NAS Recommendations

[madtoady]

I'm looking to buy my first NAS as the 2TB WD MyPassport external HDD is full to the brim. I like the idea of being able to access my files and movies from multiple sources and attaching my external to the NAS for extra storage.

I'm looking for about 8TB of storage (WD Red) from a 2 or 4 bay NAS. It will be mostly be storing movies and being watched via Plex. I am using my PC as my Plex Media Server atm which isn't a problem as I know NAS units that are capable of transcoding high quality 1080p movies are on the expensive side.

£400-500 (Including roughly 8TB storage) being the ideal price point but willing to go up to £600 if I really need to.

 

[lsg1r]

Synology is the obvious option with 4tb drives.... pick a 4/5 bay, use their custom raid and then expand the hard drives later if it's pushing the price too far at the beginning or your want more 'security from raid redundancy'.
Qnap/Thecus are another option but to be fair I haven't used them

Alternatively you could look at a hp microserver running xpenology as they're often on offer at relatively cheap prices, again I have no experience of this but there's a whole thread on it on here somewhere.

 

[demon8991]

Is there any reason why you wouldn't get 6TB red drives.

From my experience it would be best practice to buy the biggest drives possible so you can fully utilise each bay. Then set the RAID type to SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) and the unit will take care of the rest.

This would be your best bet and then just grab 6TB drives one at a time.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Synology Diskstation DS415+ 4 Bay 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Network Attached Storage (Unpopulated)= £459.98

Total: £470.48
(includes shipping: £10.50)
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