I'm looking to buy a NAS for the first time, I'm thinking something with 4-6 Bays with a price range of about $600.
I'll mainly be using it to store stuff and occasionally other people will access it to watch media.
They will all be accessing using laptops/computers so I don't think I need to worry about transcoding?
Edit: Should add that I have 2x4TB WD Reds doing nothing atm.
Any recommendations?
It is not an easy option, but good for tinkerers:
NAS4Free and some very good, but commodity hardware. FreeBSD is a highly secure and reliable OS. NAS4free is a very solid project with a brilliant history.
A cheap used HP desktop with multiple bays- but one that has a standard ATX PSU. You can use something off the street if it is in good shape. But not an old server if you care about noise/heat/energy use and don't want to be up for expensive replacement parts. A high quality, high efficiency power supply, rip out but keep the original PSU as a backup, for when your nice new one fails. A low power CPU if you really want longevity.
Nowhere near a plug and play solution, but a NAS you can keep and love a long time. New features all the time. If on a budget, start with a two separate disks, one in the NAS, and one for (at least) weekly backup. You setup a schedule so it does it itself, or when you plug your second disk in (assuming you want an offline backup to guard against ransomware).
Security updates all the time. Upgrade to bigger disks and/or a RAID when you want or need. Only decent NAS-specific (or better enterprise-level) disks, cheapest would be WD Reds, for example.
Either that, or Apple's time capsule- it is also BSD based, and of the commercial providers, it is definitely the most reliable, and very well supported software. Totally plug and play- up and running in minutes. Leave on and forget, esp if you use their brilliant Time Machine software.
Down the rung to where I have trouble (but do) descend is Drobo, then Synology… followed by the others. All are tailored hardware and Linux software, so you are at the mercy of the manufacturer for conscientiously (Linux distributions force many patches just for security alone, and so should their software). The reality for most is the product will be up for replacement in months, so they hate supporting the old stuff. And as you are in far-flung Oz, you are probably going to need to rely on your vendor when they fail too.
I understand your concerns about using proprietary hardware/software, and I share those concerns too. But I also really really hate tinkering, so I just want something that does not take forever to set up.
@BarginHunter:Just trying to do it cheap for u :-)
If you want ease, buy a new mini-tower PC (they have space for drives), Eg the HP ML10v2 (new for approx $200 on OzB recently, no drives w full warranty) but there are many other options around.
Run it without a screen, just connect to your LAN and log-on. Configure the drives, create your shares, set access controls, and away you go. As a new user, you have to figure that little bit out, as you would any NAS.
I burnt my NAS4free to a 8GB USB disk and booted from that- so the internal disks are 100% storage.
synology but probly above your budget for 6 bays. 4 is enough. get 3 first then increase a year later when price of hdd are cheaper
How much are the 6 Bays? And which 4 bay model would you recommend?
I'm a fan of netgear 4 Bays with enterprise grade hdd's
Happy with my synology just haven't found a great way to back the NAS up off site which is cost effective. Buying a second NAS to put off site is a bit too expensive for our needs.
google drive hiding in the cloud?
I have the Synology ds416play, but only 2 WD 3tb Red Hdd's at the moment. Mainly use it for storage - videos and pictures, but I have Plex installed on it and also on my android tv, xbox and playstation. Works like a charm. Really good value for money and the Synology Diskstation OS is easy to set up and use. Highly recommended.
Do you have it with the default 1GB of RAM or have you upgraded it? Also, by play do u mean 4 bay?
You're right. 4 bay, I am just waiting on a decent deal on two 6tb reds. And I do have it with the default 1GB RAM on it.
I have PoE around the house with everything hardwired plus I am making use of the Dual 1GbE LAN ports which gives me a really high speed access with the nbn on.
Synology is what you want; 4 bay for that price. I have a DS413, current model is the DS416 (sells for $535 at PCCaseGear). Use mine for file storage and media streaming to TV. I don't need to transcode anything as I have a Rpi3 with Kodi and it plays most file formats.
+1 for Synology.
I have a DS412 or DS413 also, I use it for backups and run a Xpenology box (Synology DSM software on desktop hardware) for my media server.
DSM (the OS) is very easy to use.
I've had the ASUStor for a few years now, no problems at all.
Hi Bargain hunter. As ZV says above, just get an HP Workstation off eBay and run a NAS OS on it. I've been running an HP Z210 with i5 CPU & 8Gb RAM for years loaded with a couple of mirrored Archive 8TB HDDs as my offsite backup NAS without a problem at all. I was running another Z210 for my actual NAS with 4 X 4TB but it needed a heap of case modification and the HDDs ran a little too hot as they were crammed in but it worked flawlessly for years so they didn't seem to mind. I recently upgraded it using a massive beastly Z440 PC (friggin overkill XEON CPU & 32Gb RAM!) I scored 2nd hand for a couple of hundred but it had plenty of space to install 4 X 8TB HDDs with heaps of airflow to keep them cool as possible.
I run Xpenology on all my NAS boxes. Quick, simple, flexible and rock solid. Can't recommend DIYing this way enough. Any questions just ask!
Yea forgot to mention Xpenology… does it have the camera surveillance software? If so, I might need another NAS box to run that!
Beware with overkill, the perfect NAS generates minimal heat and has minimal fans. Only low-power Xeons are really worth using as requiring the CPU to have >2 cores, >1GHz… as well as cooling fans just to run a bunch of shares and minimal services is a waste and just geerates heat and noise for no benefit. It'll be running idle and barely ever spike to 10% utilisation. Even extra memory is wasted and just sits there sinking power and generating heat. One stick with 4GB is probably overkill. A big-ass RAID will probably need airflow capacity (case fans) to speed up and down quite well to keep the drives cool. I run a Xeon E3-1220L v3 (no fan) and a single quiet 120mm case fan (as well as the 120mm in the PSU, which I've never noticed turn on as the PSU stays below 30% utilisation).
But I'm not running a RAID now, on the odd occasion I've seen a failing disk (never at home) I've been able to recover 100% of the data faster using spinrite, and far, far, easier than anyone using mdadm (RAID tools) on a large (>500GB) volume can hope to see it rebuild after a physical failure. And with the share back in action immediately, I'm able to transfer the data (or record benchmarks of the sector failure rates for future reference) as the system is back online straight away.
On my system, booting to spinrite is as easy as shutting down, switching boot disks and restarting. Beats the hell out of pulling disks and unplugging everything with all your data offline.
Yep, I'm running Surveillance Station on my Xpenologu NAS, no problem at all. Just be careful as it only suppprts 2 cameras by default then if you pay for the extra licenses to handle more you have to downgrade the version of Surveillance Station if running Xpenology. No problem though as it still works perfectly for me (6 cameras total) and I'm not even sure what the limitations of the older version are. May just be a but of FOMO marketing with people wanting the latest version, not sure. No limits if running full Synology tho.
Also, there's zero issues with heat & fan noise from running the XEON machine and only a small rise in power consumption too so all good. May also he because its a well designed HP Workstation and not just a generic machine or a full blown Server.
Cool, thanks for the heads up on SS, it's good software i want to try.
BTW, I didn't say you'd notice the heat or the noise- yes workstations do have the most ideal thermal management. It's just that if you want reliability, moving parts and heat are where it starts. My kit mostly only comes down to be occasionally changed or vacuumed. Disliking vacuuming as much as noise doesn't help!
If you plan to leave it on all the time, get something with good software and a good power supply. Anything else will fail in one of millions of misery-laden ways. Every dollar less than a proper enterprise solution will bring with it a lower mean time to failure. The best consumer grade ones have lasted 10 years, are still supported and work very well. But they are slow by today's standards, and had bad power supplies that take them down early.
Most are unsupported after a couple of years and come with bug-laden, insecure software so could go to straight to the tip without passing Go, or a few years at your house where all that will really result is data loss and frustration.
Data loss has to be guarded against, and a big-ass-multi-GB NAS makes this harder in most cases. Just having RAID means zip and can make recovering data after a failure much harder.
Consider as part of the purchase a backup system/strategy to protect the data you store on the NAS as well as your PC.