Recommended NAS box?

Mercutio

Mercutio

Mercutio

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Sheffield, UK
I'm after a NAS box, needs to be under £170. I don't mind going second hand for something suitable (so... "oh the xxxx generally goes for around £xx" is fine as a suggestion. The DS414 is currently a strong contender as it's second hand price starts to come into range).

List of needs:
GOOD (max out gigabit at least) transfer speeds.
DLNA/media streaming type abilities
Possibly some form of smartphone app integration (more of a "nice to have")

Some... wishes:
I've seen a couple of boxes that can do decent dual gigabit channel bonding. That would be excellent (as I've got the other hardware needed for this to work).

Ones that can take a USB wifi adapter would be a pretty major plus (mainly only if the above box is ticked though. If it's only got a pair of ports and they're both linked direct to my main machine, I need some way for it to connect to the rest of the house the rest of the time).
 
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If you've got a smart switch, just trunk the ports, no need to connect it directly to your PC.

I have the DS414 and love it. Use WD Red drives, if you're filling it with 6TB drives, create a Disk Group first, the create volumes within that group.

I don't use DLNA on mine, I stick to SMB for Windows machines and NFS for Kodi clients.
 
Do synology use ntfs partition?

Or one of the Linux format?

Synology nas is great for storage but when something goes wrong then it's difficult to recover the data directly from the hard drives.
 
I've just got a Synology DS410j

Seems great so far, although installation didn't go as expected, it appeared to individually add each disk into a raid array rather than just letting me shove all the disks in and then asking me what I wanted. It also took >8 hours of disk thrashing because there is no cancel button. Probably operator fault... :o

Then when it was finished it carried on thrashing for no apparent reason for another hour.

You possibly won't need a gigabit link, this is just a low power processor and this model doesn't do more than 10MB/s anyway, although I haven't moved it off my 10/100 port to confirm this yet.
In testing that's about 95 seconds to transfer 1Gb

This is a five old model but Synology are still doing OS updates, which is nice to know.

There are a few apps for the iPhone that allow remote access to different functions, I did get remote file access to work, but it was pretty flaky and right now it's not working. I don't need it, I just tried it for the sake of this post.

This is actually a lot more capable than a file server, but it's also a lot easier to use if you are unfamiliar with Microsoft server line. It's also only the size of a tin of Quality street.

Mine has two USB ports for adding a backup USB hard drive, but I believe you can plug in a wi-fi dongle as well.


If you do need faster transfer rates, then a SAS card and multiple drives will be required which totally butt screws the £170 budget, but consider if you really do need such a capability.
This streams 1080p just fine, and just getting a coffee while it transfers files isn't a hardship, having a low power and quiet solution is preferable I reckon.
I like the 4 bay setup, you can even spec a hot spare for maximum uptime. It'll also send you an email if any of the drives start dropping out.


Mark Metalface had a DS414 up recently for £200 but it went to ebay.
 
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Suggest you think carefully before buying an older Synology product, they stop DSM updates after 4 years, not because the hardware is incapable of new features, some of the high end stuff from 5 years back is a lot more capable than the entry level stuff of today, but because they choose to make perfectly capable hardware unsupported after 4 years. From that point on its security patches only.

Look at XPology or Openfiler/FreeNAS/Unraid on a micro server or one of the cheap Dell deals doing the rounds.
 
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bitslice said:
I've just got a Synology DS410j

Seems great so far, although installation didn't go as expected, it appeared to individually add each disk into a raid array rather than just letting me shove all the disks in and then asking me what I wanted. It also took >8 hours of disk thrashing because there is no cancel button. Probably operator fault... :o

Then when it was finished it carried on thrashing for no apparent reason for another hour.

You possibly won't need a gigabit link, this is just a low power processor and this model doesn't do more than 10MB/s anyway, although I haven't moved it off my 10/100 port to confirm this yet.
In testing that's about 95 seconds to transfer 1Gb

This is a five old model but Synology are still doing OS updates, which is nice to know.

There are a few apps for the iPhone that allow remote access to different functions, I did get remote file access to work, but it was pretty flaky and right now it's not working. I don't need it, I just tried it for the sake of this post.

This is actually a lot more capable than a file server, but it's also a lot easier to use if you are unfamiliar with Microsoft server line. It's also only the size of a tin of Quality street.

Mine has two USB ports for adding a backup USB hard drive, but I believe you can plug in a wi-fi dongle as well.


If you do need faster transfer rates, then a SAS card and multiple drives will be required which totally butt screws the £170 budget, but consider if you really do need such a capability.
This streams 1080p just fine, and just getting a coffee while it transfers files isn't a hardship, having a low power and quiet solution is preferable I reckon.
I like the 4 bay setup, you can even spec a hot spare for maximum uptime. It'll also send you an email if any of the drives start dropping out.


Mark Metalface had a DS414 up recently for £200 but it went to ebay.
Click to expand...

10MB/s ? lol

Get a gigabit network
 
bitslice said:
I've just got a Synology DS410j


You possibly won't need a gigabit link, this is just a low power processor and this model doesn't do more than 10MB/s anyway, although I haven't moved it off my 10/100 port to confirm this yet

In testing that's about 95 seconds to transfer 1Gb
Click to expand...

Why have you only got that speed is that down to you home network?
 
Yes.

He says it's on a 100Mbit network, which means 10-12MB/s max.

DS410J means this is a 2009/2010 model.
 
If you don't mind tinkering keeping things up to date and installing stuff then the Microserver style/custom build NAS's will suit you.

However - If you just want something that works look at either QNAP or Synology - out of the box they work great and easy- no need to faff around. Loads of apps, mobile apps, and features like surveillance system recording make them worth the extra cash.

Interestingly all the HP microserver users I know have moved to Synology now - they said they just cba with all the faffing and preferred something that just works (which is what a NAS should be to be fair).
 
I've been very pleased with my Synology 207+. It's a little slow now so picked up a HP micro server and will either put Synology OS on that or Windows Home Server.
 
zoomee said:
If you don't mind tinkering keeping things up to date and installing stuff then the Microserver style/custom build NAS's will suit you.

However - If you just want something that works look at either QNAP or Synology - out of the box they work great and easy- no need to faff around. Loads of apps, mobile apps, and features like surveillance system recording make them worth the extra cash.

Interestingly all the HP microserver users I know have moved to Synology now - they said they just cba with all the faffing and preferred something that just works (which is what a NAS should be to be fair).
Click to expand...

Well, i keep flipping between "build my own" and "buy a nice, small NAS box". I've read a few bits on an i3 homebrew getting down to 9w idle (this was a BGA setup though, I'd think a proper socket+board would be around 15-20w) and have kinda started towards this again at the moment.
I don't need anything too complicated setup wise so kinda tempted to go with a full machine again. It gives me the ability to have the 3 ethernet ports easily (having GOOD speeds to my desktop machine is pretty high up the needs).

What's the cheapest NAS that can definitely max out gigabit? That might be an easier starting point.
 
Both my N54 and G1610T Microservers running xpenology can both pretty much saturate a GigE link, they both make a great NAS.
 
Mercutio said:
Well, i keep flipping between "build my own" and "buy a nice, small NAS box". I've read a few bits on an i3 homebrew getting down to 9w idle (this was a BGA setup though, I'd think a proper socket+board would be around 15-20w) and have kinda started towards this again at the moment.
I don't need anything too complicated setup wise so kinda tempted to go with a full machine again. It gives me the ability to have the 3 ethernet ports easily (having GOOD speeds to my desktop machine is pretty high up the needs).

What's the cheapest NAS that can definitely max out gigabit? That might be an easier starting point.
Click to expand...

I have a full desktop machine running Ubuntu (SMB shares and PLEX amongst other bits) and this maxes out gigabit (~110MB/s). Though I would suspect any flavour of Linux / NAS software should be able to do this on a full desktop build. Though I have found that Windows server can achieve ~117MB/s but I wouldn't trust windows to run 24x7x365.
 
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