NAS recommendations?

[John K Jordan]

I’ve been trying to educate myself about NAS and have read a bunch of reviews from testers and users. Some have both glowing praise and horror stories for the same devices making it hard for the inexperienced to decide. I read some security vulnerability warnings too.

Anyone have recommendations based on solid experience with specific units? And favorite disk drive brands/models?

I would like personal access from several of my own computers plus occasionally transfer specific large video files to/from others. Speed is not as important to me as reliability. Ease of setup would be a big plus. Will connect to gigabit ethernet. I’m thinking a four bay unit with two 8 or 10TB drives in raid 1 configuration would be a good start. $1000 would be nice but I suspect something solid might cost more.

JKJ

[roger wiegand]

I've been running Synology NAS' for almost 15 years now, a simple two disk model for about a decade and now a much larger four disk model. I've been using the Western digital Red drives that are intended for server operation. The current box has four 2TB drives set up with their RAID configuration that maximizes both speed and redundancy (SHR). (big disks were more expensive when I set it up, and I haven't outgrown it yet, SSD would be great, but I suspect still pretty pricy in those sizes.) As a mounted volume on my desktop Mac I can back it up to the cloud with CrashPlan, giving me off-site storage. I haven't looked for a long time at the widgets that allow direct backup of the NAS, they drove me batty when I tried to use them and I abandoned the effort. Backing it up as an attached disk on the Mac works perfectly. Connection tot he computer is via gigabit ethernet.

The two systems I've used have been flawless. With a UPS and backup generator the NAS hasn't gone down in years now (knock wood!). With the old two bay NAS I upgraded the disks once, that worked perfectly, replacing the drives one at a time and allowing them to rebuild themselves. Nothing has yet failed on the bigger system.

I'm sure my specific models are obsolete now, but I'd buy the brand again without a second thought.

[John M Wilson]

I also have a Synology NAS that I have been running for about 7 years... I'd had a couple of other attempts at using local storage for a backup before that, but never found a solution that worked well to access from multiple locations, for users with varying levels of computer savvy.

The Synology unit was flawless out of the box -- I got a 4 bay unit, but initially only populated 2 of the bays, and added the other drives as my storage needs grew. The included suite of software is robust, and the Synology name is big enough that other 3rd party apps (such as Plex) have developed solutions that run natively in the Synology system. In addition to backup, I also use it as a music server. There are many more applications available, but my needs are modest. Access is seamless from any of our computers, and file transfer and storage is very fast over Gigabit ethernet. Very easy to use, and lots of on-line resources to help me learn how to use new features.

I currently have four 4 TB drives configured in a RAID, so that if 1 goes down, there is enough redundancy to continue without immediate intervention or data loss. I also have it configured to automatically keep an off-line backup in the Amazon Glacier system for pennies a month.

As Roger said, my hardware is probably obsolete, but I would certainly buy a current Synology system again with much confidence.

[Ed Fang]

ill agree with the rest here. I have used multiple synology units for both business and home. They are well designed and do what you need them to do.

[Lee DeRaud]

Another Synology fan here: been running a DS218+ going on three years now. (Two-bay x 8TB RAID1.) Total downtime is something like half an hour, divided into the 5-10 minute chunks it needs to reboot during OS updates once a year or so.

Side question for those with more Synology experience: is there any particular benefit to the DSM7 update for a single-LAN home user? Most of the listed improvements seem more geared to corporate multi-system usage. (It appears that support for DSM6.x will go out well past my expected lifetime, if not the hardware's...)

[Mike Henderson]

I run Synology, also. I have the DS416J with four 8TB disks in it. If you go Synology, watch for the maximum volume size. The maximum on mine is 16TB but the newer units allow much larger volumes. Go for one which allows larger volumes.

The Synology is easy to learn and reliable. You can buy used with good results.

@Lee - I run DSM7 with no problems. I don't know if there's any benefit but I updated. It's a more colorful, fancy DSM-6.

@John - I bought Western Digital Red Pro 8TB drives (rebuilt) and have had no problems with them. And they were fairly cheap. I think I paid a bit over $100 each several years ago. There are other very good brands of disks, also.

Mike

[George Yetka]

Picked up a qnap for the office this summer and setup was pretty good currently running 2 6Tb's in Raid. Theres a couple schools of thought on using them. Some are using them as backup and some use them as the data source. Ive always used my pc as the primary and regularly backup to a drive. But the idea of using the NAS as your primary storage for all data allows you to be always instantly up to date. If your PC goes down then you can be up and running immediately after replacing or repairing.

If you were to use it as a primary I would think the extra money into SSD's may be worth thinking about. For data backup Id stick to a standard drive. The NAS Hard drives vs regular ones are a better choice the smaller boxes with little space between drives creates heat and these are built to handle it.

[Mike Henderson]

Just FYI for John - there a Synology DS916+ on eBay right now for $275. That would be a good purchase. You'd have to purchase the disks extra.

Mike

[John K Jordan]

Just FYI for John - there a Synology DS916+ on eBay right now for $275. That would be a good purchase. You'd have to purchase the disks extra.

Mike

Thanks, I'll check, haven't looked at that model. I'm currently considering the DS920+ , the DS420+, the DS418 , and some others. (My tech son confirmed the Synology brand was worth considering)

I'm a little overwhelmed reading specs I don't understand as well as sorting out features I don't think I'll need. All of them look like they have more than I need, for example, I have no need to transcode video and smart video camera security. I basically want something to connect to ethernet and let me backup files including large video source files for editing, and access them from several home computers. Each individual computer already uses Macrium Reflect for automatic backups of system and critical drives onto 5TB drives so the NAS backup would be a bit of redundancy. But the file sharing would be a big help.

I'm hoping I can ignore some features I don't currently need to simplify installation and get the thing up running quickly. Is that a pipe dream?

JKJ

[Lee DeRaud]

Just FYI for John - there a Synology DS916+ on eBay right now for $275. That would be a good purchase. You'd have to purchase the disks extra.And just as a further FYI, that's a 5-year-old model. Here's how to decode the model numbers:
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/synology-nas-model-numbers-explained-2946185

[John K Jordan]

And just as a further FYI, that's a 5-year-old model. Here's how to decode the model numbers:
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/synology-nas-model-numbers-explained-2946185

Timely article, thanks!

[Mike Henderson]

Thanks, I'll check, haven't looked at that model. I'm currently considering the DS920+ , the DS420+, the DS418 , and some others. (My tech son confirmed the Synology brand was worth considering)

I'm a little overwhelmed reading specs I don't understand as well as sorting out features I don't think I'll need. All of them look like they have more than I need, for example, I have no need to transcode video and smart video camera security. I basically want something to connect to ethernet and let me backup files including large video source files for editing, and access them from several home computers. Each individual computer already uses Macrium Reflect for automatic backups of system and critical drives onto 5TB drives so the NAS backup would be a bit of redundancy. But the file sharing would be a big help.

I'm hoping I can ignore some features I don't currently need to simplify installation and get the thing up running quickly. Is that a pipe dream?

JKJ

If you just want to backup files, almost any one will work for you. Just make sure it supports volumes bigger than 16TB - and all the newer ones should do that. The setup is easy and there's not much customization to do.

I'd get one that allows at least 4 drives. If you decide you need more in the future, you can take the drives out and put them in a larger Synology without having to re-load all the data. Then sell your old one as a bare unit. Gigabit Ethernet will be your bottleneck for loading lots and lots of stuff - but you can just trade off time (meaning let it run overnight).

Mike

[Lee DeRaud]

I basically want something to connect to ethernet and let me backup files including large video source files for editing, and access them from several home computers. Each individual computer already uses Macrium Reflect for automatic backups of system and critical drives onto 5TB drives so the NAS backup would be a bit of redundancy. But the file sharing would be a big help.

I'm hoping I can ignore some features I don't currently need to simplify installation and get the thing up running quickly. Is that a pipe dream?I think I had mine up and running, created a couple of users (so GF could have her own space), and mapped my home folder as the "A:" drive on three computer within an hour of getting it out of the box.

Re backup, I probably overkilled the whole setup, but it's set up as follows:
1. Created a shared folder on the NAS called 'Backups', with a separate subfolder for each computer in the house, mapped as "B:" in Windows.
2. Acronis TrueImage backs up each computer once a week, very late at night, to the appropriate subfolder.
3. TrueImage also backs up the NAS itself once a week to a large USB drive on my main desktop computer.
4. Once or twice a month, I copy the backup from #3 to one of two 5TB USB drives, that rotate monthly between a fire-proof safe at the house and an off-site storage unit.
5. The 'home' folders do nightly incremental backups to yet another 5TB USB drive connected directly to the NAS.

#4 is the only manual step. The plan is that I always have options in an emergency regarding what I can grab in a hurry to recreate the whole thing later if need be. (Some of the fires the last couple of years got entirely too close for comfort.)

[John K Jordan]

Re backup, I probably overkilled the whole setup, but it's set up as follows:
...

That backup plan doesn't sound excessive. When I was working developing software then later in 3d modeling/animation/video, I never had fewer than 5 copies of work in progress, distributed manually on multiple machines on my home network and removable disk drives, some stored offsite. The technology 15-25 years ago made some of this challenging.

[roger wiegand]

To try to keep things simple I back up all of our computers to both the NAS and to the cloud in near real time using Crashplan, then also back up the NAS to Crashplan. Back when the computers had hard disks I did successful recoveries from both the local and remote backups. It can take a couple days of download a Tb over the internet, but it works. The local recovery is much faster. In the decade since converting to SSD technology I haven't had a failure.

[Jerome Stanek]

I had a Synology unit that bit the dust and had some problems with connectability on some of my computers. I have a Buffalo unit that I bought from Micro Center That works much better. It is about 10 years old now

[John K Jordan]

Thanks. I did look at the Buffalo and some others as well. The Synology unit you had must have been a few years ago!

After more research, I decided to go with this for starters:
Synology 4-bay DS920+
Three Seagate Ironwolf 12TB drives.
We'll see how that goes.

JKJ

[John M Wilson]

I think you chose wisely!

For off-site backup, I recommend AWS Glacier -- it's as slow as the name implies, but it's priced accordingly, and amazingly easy to set up in a Synology system. Set it and forget it, with no juggling of hardware or weekly tasks to remember.

[Osvaldo Cristo]

Why a dedicated NAS unit?

Use one of your computers: there is a number of motherboards that support RAID on board natively besides Widows 10 PRO also support them in the case your motherboard not.

I run RAID 1 in my main computer for years: I had just to purchase a couple of bare disks. You can create for those disks the share policy you think is appropriate for your home network.

Quick, cheap and easy, IMO. Oh yes, and more reliable: I had in all my life a couple of disk failures but two of my three NAS I had since past century, failed.

[roger wiegand]

Why a dedicated NAS unit?




1) Most of us don't buy computers that will house 4-6 drives. 2) many of us use laptops for everything and sometimes walk away with them, which would leave the other uses in the house with no server to connect to. 3) performance on your computer will become poor if someone else is doing a disk-intensive task on the NAS you are hosting.

There are probably more reasons, but a NAS is a cheap, convenient solution to fast, shared storage space.

[Lee DeRaud]

1) Most of us don't buy computers that will house 4-6 drives. 2) many of us use laptops for everything and sometimes walk away with them, which would leave the other uses in the house with no server to connect to. 3) performance on your computer will become poor if someone else is doing a disk-intensive task on the NAS you are hosting.

There are probably more reasons, but a NAS is a cheap, convenient solution to fast, shared storage space.4) You can stick an NAS away in a cabinet somewhere and (more or less) forget about it. A Windows machine, not so much. The only time I ever see mine is when I need to retrieve a new pack of paper for the printer.

[Jerome Stanek]

4) You can stick an NAS away in a cabinet somewhere and (more or less) forget about it. A Windows machine, not so much. The only time I ever see mine is when I need to retrieve a new pack of paper for the printer.

Agree Mine is in the basement and never have to reboot it or worry about over heating

[Mike Henderson]

Agree Mine is in the basement and never have to reboot it or worry about over heating

Just be careful the air holes in the front don't get clogged with dust. Blow it out now and then.

Mike

[John K Jordan]

The NAS is installed and working well. Thanks for all the help here.
Synology 920+ on it's own UPS, three 12TB drives in RAID 5, extra memory, and have a 400GB SSD cache module on its way.
I've copied about 500GB to it as a test, including over 75,000 photos photos.

My question now is about android apps. I see a lot of NAS apps in the Google store and some have pretty low ratings. Some appear to do more than I need from the phone, like admin control. From the phone I would mostly like to search and quickly view photos.

** Does anyone have experience with or have a preferred android app for accessing the NAS?

JKJ

[Mike Henderson]

I set mine up so I can FTP to it but I never really used it very much. It's there if I need it.

I tested it using FileZilla when I was traveling.

[Update: I forgot about QuickConnect that Synology provides. Look into that.}


Mike

[FTP can be a security hole so you want to decide if you want that.]

[Lee DeRaud]

My question now is about android apps. I see a lot of NAS apps in the Google store and some have pretty low ratings. Some appear to do more than I need from the phone, like admin control. From the phone I would mostly like to search and quickly view photos.

** Does anyone have experience with or have a preferred android app for accessing the NAS?'DS File' is the official Synology file browser for Android. I don't use it a lot, but no complaints.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.synology.DSfile&hl=en_US&gl=US

[Lee DeRaud]

FYI, I installed the DSM7 update. So far, everything works the same, except (1) CPU load seems to run lower and (2) I (finally) got the certificate problem solved that I'd been struggling with. It now has an official signed certificate for the QuickConnect web access address. I still don't know if the issue was something I was doing wrong or an issue at their end, but Chrome really didn't like the default synology.com certificate. In any event, they automagically configured a new one.

[John M Wilson]

Trom the phone I would mostly like to search and quickly view photos.

** Does anyone have experience with or have a preferred android app for accessing the NAS?

JKJ

Like Lee, I have used DS File on the rare occasion I have needed to access my server from my phone.

I've not used it, but the native Synology App called "Moments" might be what you are looking for...

JW

PS -- there is also a native app called "Photo Station 6" but I'm not sure what the different feature set would mean for you.

[Lee DeRaud]

PS -- there is also a native app called "Photo Station 6" but I'm not sure what the different feature set would mean for you.'Photo Station' goes away in DSM7, replaced by 'Photos'...not quite sure how different it is beyond the name change. I've never used either one though: everything I do photo-related is on PCs on the LAN, and I'll keep using Picasa as my photo browser until they pry it from my cold dead hands. :)

[Chris Fairbanks]

The NAS is installed and working well. Thanks for all the help here.
Synology 920+ on it's own UPS, three 12TB drives in RAID 5, extra memory, and have a 400GB SSD cache module on its way.
I've copied about 500GB to it as a test, including over 75,000 photos photos.

My question now is about android apps. I see a lot of NAS apps in the Google store and some have pretty low ratings. Some appear to do more than I need from the phone, like admin control. From the phone I would mostly like to search and quickly view photos.

** Does anyone have experience with or have a preferred android app for accessing the NAS?

JKJ

John, like Roger and others I have been a synology user for well over a decade. One thing you want to be cautious of with any type of storage system is drive failure. While your Raid5 setup will protect your data in the event of a single drive failure, a rebuild of a 12tb drive is going to take 24-48 hours and that’s assuming you have a spare on hand. If during this time you have another drive start to act up all your data is going to be lost. That is why most companies run either raid 6 or raid 10 for data protection and not raid 5. I run a 5 drive synology system in raid 6 at home and my Colo server runs raid 10. If you don’t want to add another drive to convert your synology to raid 10 at least make sure you have good backups of it. I also backup everything to aws glacier and the built in synology client works great for that. It’s only 4/10th of a cent per GB per month to backup your data. Where amazon gets you is if you have to restore. They charge multiple different costs but it quickly adds up to over 10 cents per gb to restore. So just make sure you never need it ��

The other feature you may want enable is called snapshot replication. The idea is you can setup the synology to take a snapshot of the data on the system every X amount of time. That way if you accidentally delete or overwrite a file you can quickly restore it. This is also a great level of protection from ransomware unless they actually compromise your synology and delete your snapshots. I run hourly snapshots and keep the last 12 hours, 7 days and 3 months of them. That way I can go back in time easily and fix anything I have messed up. Snapshots are done at the block level of the file system so they don’t consume that much space assuming you are not adding and deleting a bunch of files on a regular basis.

Finally make sure to keep your synology secure. The two main things are to disable the default admin account and make sure you have auto updates enabled. Synology has a bunch of articles on this but here is one I found with a quick google search. https://blog.synology.com/10-security-tips-to-keep-your-data-safe Good luck and feel free to ask any other questions you may have.

[John K Jordan]

'Photo Station' goes away in DSM7, replaced by 'Photos'...not quite sure how different it is beyond the name change. I've never used either one though: everything I do photo-related is on PCs on the LAN, and I'll keep using Picasa as my photo browser until they pry it from my cold dead hands. :)

I installed the 7.0-41890.

I do almost all my photo work with Photoshop or PS Elements but sometimes I want to show someone a photo on my phone. I think it would be nice to connect to the NAS from anywhere and pull up the photo.

[John K Jordan]

I've been reading as much as I can. (but not much today! - I hauled, unloaded, and stacked 150 bales of hay and I'll do it again in a couple of days, seems like this was easier back when I was 70 :))

How about a "Hot spare" drive? Synology says if the storage pool degrades a hot spare can automatically repair the failing drive. (Under Storage/Storage Pool) Is this useful? I was planning to buy a couple of spare 12tb drives anyway.

Fortunately, I am not using this for data backup. I back up separately to a pool of removable drives using Macrium Reflect. All drives are backed up on three or four independent drives on manual rotation multiple times per week. I've been using multiple independent backup drives since when I was working for a living and never lost data in decades of work.

I wanted to set up a NAS as an experiment, for a learning experience and to see how useful it would be to give me access to selected files on any of the computers on my private home network (when those computers were offline) and to occasionally transfer video and photo files from friend or family. No business use, all hobby. I rely on no cloud service.

So far I haven't been disappointed.

BTW, I've configured the Macrium software to make a full backup of specified drives on a fixed schedule, then between those full backups make differential and incremental backups, sounds somewhat like the snapshot mode you mentioned. My son uses it in his video and photography business computers and said it has worked well when he needed to recover files that were corrupted or accidentally overwritten. Physical external backup drives on the shelf also seem like good insurance against ransomware. It will easily restore the entire operating system on a computer if needed. I used it to clone the Win system drive when upgrading one computer from spinning to SSD. (BTW, Macrium is good but not free.)

Good advice on the basic security. Already done at startup. I've read a lot of stuff on the security and I'll read the blog article you mentioned, thanks. I have my own system for passwords - I'm still not sure I trust password managers.

Thanks for all the help and advice.

JKJ



John, like Roger and others I have been a synology user for well over a decade. One thing you want to be cautious of with any type of storage system is drive failure. While your Raid5 setup will protect your data in the event of a single drive failure, a rebuild of a 12tb drive is going to take 24-48 hours and that’s assuming you have a spare on hand. If during this time you have another drive start to act up all your data is going to be lost. That is why most companies run either raid 6 or raid 10 for data protection and not raid 5. I run a 5 drive synology system in raid 6 at home and my Colo server runs raid 10. If you don’t want to add another drive to convert your synology to raid 10 at least make sure you have good backups of it. I also backup everything to aws glacier and the built in synology client works great for that. It’s only 4/10th of a cent per GB per month to backup your data. Where amazon gets you is if you have to restore. They charge multiple different costs but it quickly adds up to over 10 cents per gb to restore. So just make sure you never need it ��

The other feature you may want enable is called snapshot replication. The idea is you can setup the synology to take a snapshot of the data on the system every X amount of time. That way if you accidentally delete or overwrite a file you can quickly restore it. This is also a great level of protection from ransomware unless they actually compromise your synology and delete your snapshots. I run hourly snapshots and keep the last 12 hours, 7 days and 3 months of them. That way I can go back in time easily and fix anything I have messed up. Snapshots are done at the block level of the file system so they don’t consume that much space assuming you are not adding and deleting a bunch of files on a regular basis.

Finally make sure to keep your synology secure. The two main things are to disable the default admin account and make sure you have auto updates enabled. Synology has a bunch of articles on this but here is one I found with a quick google search. https://blog.synology.com/10-security-tips-to-keep-your-data-safe Good luck and feel free to ask any other questions you may have.

[Warren Lake]

respect the level of knowledge many you computer wizards have.

[Lee DeRaud]

I do almost all my photo work with Photoshop or PS Elements but sometimes I want to show someone a photo on my phone. I think it would be nice to connect to the NAS from anywhere and pull up the photo.DS File is fine for that kind of thing, assuming you have QuickConnect set up.

(I just use Picasa as a browser/viewer, not to edit anything...it's configured to bring up PS for editing. If it ever becomes unusable on Windows, I'll probably try Bridge again, but I wasn't impressed with it the first time.)

[John M Wilson]

How about a "Hot spare" drive? Synology says if the storage pool degrades a hot spare can automatically repair the failing drive. (Under Storage/Storage Pool) Is this useful? I was planning to buy a couple of spare 12tb drives anyway.

JKJ

I do not use a hot spare -- with a 4 drive unit, I have 4 identical 4T (yeah, I know, they were "big" when I bought 'em) drives in a RAID configuration. Redundancy is scattered throughout the drives, so if one goes down, I don't lose anything while I get and install a replacement. This yields about 11 T of useable storage.

As I understand it, a "hot spare" does not participate in the RAID, but just sits waiting to be mounted. With my set up, this would only allow me 3 drives in the RAID, which would decrease my available storage area below what I need.

I consider the likelyhood of a second drive failing before Amazon could deliver me another one to be a vanishingly small risk -- still a possibility, but one I am willing to take given the fact that I do have the Glacier off-site backup available.

Your needs may differ, but with today's NAS rated drives, the mean time between failure is measured in years.

JW