Best NAS for remote Windows, Mac backups, remote access, torrenting and CCTV?

Trojan Horse · 14 Feb 2017 at 13:07

I'm wanting to buy a NAS for next year.

It's going to be a pretty big NAS, slowly I'll max it out to 4x4tb drives, but I will probably only have 1 4tb to start off with. This is what I want to do with it:

Access NAS remotely
Backup MBP and Windows automatically
Torrent on NAS
Stream files to PCs and remotely
Store OneDrive / Dropbox files on NAS
Use it as a CCTV feed

Are there any pros/cons to building my own NAS as opposed to buying a Synology? What model would be best?

crazyDAJT · 14 Feb 2017 at 21:50

Synology NAS are grate, I have a DS214Play (2 bay) and it just works grate, easy to use and with good additional functionality.

It will do everything you want and more, although you are limited to 2 up cams on surveillance centre.

However a 4 bay unit will run you around £370+. At this point you might want to think about using a computer to do it, second hand or a low powered atom motherbord, this will give you a lot more functionality and expansion options.

But it is a lot more of a project.

I would also suggest starting with at least 2 drives so you have some redundancy.

PiKe · 14 Feb 2017 at 21:52

I would build an unraid box.

And I did, and it's brilliant.

Deluge, couch potato, sonarr, Plex and data integrity thanks to the ZFS filesystem.

crazyDAJT · 14 Feb 2017 at 22:01

Thats is kind of what I was talking about.

It's what I'm looking at as I have no option to expand.

I'm looking second hand server stuff, dual socket lga1366. For around £200 you can get a lot of power for VM's etc. Not very power efficiency however.

Edit: how you get ZFS on unraid?

PiKe · 14 Feb 2017 at 22:08

Unraid is built around being a NAS first and foremost but there are dockers you can run like deluge, Plex etc and even run full blown VMs.

Edit: my mistake freenas is ZFS, unraid is its own implementation.

crazyDAJT · 14 Feb 2017 at 22:18

Was thinking that was a bit odd about ZFS, anway from my research the parity system works quite nicely to the home user.

Yes it's slower on writes (but this can be worked around using a cache drive)
If you have a catastrophic failure you can just pull the drives and read data off them because is doesn't stripe data across like raid.

Also the VM support in Uraid is supposed to be amazing with easy GPU passthough

PiKe · 14 Feb 2017 at 23:01

Yes writes are a bit rubbish, so my initial transfer of 1.1tb took a while!

I'm installing a 120gb SSD cache drive for my torrents and appdata so that should help things along nicely.

The server doesn't have to be anything special either. Mine is just a HP Microserver N36L with 4gb RAM and it works well, obviously transcoding is out of the window but all my devices can direct play.

Another nice thing is with the way parity works, you only ever lose 1 drive no matter how many drives you add (or 2 with duel parity), they can also be different sizes as long as it's not bigger than the parity drive.

bledd · 16 Feb 2017 at 16:43

Synology 916+.

4 bay Synology with hardware transcoding, Plex will work with it too.

Yes, they are expensive, but you can just set them and forget about it.