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
Member
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
[OP]
Moderator
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
Contributor
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.
Member
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.
Contributor
Originally Posted by Osvaldo Cristo
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.
Contributor
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.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Member
Agree Mine is in the basement and never have to reboot it or worry about over heating
Contributor
Just be careful the air holes in the front don't get clogged with dust. Blow it out now and then.
Mike
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
[OP]
Moderator
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
Contributor
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.]
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 10-13-2021 at 3:19 PM.
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
Contributor
'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/d...hl=en_US&gl=US
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
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.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
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.
Last edited by John M Wilson; 10-13-2021 at 3:49 PM. Reason: Additional Info
Contributor
'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.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
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-securit...your-data-safe Good luck and feel free to ask any other questions you may have.
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