac.

The problem I have is my Drobo5N has a drive pool limitation of 16TB thanks to the file system it uses. This wasn’t a big deal when I first got it as 16TB was a whole chunk of storage, unfortunately now with expanding my pool of drives over the years I’m now getting close to hitting that mark.

Drobo themselves have released a patch to allow expansion to 64TB but it requires the Drobo to be erased and reformatted with your data backed up to a separate drive before hand.

The option that makes more sense to me is to look at a new NAS with better specs than my Drobo and migrate my data to that, then transfer my current pool of drives from my Drobo to populate and expanded the new NAS.

The reason I went with Drobo was the ease of expanding the array when more space was required. I’d be keen to keep that functionality. When I’ve looked myself and I think Synology can do this with Synology Hybrid Raid?

My current Drobo is five bay, so again either 5 or 6 bay would be ideal.

Any advice would be great.

 

[ChrisD.]

I've recently bought the QNAP TS-673A and it's a little beast. I'm very happy with it and the eprformance.

 

[neil_g]

Personally I'd go Synology. Used them a few years back but the hardware was good and their support was great.

QNAP we're finding quite a lot of models having backplane issues at the moment, and support/RMA is like wading through treacle. QNAP direct shipped us a unit with incompatible drives not so long ago too which was strange.

 

[Slackworth]

Another vote for Synology here - used them for years and *touch wood*, they've been bombproof.

Would be a DS1520+ or DS1621+ depending if you want a 5 or 6-bay unless you want 10Gbps in which case go for the DS1621xs+.

 

[ChrisD.]

DS1621xs+

£1230 and doesn't even have PCI slots! Wow. I knew Synology are expensive but that's taking the biscuit.

 

[Slackworth]

The Xs does have a PCI-E x8 slot for expansion if needed I agree it's not the best value of the bunch - I'd probably look at the 1520+ in the Op's shoes.

 

[neil_g]

£1230 and doesn't even have PCI slots! Wow. I knew Synology are expensive but that's taking the biscuit.

specs say -

1 x Gen3 x8 slot (x8 link)

 

[Slackworth]

It's also worth looking to see if anyone has the previous years model - such as DS1618+ - the differences are fairly slim and there might be a reasonable saving but I guess this will be in the nearly new/eBay world.

 

[ChrisD.]

Couldn't see it on the pictures, but even so it's a single x8 slot. My TS-673A was under £900, has 2.5 GbE as standard (okay not 10 GbE) and two PCIe Gen 3 x4. It's also a quad core, can run ZFS and (apparently) take up to 64GB of RAM (ECC or unregistered). The CPU is going to be quicker and way less power hungry than the ageing Intel Xeon D in the Synology.

Synology's OS is superb and their NAS's are well built and look nice, but to me they've always been mega expensive compared to the competition.

I use my NAS harder than most (storage for a lot of VMs, backup, media file shares etc) and my experience with QNAP has been rock solid.

 

[sandys]

if you are feeling adventurous you could roll your own, I built mine around an Asrockrack X570 and a low power Ryzen GE, it's a beast, of course probably uses a bit more power, it does about 22w idling and 50w loading the CPUs on game servers, but it comes with a stack on board, dual 10G, IMPI for remote management, 8xsata, 2 NVMe plus plenty of free slots for upgradability, I did it just for interest and to upgrade my HP microserver, a QNAP or Synology would be far simpler, but it is a cracking little machine, in my free slots I have another 4 NVMe on top of the 2 onboard and can fill the dual 10Gb NICs nicely transferring to and from the NAS.

Took me a whilst to do it and if I'm honest I would probably have bought a QNAP if I realized the rathole of tinkering this would take me down but I learned a lot. I quite liked the QNAP H686/H886 personally but appears quite similar to what you have chosen from Synology.

 

[ChrisD.]

@sandys which specific board and CPU did you go for?

 

[Quartz]

Yes, roll your own. Check out the Craft Computing Youtube channel for a TrueNAS tutorial.

He also shows you how to use Proxmox.

 

[sandys]

@sandys which specific board and CPU did you go for?

Asrockrack x570D4U-2L2T and the processor a 35w 4350GE or something like that, though it actually runs a 5950x at the moment just because a good deal came up on the CPU and I haven't got a motherboard to put it into so that I can retire my Threadripper yet, nor could I buy a bloody GPU to let it all flex, all in good time.

I almost bought the ITX version to do a restomod to my HP Microserver but decided my ambition was overtaking ability so built in a Fractal Node 804.

 

[ChrisD.]

Asrockrack x570D4U-2L2T and the processor a 35w 4350GE or something like that, though it actually runs a 5950x at the moment just because a good deal came up on the CPU and I haven't got a motherboard to put it into so that I can retire my Threadripper yet, nor could I buy a bloody GPU to let it all flex, all in good time.

I almost bought the ITX version to do a restomod to my HP Microserver but decided my ambition was overtaking ability so built in a Fractal Node 804.

Nice. I've actually thought about doing it myself as I generally only need a NAS to store data and act as an iSCSI server. I've no need for any of the apps as I run those all in VMs hosted in a vSphere environment. In the end though I thought it would be a lot of effort so I just bought the QNAP to replace my older one. It does the job well to be honest but I'm always curious about building my own and using TrueNAS on it.

 

[sandys]

In the end though I thought it would be a lot of effort so I just bought the QNAP to replace my older one.

You thought correctly though I was going down the virtualize all the things route as I felt it had the chops, my old HP it just did file sharing and kept at that level this would have been a doddle.

 

[Dave85]

I just bought the QNAP to replace my older one. It does the job well to be honest but I'm always curious about building my own and using TrueNAS on it.

It's funny before I bought your old one I watched all the videos on making my own and went nah and got your one. Its a proper little beast and I like slightly older hardware just mimics my self .

 

[ChrisD.]

It's funny before I bought your old one I watched all the videos on making my own and went nah and got your one. Its a proper little beast and I like slightly older hardware just mimics my self .

I actually wished I’d have kept it now as a secondary.

 

[Robi]

The Synology OS is the same on home user models (DS218j) and high end data centre models (RS3618xs). Storage/network/virtualisation consultants at my company who install and configure these on an almost daily basis, also use them at home - that tells you all you need to know about how good Synology NAS' are.

DSM is so easy to use, packed full of features and the 3rd party packages are fantastic.

 

[Dave85]

I agree having used DSM the QNAP system is not as friendly. The issue I have with synology is the cost for the lackluster hardware you get compared to QNAP. They very much are the apple of the nas world to me, polished but pricey.

 

[peige]

My synology is doing so much more than being a NAS. Its running a 3 camera cctv system, running transmission, NZBGet and running TeslaMate collating data from my car. All that and still streaming 4k video to the TV. Some nights even steaming 1080p to two different TV's at the same time.

You do pay for synology stuff but its very good. Last year I scaled up my hard drives by dropping each out and letting it rebuild four times as I repeated with each new drive, then expanding the whole volume onto the new space. Took 4 days in the end but all within DSM and very easy to do.