NAS upgrade... looking into a new Synology unit (what are others using?)

[deathman20]

So my little story of how I started and have come to where I am now:

So a long time ago (2008-2010ish) I was in need of a server. I wanted something on 24/7 that wasn't my main PC, that could host movies so I could play them on TV's in my house. As well access the files outside the home if I was traveling or such. We'll made a small PC of parts and went to it at the time, course limited knowledge back in the day and really only ended up with access just to the files inside the house. Was a bust and disappointed. Didn't have a lot of time or knowledge of other systems outside of Windows at the time so I moved onto something different.

I started looking at Synology boxes, that could do a vast array of different tasks. Easy GUI, apps for phones/tablets to access content, even way more stuff that I didn't even know about back then. At the time I jumped on it and got me a while pricey unit, a DS1511+. A 5 bay NAS box, that I loaded with 1TB WD Green drives at first then upgraded to some Seagate 2TB drives, shortly after, that I still run to this day. We'll the system is aging. It still works, functions with tasks, just slower. Now with the latest update that just came out it will be the last major update to the system after 7 years.

While my storage over the past years has increased a lot, my space on my system has been at a stand still while I offload stuff off the drive into long term storage that I don't need access to, just to keep some free space. We'll I think with the aging unit, and limited space, and now last major update on the box its time to expand into the next unit. Now looking in the quick term just to get the system up and running but with space and not spend a total arm and a leg. I'll double my current capacity from 4x 2TB drives in SHR(raid5) to 4x 4TB drives in SHR(raid5). Effectively doubling my capacity and still giving room to expand into another 2 drives for either future backup or expanding the main volume size. With that I'd turn my old box into a system for backups only. Probably turn it into a SHR(raid6) volume for redundancy just due to the age of the drives and basically give me 3x the space I have for my current backups which is just a single 2TB drive. All in its roughly $1250 for this upgrade.

Anyways just curious what every one else is running or what you do around your place for File Storage, Media Storage / Playback, Surveillance (looking into this now), etc

 

[deathman20]

Well decided to bite the bullet and pulled the trigger. That being said my old NAS has treated me well over the years. Very solid, quiet box and will suit itself very well for a backup unit.
DS1618+ w/ 4x 4TB Ironwolf drives incoming, with everything being here by Thursday I couldn't be more happy. Among some additional network upgrades (Cables and Switch) should be a nice fun update to the network and my storage capacities. With the 2x extra bays I have in the unit got a few SSD's laying around here probably pop one or two in to try the caching function on it.

 

[habbajabba]

I am highly interested in the very same thing. I almost pulled the trigger on a pi based xu4 cloudshell kit but was unsure of exactly what to run and why. Looking at the Qnas boxes seems to be what I would definitely get instead. As nice as the cloudshell kit is, it just doesn't nor will ever have the power of an actual qnas 2-bay box out the door. Uses it's own server gui which can utilize the IOT. Multiple virtualized OS's, transcoding, you name it. High throughput in raid and for about $350 w/no drives the Qnap TS-251+ is expandable to 8gb's memory. Solves the linux problem, the kodi problem, the backup problem, the android problem, all from one interface. Other than installing openmediavault itself, qnap is still much more flexible overall.
As for surveillance, I personally would still isolate that as much as possible just like a proper fw box would be, and no moving parts for low maintenance. For 350 I could pull my 2 wd 6tb drives and use them and still have a 2tb backup on board. A couple nas drives later and that's a lot of money lol. $350 was what it would have cost me just to boot a cloudshell kit with all the extras costs and no drives. With the Qnap there's literally no building it. Just add harddrives and boot it. The older I get the less instructions and work do I need lol.
Wow, a $1000 box. What exactly will you run on it? I saw the 6tb ironwolf's for around $220? How much actual data space is there if it's 6x4tb's in raid? 12?

 

[deathman20]

Yeah years ago (2011) i really did a lot of digging into what a good NAS would be. I wanted something easy to setup for internal files, as well easy setup for access to the web but secure.
I messed around with a Linux and Windows PC for a year or more to just get access to files at the time, with zero luck. Guess I was stupid in that regard.

I got my original Synology DS1511+ and was up and running with internet access within 15min! Access to files, mail notifications, download capabilities, etc. Guess thats what I liked about the Synology box and still do like. Besides the wife actually likes using some of the functions, and understands how to do somethings with it. Win win in my book and at first she thought it was silly. Now she wouldn't know what to do without it. Though now I have the option to do a few extra things with the DS1618+... like I could run a VM on it! Probably have to drop in more Ram for it to function but curious what I could do with that.

I did look at the Qnap but just didn't seem to have that refined look and feel back in the day, especially applications on the phones/tablets (big deal for me). Though they really do excel on the Transcoding front for videos if your interested in that. Me I just run the file, and transcode the audio which is basically nothing on the box (very easy to do, only uses 30% of the CPU).

Though do note, Ram on a NAS box by default... really it doesn't require much. My old one can support 4GB, and I do have 4GB in there right now. But my new one comes with 4Gb and can use up to 16GB if not mistaken. Though my current server with all the tasks running.... I rarely use over 1.5GB. That is notifications, logging, photo station, music station, video stations/play back, plex, file server, backup functions, anti virus suite, note station, office suite (synology's own version), drive suite (my local cloud drive). Not bad for small ram usage Really think the only time I've seen it spike over 2GB was when I re-cataloged my photo library (100GB) and thats nothing.

Yeah overall drives and pricing is a killer. My DS1511+, was a 5 bay, 2x 1Gb lan connections with a USB 2.0 port in the back, and a dual core low power proc (forgot which atom). My new unit is a DS1618+, 6 bay, 4x 1Gb lan connections, 3x USB 3.0 ports, 1 PCI-E card slot for either a 10Gb lan card or NVMe/M.2 card, with a quad core Atom (new 3000 series) for the same price. $800 isn't cheap by any means but its a beast of a box and truly not paying a arm and a leg for it (over the long haul). Though HDD prices... arg. You'd think they would come down over the time. I think I paid the same price for my "cheap" Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB drives back in the day as my 4TB Ironwolfs I'm getting now. Funny thing is the Samsung drives... they are NOT NAS rated and have served me for... 7+ years!

 

[deathman20]

Update:
At least minor update on my upgrades on server side. With the new switch and finally new cables my old NAS is now LAG (Bonded) on 2 ports. Actually helped increase throughput on the network to just my PC but 10MB/sec roughly. So instead of 80-90MB I get 90-110MB/sec actually. Edited the registry in windows to only reserve 10% of the network for "critical items" instead of the default 20%. Could probably drop it to 5% or even 0% but not going to push my luck.

And a quick picture of the area now. Forgot to take what it looked like before but it was ugly. New NAS will sit right where the router is and the router will sit on top of it.

Only have 2 cables not connected right now. Second PC and TV/Steam Box. Probably connect the steam box up so I can use it again on my TV. TV has 5Ghz so bandwidth viewing videos is not an issue, and its only 15ft away straight line at most.

 

[deathman20]

And it has arrived... I'll hopefully have a little chance to start setting it up here at work.

 

[gsrcrxsi]

I started with a Synology DS416 4-bay NAS. I used it in conjunction with plex. quickly found it to be lacking in power and speed. especially if i needed any transcoding. I never setup any VPN access

then i moved to a hybrid setup using a quadcore desktop system to do the transcoding, and puling and serving files over the synology NAS. this worked well for 1080p transcodes, but file transfers were still slow. Again I didnt play with any VPN setups yet.

finally bit the bullet and went all in on a purpose built server. I got a good deal on a 3U Supermicro server from eBay. Dual socket Supermicro LGA2011 (Xeon V1/V2) with 2x 8-core Xeons, 48GB DDR3 ram (i upped it to 64), and i populated it with my own disks, swapped out the low power 8-cores for more powerful 10-core chips (2x E5-2680v2), and added an LSI HBA card. loaded it up with FreeNAS to get the storage situated, then loaded Plex Media Server on it in a jail. Handles anything including 4k transcodes and many many streams without missing a beat. i also swapped out the server fans with quieter noctua fans.

I initially tried setting up a VPN via my netgear router (R6700v2), but ran into many issues with openvpn stemming from the fact that the router is using obsolete encryption and openvpn refused to work properly because of it.

I ended up setting up an openvpn server also running as a jail on this same server, and now i have access to everything. I can be anywhere in the world, and when i connect to my VPN it's essentially as if im home on my lan and i have access to everything as if i was (router config, system RDPs, NAS file access, etc).

the server is also running transmission BT client in a jail, and pihole whole home ad blocking in a virtual machine.

the cost and complexity to setup is definitely more than something like a synology unit, but i couldnt be happier with the performance and access. stability is rock solid (months and months of uptime) and i was even able to access it from China to get through the Great Firewall and other geolocked services like Netflix

 

[deathman20]

I started with a Synology DS416 4-bay NAS. I used it in conjunction with plex. quickly found it to be lacking in power and speed. especially if i needed any transcoding. I never setup any VPN access

then i moved to a hybrid setup using a quadcore desktop system to do the transcoding, and puling and serving files over the synology NAS. this worked well for 1080p transcodes, but file transfers were still slow. Again I didnt play with any VPN setups yet.

finally bit the bullet and went all in on a purpose built server. I got a good deal on a 3U Supermicro server from eBay. Dual socket Supermicro LGA2011 (Xeon V1/V2) with 2x 8-core Xeons, 48GB DDR3 ram (i upped it to 64), and i populated it with my own disks, swapped out the low power 8-cores for more powerful 10-core chips (2x E5-2680v2), and added an LSI HBA card. loaded it up with FreeNAS to get the storage situated, then loaded Plex Media Server on it in a jail. Handles anything including 4k transcodes and many many streams without missing a beat. i also swapped out the server fans with quieter noctua fans.

I initially tried setting up a VPN via my netgear router (R6700v2), but ran into many issues with openvpn stemming from the fact that the router is using obsolete encryption and openvpn refused to work properly because of it.

I ended up setting up an openvpn server also running as a jail on this same server, and now i have access to everything. I can be anywhere in the world, and when i connect to my VPN it's essentially as if im home on my lan and i have access to everything as if i was (router config, system RDPs, NAS file access, etc).

the server is also running transmission BT client in a jail, and pihole whole home ad blocking in a virtual machine.

the cost and complexity to setup is definitely more than something like a synology unit, but i couldnt be happier with the performance and access. stability is rock solid (months and months of uptime) and i was even able to access it from China to get through the Great Firewall and other geolocked services like Netflix

Wow... yeah that might be a little bit more than my NAS Though it does give you extreme flexibility just got to set it up.

You mentioned for Plex and not being able to handle your load. I originally used DS Video but the audio codecs on each TV or Blu-Ray player at the time was a crap shoot if it would work or not with my library. I switched to Plex I think just this past year and I just switched it to only do audio transcoding, video itself I leave in its full format at the current time but only do it via the home network. If I need a video when I'm out, I'll just download it. Typically not gone very long typically from the house but its always nice to get access to the files if needed.

What do you use the old Synology for now?

 

[gsrcrxsi]

Wow... yeah that might be a little bit more than my NAS Though it does give you extreme flexibility just got to set it up.

You mentioned for Plex and not being able to handle your load. I originally used DS Video but the audio codecs on each TV or Blu-Ray player at the time was a crap shoot if it would work or not with my library. I switched to Plex I think just this past year and I just switched it to only do audio transcoding, video itself I leave in its full format at the current time but only do it via the home network. If I need a video when I'm out, I'll just download it. Typically not gone very long typically from the house but its always nice to get access to the files if needed.

What do you use the old Synology for now?

Yeah I have a bit of 4k content, and now I've been streaming over the internet from my house to mobile devices, so i hit transcoding at times on the audio and video.

My old synology unit is still in service as a backup for the most important files (not really the media files).

my Synology has 4x 2TB drives in SHR (basically raid 5) for 6TB
my new sever has 4x6TB drives and 4x4TB drives in mirrored vdevs (basically raid 10) for 20TB of space

i still need to get it setup with replication tasks so that the backup of important files is automatic but i havent played with it too much lately.

 

[deathman20]

Aaand now its official. Got it up and running, connected via the web for both units now and transferring data as we speak so I can take the old box offline and bring it back online as a primary backup unit.
As well with the new unit decided to try out the Caching function. Needed to place 2 drives in (2x Samsung 840 Pro - 128GB) so I could do a read/write cache on the unit. Just for testing purposes right now as I wanted to see what the real benefits of it would be. Most likely I doubt I'll need it for my stuff since its just a few users accessing the box.

As well got smart this time, used some return address labels. Marked the drives (Unit, Bay, and Date installed) as well as the units for (Name, Internal Address, Ports (internal/external) and Extneral Address). Now I won't forget some of the stuff easily

Doh realized in the picture forgot to move the top unit back a little, its crooked

 

[habbajabba]

Transcode audio? I encoded all my flac to mp3 just so I could put it on my new 512gb sdxc card for my ts tablet. The $350 I was gonna throw at a cloudshell kit I may as well do a qnap box instead as it's a hell of a lot more powerful than just running freenas or whatever. Besides with all that beautiful nas storage why not encode to mp3 and stream that? (or are you referring to 5.1/dts?-probably) The lossless is for when I'm sitting in front of my A5+ system. Taudioencoder supports multithread encoding and will recreate exact folder structure to anywhere you want. I used foobar and could have cut the transcode time in half with taudio. That new nas box ought to last you the rest of your life. I'm jealous just a little. I still know not one person who knows diddly about computers.

 

[deathman20]

Transcode audio? I encoded all my flac to mp3 just so I could put it on my new 512gb sdxc card for my ts tablet. The $350 I was gonna throw at a cloudshell kit I may as well do a qnap box instead as it's a hell of a lot more powerful than just running freenas or whatever. Besides with all that beautiful nas storage why not encode to mp3 and stream that? (or are you referring to 5.1/dts?-probably) The lossless is for when I'm sitting in front of my A5+ system. Taudioencoder supports multithread encoding and will recreate exact folder structure to anywhere you want. I used foobar and could have cut the transcode time in half with taudio. That new nas box ought to last you the rest of your life. I'm jealous just a little. I still know not one person who knows diddly about computers.

So some of my movie files, have higher rate codecs (7.1, DTS, Atoms, etc) than my TV or other devices can handle. So on each device I can set the audio to transcode down to a usable format on that device, weather stereo or 5.1... I know I can also reliably transcode video files to 1080p and down now if not mistaken with this box. Haven't tried it yet and really no plans on to at this time.

As for my media files, they are all in mp3 anyways right now so no issue with streaming that

I'm hoping the NAS will last me a good amount of time. Hopefully my old one will last an extra amount of time so I can just use it for backup purposes now, at least til I need/want to replace my primary box again waaay in the future.

 

[deathman20]

I'll have to change up my sig but... Unit is 100% functional now. All Plex, Music, Photo, Drive (Cloud function), Notes, etc functions perfectly. Got a little more locked down with this new box as well but so far all good!

With that I have totally purged the old units volume, created a larger SHR - 2 (Raid6) volume to have redundancy. Decided SHR (Raid5) wasn't a great idea considering the age of the drives and since its not "server rated". So right now I'll be able to back up the majority of my stuff on this other box no problems and will take some of my non-changing formats (basically old movies) onto a removable drive, just like my other backups I use to have for "offline redundancy". Should give me plenty of space on my backup drive for years to come even with only 5.44TB of space.

 

[deathman20]

So added feature that I can play with now is VM's on the box. Not sure how functional it will be, probably should install a little bit more ram since it taps out my current one to around 82-89% when running with a 2GB VM using 2 cores of the 4 cores in the system.

Anyways just goes to show it is installing Ubuntu, from my home while I'm at work and running it I'd say over internet connection very nicely all things considered. Left side is the VM during a portion of the install, right side is the actual interface with stats going on. Kinda cool I can install VM's including Windows that I could access anywhere like a normal PC just... slower

 

[JrClocker]

I'm running a QNAP TS-453A as a NAS, with 4x5 TB drives in RAID 10.

The reason I bought this QNAP was that it had 4x1 GB network ports. I bought a new network switch at the same time that allowed me to "gang" the 4x1 GB network ports to look like 1x4 GB network port. It's really nice to be able to pound data in and out of the NAS from separate machines with 1 GB ports and max out the network traffic on the individual machines.

I heard horror stories about running large RAID 5 arrays (super long rebuilds, losing data on rebuilds, etc.) With 4 drives, there wasn't a difference between RAID 10 and RAID 6 for storage efficiency, and the RAID 10 has potentially much better read and write speeds compared to RAID 6.

The NAS does everything I want it to do. The processor is beefy enough to software transcode 1 1080p file. Plex added Intel hardware transcoding support, and the NAS can now transcode 3 1080p streams at once. With the new hardware transcoding support, the audio transcode takes about the same amount of CPU power as the video transcode.

However, with my 20 TB of drives set to 10 TB of storage, I am starting to run out of space. I am trying to decide between getting 4x8 TB drives (giving me 16 TB of storage) or getting a new NAS and keeping my existing one as a backup.

4x8 TB of drives will run me about $1,000. A new NAS and new drives more than that.

I'm not sure which way I am going to go. I love buying to tech stuff, but can't justify dropping another $2,000 (or more) when my current NAS meets all of my needs...except that I am running out of space!

 

[habbajabba]

A friend had wall to wall vhs copies and only recently transferred to disk which is funny. I plan on putting my m-disc burner to good use. I have the Twilight Zone on dvd, and a NatGeo mag dvd collection as well but see no need to load everything I collect in a nas, so a disc that costs ~$3.60 for 50GB of storage and takes no space is a compliment to the nas itself. Being able to burn discs of up to 128GB is pretty cool but the archival ones do get more expensive.

I wanted a supermicro forever but the build itself is the turnoff at this point. A $340 qnap nas would be ideal as I live alone and have one desktop, 2 tablets, and one smart tv.
I remember hacking my att phone to get free data and streaming music to it at work using HFS file server as a novelty. Now I'd like to vm linux, access my media seamlessly, and still be able to basically serve up anything, webpage whatever. With the built-in software I could easily do all that. As well, since computers are not going away, it seems to be a good investment.

 

[deathman20]

I'm running a QNAP TS-453A as a NAS, with 4x5 TB drives in RAID 10.

The reason I bought this QNAP was that it had 4x1 GB network ports. I bought a new network switch at the same time that allowed me to "gang" the 4x1 GB network ports to look like 1x4 GB network port. It's really nice to be able to pound data in and out of the NAS from separate machines with 1 GB ports and max out the network traffic on the individual machines.

I heard horror stories about running large RAID 5 arrays (super long rebuilds, losing data on rebuilds, etc.) With 4 drives, there wasn't a difference between RAID 10 and RAID 6 for storage efficiency, and the RAID 10 has potentially much better read and write speeds compared to RAID 6.

The NAS does everything I want it to do. The processor is beefy enough to software transcode 1 1080p file. Plex added Intel hardware transcoding support, and the NAS can now transcode 3 1080p streams at once. With the new hardware transcoding support, the audio transcode takes about the same amount of CPU power as the video transcode.

However, with my 20 TB of drives set to 10 TB of storage, I am starting to run out of space. I am trying to decide between getting 4x8 TB drives (giving me 16 TB of storage) or getting a new NAS and keeping my existing one as a backup.

4x8 TB of drives will run me about $1,000. A new NAS and new drives more than that.

I'm not sure which way I am going to go. I love buying to tech stuff, but can't justify dropping another $2,000 (or more) when my current NAS meets all of my needs...except that I am running out of space!

Yeah rebuilding drive arrays on a RAID 5 or RAID 6 can take time but its not too bad. While for instance on my old box since its essentially a RAID6, I was doing a backup while it was checking the consistency of the disks. Essentially double checking the whole drive. That took... think 30 hours on 5x 2TB drives while backing up 4.5TB of data roughly. Now my new drives did the same check on a Raid5 with 4x 4TB drives in roughly 13 hours, while copying 5GB of data over. Guess each to their own on it though RAID10 does sound nice and its not as process intensive as RAID5 or RAID6. If I decided to drop another $240 at the time I might of considered that as an option.

Really your box takes as much power to video trans code as it does audio? My old box that using for a backup couldn't handle trans-coding video period... it was dirt slow lots of buffering. Audio though it had no issue using 30-50% of the CPU power (including background tasks). Could easily run 2-3 1080p videos at the same time trans-coding the audio. Cool that your box can handle more now though. More is better

As for the storage space dilemma/new box. Really its what I went through. I eventually decided to upgrade since my warranty on the box was out, and new updates of the OS just finished its last major release, only security updates to come. To keep with features and to get a better backup solution so I could actually backup more data I decided on the new box, but a larger one at that (6 bays instead of 5). I could of gone with previous year model that was 8 bays @ $100 more but lesser hardware. So that is why I decided on a new box, being faster, newer, USB ports on it (3.0 ports a big plus) and 4 lan ports, and the biggest was a considerably faster CPU. This should help meet my demands for many more years and really have a much better backup solution. Still yeah its $$$, especially when considering new large drives its a real hit on the pocket book. Maybe if you want both see what 12 month installment plans there may be? I scored mine through Amazon, got $70 off + 12 months to pay it.

A friend had wall to wall vhs copies and only recently transferred to disk which is funny. I plan on putting my m-disc burner to good use. I have the Twilight Zone on dvd, and a NatGeo mag dvd collection as well but see no need to load everything I collect in a nas, so a disc that costs ~$3.60 for 50GB of storage and takes no space is a compliment to the nas itself. Being able to burn discs of up to 128GB is pretty cool but the archival ones do get more expensive.

I wanted a supermicro forever but the build itself is the turnoff at this point. A $340 qnap nas would be ideal as I live alone and have one desktop, 2 tablets, and one smart tv.
I remember hacking my att phone to get free data and streaming music to it at work using HFS file server as a novelty. Now I'd like to vm linux, access my media seamlessly, and still be able to basically serve up anything, webpage whatever. With the built-in software I could easily do all that. As well, since computers are not going away, it seems to be a good investment.

I archived my whole DVD collection for quick access via the in-house network. Starting to consider my blu-rays just not sure how I want to handle them really. So large amount of storage I feel for you. I could easily see it for somethings of mine just burning them to a disk/using a small portable HDD and just placing them into my firesafe. Actually when I was running out of space on my NAS I was doing that for certain items consistently. Now benefit is I can have them on the NAS again and still have it off the network as a backup

Yeah a NAS is just nice, small, specific build, low power and they typically have lots of features. Might not be super powerful compared to a standard PC build but its decent and stable.

 

[habbajabba]

Way ahead of me which is fine. I would love to run linux again on a daily instead of windows. Use it for the daily driver if you will and keep the power requirements low. If I'm to have multiple monitors I want them doing their own thing. Tbh, I can't really see a need to even keep windows around but for the windows only experience. Wine is a hack imo when a simple vm would ultimately be a better solution esp. with multiple monitors. Aside from turning my desktop into a linux based nas and then having to try and configure it to work like a qnap would, I'm still leaning towards the qnap itself as the better solution. Put windows in a vm and use my desktop for a linux distro

The 50GB verbatims I just bought give me about 45GB usable storage and are re-writable. The 100GB are permanent and cost like $20 ea. so that's cost prohibitive compared to a std. mechanical hd. being reusable. The cool thing about m-discs is that any dvd player can access them (pc based of course). I still have about 6TB of free space so really have only used half so far. I got time to get a qnap. This thread has made me really want one now. Problem is now I want a 4bay in raid 10 lol.

 

[knoober]

https://blog.linuxserver.io/2017/06/24/the-perfect-media-server-2017/

While I would love to try and claim the knowledge as my own....I found this recently and it made it to the top of my list for NAS discussion. Frankly I would love to see someone tear this article into pieces because it seems to good to be true, but I think it is pretty solid.

 

[gsrcrxsi]

https://blog.linuxserver.io/2017/06/24/the-perfect-media-server-2017/

While I would love to try and claim the knowledge as my own....I found this recently and it made it to the top of my list for NAS discussion. Frankly I would love to see someone tear this article into pieces because it seems to good to be true, but I think it is pretty solid.

i dont see anything wrong with it really. its just a JBOD type setup for his disks + docker for apps. sure JBOD gives you flexibility for using any old disk you have laying around. but i prefer more traditional raid type solutions. he talks about how the disks aren't striped and that increases the chances of data recovery in the event of a drive failure. in some cases sure, but its also possible that you'll lose it all with no chance to recover.

reading through it, seems like a lot of work to setup and get going when you can have a better setup with FreeNAS11 + jails. (which is what i do). he was talking about 68 days uptime, but that's not really that impressive for linux systems.

i would definitely prefer freeNAS over that for a file server / media server. just my .02