Looking For A Good NAS Solution

I just want a simple, quiet box I can set up and then pretty much forget about but access with all my devices, not cheap but a NAS seems the best way to go.
 
I had a Buffalo Linkstation Live until recently when it decided to die. I've done a fair bit of digging around and I will be going for the Synology Diskstation DS212J with 2 x 2Tb HDD's, it just seems the best NAS choice around at the moment for the average home user.

As some have said they will work out the box, are quiet, low power consumption and have a small footprint but are packed full of all the features you could possibly want from a NAS device.

Stu
 
Synology all the way. Easy to use, nice feature set, robust, reliable and cheap to run. Works with most devices / phones / tablets but is esp good with apple products. ios has a very nice set of apps, including media sever and itunes server. Streams to airport express and airplay devices. 'nuff said
 
Based on that , is it best to set clients up with Cloud Station or just map the folders as shares then?
 
I had a Buffalo Linkstation Live until recently when it decided to die. I've done a fair bit of digging around and I will be going for the Synology Diskstation DS212J with 2 x 2Tb HDD's, it just seems the best NAS choice around at the moment for the average home user.

As some have said they will work out the box, are quiet, low power consumption and have a small footprint but are packed full of all the features you could possibly want from a NAS device.

Stu

I agree. Soo easy to setup and get going

If you can, try and get one of the non-J models. Bought a 211 last year for the office and it is faster than the 212J I have at home.

There's roughly £60 diff between the ds212j and ds212. Worth it if you can afford it but for the average home use the j model should be plenty fine.

Is the single bay Synology still worth it?

Depends. There's only £35 difference in it so not really sure. Depends on what you are planning to do setup wise.
 
Would you have the NAS just replicating one of disks in your PC then?

Yes. I have a disk in my pc whcih then replicates to my nas running two 2tb disks in raid1. If the pc disk fails I have my nas. If either disc fails in the nas I just slot a new one in and it rebuilds itself. If both discs in nas fail then I replace those and remirror fomr the disc in my pc.

Same principle with a one disc enclosure. Or get a two disc enclosure but only stick one disc in it. You always have space to expand then.
 
Thanks for the advice, that sounds like a good set-up, I don't have huge amounts of data and the chances both my PC and the NAS dying simultaneously are pretty low so I could probably get away with a 1 bay NAS replicating the disc from my main machine.

Is the bundled software good enough to set this up or do you use a better third party application?
 
I have a QNAP NAS. I definitely reccomend going for either one of the 2-4 bay QNAP or Synology - I spent ages mucking about with cheaper NAS, microservers, etc. and ended up spending far more money and wasting time/effort and never found something that did everything I wanted how I wanted it until I bought the QNAP Turbo NAS TS-412.

I currently have the first 2 slots in RAID and software mirroring to an external USB2 drive (which retains NTFS format so even if the RAID array breaks I still have a copy of my data) its a little over the top but theres a lot of work gone into the files I have on there.
 
Brilliant, just snagged a DS110j on eBay for just under a £100 with a 1TB drive.

Look forward to setting it up next week!
 
If you really, really want it cheap just use an old PC from 5-10 years ago, stick a decent drive in it and share it out. Just get one with a lower power consumption. I have this sort of thing at home. I have an old mATX board with a 1.4 gig Intel Celery from the stone age in it running Server 2003 (One can use any OS though..). It is nailed to the wall near the ceiling (takes up no room!). This does not use a lot of power which means it can be left on (mine is an FTP server, I remote manage it using RDP).
The advantage of using a computer rather than a dedicated NAS solution is that one can use it for other things.

Hope this helps, though I doubt it.

Regards

Sub
 
I have a synology 211j and its a great bit of kit for the money. It's always being update with new contain like cloud station which allows you to have a folder on a number of computer which sync together. Download station which will watch an rss feed and download whats ever is new. Its also DLNA so you can watch your movies really easy, It also transcodes MKV file so you can watch them on your ps3 and the hybrid raid is amazing adjust the file volume. It also accessible from anywhere with all the app available on you phone / tablet. The best bit is it's so simple theres also a live demo of the UI interface on there website to try it all out.
 
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