Synology DS215J Vs Other NAS Advice

akd on 17/06/2015 - 15:17

I have been trying to purchase NAS for home backups and personal cloud (2 pc, 3 mobiles and 2 tablets) for a while but its total cost including hard drives changes my mind every time. My budget is max $600. I finalised Synology DS215J, Qnap TS231 and HP MicroServer N54. Initially HP MicroServer N54 was my first choice but I was unable to configure Amahi on my old pc (P4 CPU Compaq D410) (as an experiment). By going through the forums and past deals Synology NAS seems to be one of the better choice.

Currently Shopping Express is having specials on Synology DS215J for $219 and Seagate 3TB for $139 each. I do not need 3 TB but 2Tb is $135, so not much price difference.

I like to have advice from my fellow Ozbargainers of their experience of NAS :
* For backups of Photos, music, movies and documents, will Synology DS 251J be enough? If I am able to stream movies through Plex then it would be bonus.
* Can we access Synology NAS (e.g. photos) away from home on mobile app?
* Any experience with alternative options like Netgear NAS or WD Cloud?
* Will installing FreeNAS or Amahi or Xpenology be easy on Microserver as compared to old pc or it does not make any difference.
Thanks in advance

Computing

Comments

  • Vieira4 on 17/06/2015 - 16:43

    I own a 213j. I believe the j processor cannot run Plex. But there are other Synology apps such as DS Video/Audio/Photo/File. The j models will not offer powerful transcoding so best rip your videos in a format that is native to your viewing devices. The DS mobile apps can access your nas over the web, all you need to do is enable quickconnect on the nas. If you will be running with one disk redundancy get the highest capacity HDDs you can afford.

    • akd on 17/06/2015 - 17:26

      Thanks Vieira4, I will try to get 4TB if on specials

  • swiggity swag on 17/06/2015 - 17:18

    Lookup Xpenology, That's what i'm using and it works perfectly just on an old computer.

    • akd on 17/06/2015 - 17:28

      Thanks Kados, I will give it another go.
      Previously on Amahi, the issue was changing DNS server configuration on router. But doing that iiNet Buddi-Lite router was causing problems.

      • swiggity swag on 17/06/2015 - 17:31

        Took a little bit of fiddling around at first but now it work's solidly. Also I don't have a great deal of knowledge regarding networking etc. everything I needed to do I found on Google.

  • trex on 17/06/2015 - 19:46

    I purchased a DS214 after much consideration. I just wanted a NAS but in using the DS214 I find that it offers so much more since Synology has so many apps that you can install and use. Synology NAS also has a Cloud backup app to third party Cloud services like Google Drive etc so you can actually access your data like photos on the go.

    • akd on 17/06/2015 - 19:51

      Thanks trex

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