QNAP or Synology?

S2KIP said:
I have to admit, I do love the ability to just upgrade the drives and mix/match in my Synology. Recently gone from 4x3TB drives to 3x6TB and 1 3TB drives. Got another 6TB arriving today and the upgrade process has literally been plug and play except pressing the 'repair' button within DSM.
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You can do this with QNAP too- Live RAID Migration, i.e. upgrade disks one by one to expand an existing array.

Richdog said:
I'm about to buy this too. I take it that it streams everything you throw at it (including 4k MKV rips) to the TV without breaking a sweat?
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Sorry, never answered this- currently not using HDMI (the NAS is hidden upstairs to prevent the missus constantly unplugging it). Having said that am considering an HDMI to UTP adaptor as it's right above the TV.
 
S2KIP said:
With different capacity drives?
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Not Hybrid RAID, no, i.e. RAID across drives of different sizes (not sure I would trust that anyway!)

But for example if you have four 2Tb drives in RAID10 for 4Tb space, you can upgrade them to four 4Tb drives. When you replace the last drive the array resizes to 8Tb.
 
CGrieves said:
Not Hybrid RAID, no, i.e. RAID across drives of different sizes (not sure I would trust that anyway!)

But for example if you have four 2Tb drives in RAID10 for 4Tb space, you can upgrade them to four 4Tb drives. When you replace the last drive the array resizes to 8Tb.
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Ditto on this... why would you fit a NAS with different drive sizes? Doesn't make much logical sense unless you have no cash to do it properly? :confused:

Either way I can't see me using such a feature, it's identical size and brand drives all the way imo.
 
If your bothered about specs you wouldn't buy either a qnap or synology - A HP microserver will do the job better.

I've had both QNAP and Synology for years - Synology has great software but I can't knock QNAP either now - they've come on leaps and bounds. Synology however bests it just slightly. Reason I changed from QNAP was they were taking AGES to address security issues with underlying components in their OS (can't remember what it was exactly now) - firmware updates were not as often as Synology's.

Depends what your main purposes are I guess for which NAS I'd recommend, they're both very close now.
 
zoomee said:
If your bothered about specs you wouldn't buy either a qnap or synology - A HP microserver will do the job better.
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A HP microserver is bigger and takes much more juice, and doesn't have the polished software of either QNAP or Synology.

There is obviously a place for well-specced NAS boxes that doesn't involve building your own microserver, and to suggest otherwise is nonsense.
 
zoomee said:
If your bothered about specs you wouldn't buy either a qnap or synology - A HP microserver will do the job better.
.
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Micro servers are also pretty limited in the number of drive bays

Synology (and perhaps QNAP too, I don't know) allow you to buy either a 5 or 8 bay device and add up to another 2* 5 bay devices onto it using eSata (with the secondary devices obviously being "slaves" are a lot cheaper)

Coming from a 14TB unraid server (with various drives from 1TB-3TB inside) this is very useful indeed.

I think its a little "mis-guided" to suggest that no-one would want to use different sized drives in a NAS. I'm sure its wonderful to be able to go out and spend a small fortune on brand new disks every time, but in the long run a lot of people end up with assorted sized disks over the life time of these devices and its silly to waste it if you don't have to.

In the 5+ years Ive had my server, I don't think 4TB drives even existed commercially, and probably even 3TB were vastly expensive (ie really only for Enterprise solutions).................. Seagate produced 1st 4TB drives in 2011 but with major floods hitting a lot of HDD factories, prices rocketed on all drives/ drive sizes worldwide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

Obviously its ideal if you do have the money to use identical drives / sizes - but few can afford that luxury.
 
It's worth bearing in mind that any ext4 file system created <16TB cannot be expanded beyond 16TB.

zom247 said:
Will be setting up my 415+ today. Is the ram update easy to do? What guide did you follow and what ram did you buy?
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It's not easy, you have to take it all apart. Have a google, there's a few guides knocking around. I broke my clips so be careful. :)

I'm constantly using 20-30% RAM, so if you're short on cash I think the 4GB module would work fine.

It will invalidate your warranty if Synology find out.

Crucial CT102464BF160B 8 GB DDR3 PC3-12800 Unbuffered NON-ECC 1.35 V 1024 Meg x 64

That's which stick I bought.
 
S2KIP said:
It's worth bearing in mind that any ext4 file system created <16TB cannot be expanded beyond 16TB..
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It can, that's a 32bit limitation of the OS on your Synology unit.

Use Disk Groups and you can add extra volumes to use up the extra space as new volumes.
 
bledd. said:
It can, that's a 32bit limitation of the OS on your Synology unit.

Use Disk Groups and you can add extra volumes to use up the extra space as new volumes.
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Well, too late now as I flattened my NAS and started again. :D

I wasn't aware it could be done so I did it the hard way.
 
zoomee said:
If your bothered about specs you wouldn't buy either a qnap or synology - A HP microserver will do the job better.

I've had both QNAP and Synology for years - Synology has great software but I can't knock QNAP either now - they've come on leaps and bounds. Synology however bests it just slightly. Reason I changed from QNAP was they were taking AGES to address security issues with underlying components in their OS (can't remember what it was exactly now) - firmware updates were not as often as Synology's.

Depends what your main purposes are I guess for which NAS I'd recommend, they're both very close now.
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If you were REALLY bothered about specs then you'd build your own...

I've heard mostly good things about both of them to be honest.
 
I did build my own ... for many years ... but in the end it was just a lot easier to use a NAS which will just plug and go.

I'm now quite happy with my (several) QNAP NASes ... and would be happy with Synology. I do have a G8 Microserver, but that's used for other, non-NAS, things.

Actually it's a pity Cisco decided to withdraw from this market as they had devices which were basically rebadged QNAP ones for a lot less than QNAP were charging ... and even better when they left the market they released a final firmware which allowed you to cross flash to normal QNAP firmware (my QNAP 259 Pro is actually a Cisco unit which is running the latest QNAP firmware)
 
Ah, mine's all on one. I have all of the important stuff backed up, the rest were BD rips of my own which I can always redo.
 
bledd. said:
Once you factor in 'real' drive space, 4x6TB drives comes out as just over 16TB usable space, so I've got a 16TB volume and a second 300ish GB volume.
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that seems low to me .... you should lose about 10% per disk in the formatting, so you should have over 21TB of "real" space from those disks before any hardware limitation applies?

(just out of interest, because Im not going to be buying 6TB drives any time soon :) )
 
You only get usage from 3 of the 4 disks as you lose one to the RAID setup. Of course assuming RAID5 or SHR with single disk fault tolerance.
 
Yup, SHR, so only 3 disks worth of space

6TB Drive = 5588GB = 5.46 TiB
X3.

Minus a little bit of space for the Synology OS
 
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