NAS box or small pc

MrBlobby · 22 Jul 2018 at 16:00

i was thinking of buying

Synology DiskStation DS115j

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/p...as/synology-diskstation-ds115j-1275044/review

or a small pc and run freenas like a vivo

but freenas needs 8Gb of Ram whereas the Synology only has 256mb so it seems the synolgy box is overpriced but why do I need 8Gb for Freenas ?

bremen1874 · 23 Jul 2018 at 02:29

Because it uses ZFS for its file system, and ZFS needs a lot of memory.

There are other NAS distributions, NAS4FREE used to be good and may have lower hardware requirements (assuming you don’t want it to use ZFS).

skyripper · 23 Jul 2018 at 06:18

Nas4Free is now known as XigmaNas.

MrBlobby · 23 Jul 2018 at 09:00

Thanks Freenas seemed to need two drives does Nas4free ? It doesn't seem to.

skyripper · 23 Jul 2018 at 09:26

I believe both FreeNas and Nas4Free could be setup to boot from a USB drive. Leaving your actual hard drives for storage.

Armageus · 23 Jul 2018 at 11:26

What do you actually want to use a NAS for?

A single drive NAS isn't terribly useful in terms of data protection, you may be better off with just a USB Hard Drive if it's just to perform a backup.

Benefit of a Synology over FreeNas or any other NAS OS is that it generally is set up and forget - they run basically forever, updating themselves, and only require any interaction if a disk fails or is likely to fail. You are paying for ease of use, but are also limited by the hardware capabilities (e.g. if you are using it as a media server and require transcoding, then you likely need a more expensive model)