Hello, not sure how on-topic is this, but I’ll ask anyway. Since I’m wrapping my head around this topic for long time to no avail.
I’m planning to buy NAS mostly to store my music, pictures and documents on my place. At the beginning I’d like to keep it simple so I don’t plan to install billion things on it. I would definitely want to install adblocker like PiHole/AdGuard. I’m also eye-ing Tailscale for remote access (no public IP) and Jellyfin/Emby for music streaming at home. So apart from usual NFS/SMB file shares, let’s say there are these three apps I’d like it to run at the beginning.
The NAS has to be as quiet as possible, so even thought it’s more expensive, I’ll have to go with SSD drives. Looking at prices two 2 TB (in mirror RAID) should be doable and should be enough space for me, at least for now. I’m no hoarder.
I have few other “must-haves”:
- decently working companion app that automatically backups pictures from at least 2 android phones (my wife needs to deal with it and she’s not really friends with tech stuff)
- possibility to upgrade storage other than just replacing drives for bigger ones
- simple, easy to use (both setup and “rescue”) scheduled backups to external USB drive
- I knew I had something else but it completely slipped out of my head
That brings me to what’s available. I almost pulled the trigger on Synology DS423+. It looks reasonable powerful, I can put 4 SATA SSDs and 2 M.2… that’s what I thought. But it turned out it’s not possible to use M.2 as storage with anything but Synology’s own overpriced drives that aren’t even available in my country. So, it’s just four SATA drives, which is… “not great, not terrible” as some would say. What seems to be a big plus is the DSM. Everyone I know really praises it. Plus it seems to have very good reputation in terms of longevity of devices.
Then there is QNAP. Apparently their system QTS is not as polished as DSM, but everything needed should still be there. There’s similarly priced, similarly equipped TS-462. It’s just dual-core CPU, but has more RAM (not upgradeable though) and it seems it can accept M.2 as storage at least. As per internet research, the build quality is just as good as Synology.
And then there’s Asustor, which I heard about years ago and then completely forgot they exist. Last week my friend mentioned this name, so I checked their offering too. Well, Nimbustor AS5402T looks absolutely the best on paper! Well, it only has two regular drives, because it’s got FOUR M.2 slots! I assume it’s because SATA is on decline, but M.2 SSDs are cheaper than SATA nowadays so it’s actually better for me to have the numbers reversed. And it’s cheapest on top of it. So where’s the catch? I presume the ADM system is piece of shit. Right? Or is it build quality that’s bad? Reliability? IDK.
Which of these three do you think would be the best for my needs? I’m more than open to other offerings and suggestions too! Thank you very much!
You might want to look at Terramaster NASes. E.g. their F4-423 is basically an Intel NUC married to a SATA controller. They have an internal USB port where you can pull the OEM flash drive and insert your own, then install e.g. UnRAID or OpenMediaVault on it.
That will be my next device if my Synology DS415+ finally dies.
Thank you for suggestion. I stumbled upon this brand last week, it looks promising. Sadly they don’t have presence in my country. Sure there’s ebay, international sellers and possibly other ways, but I don’t want to buy such a thing with non-local warranty.
I actually bought a ausustor NAS with the intention of flashing it with trueNAS or run headless. But tbh the OS does what I need rn with reasonable effort and I actually stuck the the stock OS. The backup options are not that great to use and with one press backup you can only save a single share at a time. So I am using syncthing for that.
Yeah, once you wrote this I saw a video where it’s explained Asustor is basically “unlocked” just like regular PC, unlike Synology and Qnap who are hard-set on their offerings. This is quite a big plus IMO. Some people criticize Asustor that it relies on third party solutions like Virtualbox. Not really concern to me as I’d definitely not run a whole virtualized system. And for Docker it has Portainer if I looked right? Isn’t this considered a go-to solution with self built systems running docker? How could this be bad?
Although I have to add that from what I saw both Syno and Qnap have their own systems more polished as a whole than ADM is.
I can only be another “everyone” and say go for a Synology. If you wanna run services on your NAS then the DSM is a godsend. The 423+ sounds like a good fit, might wanna grab a RAM upgrade for it though.
edit: As you mentioned Jellyfin - if you wanna stream video you definitely want the 423+ and not the 923+ as the AMD Ryzen R1600 lacks GPU to transcode video streams.
Thanks for the reply. For now, I only intend to stream music if anything at all.
And as for the services, the main gripe now is adblock, honestly. There’s also cheap N100 mini pc burried in my drawer that I intended to run Proxmox on and play with it. But that’s reserved for “when I have time” winter evenings or so.
Synology has Container Manager, which is their GUI frontend for Docker, so if it’ll run in Docker it’ll run on a Syno NAS. I’m running Pihole on mine just fine.
As for the M.2 drives, you can use non-Synology ones as storage. Don’t quote me on it but I’ve a feeling it “just works” in the EU where they’re not allowed to force you to use specific brands, but if it doesn’t then there’s a script that removes the restriction: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_M2_volume
You should check their repo as they have other useful scripts. I’m using the one that enables dedupe on non-SSD volumes myself.
Ok, thanks for reply. I’ll keep it in mind. I’m in EU, so I’ll check the M.2 situation here.
That brings me to what’s available. I almost pulled the trigger on Synology DS423+. It looks reasonable powerful, I can put 4 SATA SSDs and 2 M.2… that’s what I thought. But it turned out it’s not possible to use M.2 as storage with anything but Synology’s own overpriced drives that aren’t even available in my country.
You can use a script to make them available. Still a pain.
Since you only need 2 TB, why do you even bother with the m.2 slots?
Why do you think that you need the m.2 in the first place? I guess you are hang up on “sata bad cause m.2 new” (thats btw only the connector not the interface, there are sata m.2 as well)
sata can handle 6 Gbps. That’s 6 times more than most home network connections can even handle. Since you have not mentioned once how many Ethernet ports the systems have and how fast they are, i figure you only have a 1 Gbps LAN.
Yes NVMe SSDs are somewhat cheaper these days, but not that much that i would bother with it. We are only talking about 2 times 2 tb.
As I wrote above. It’s not about speed, it’s about price and mostly availability. When I look at 2,5" at my country’s biggest retailer, there’s not really much to chose from and the number of available offerings are more or less shrinking. That’s not really the case with M.2 which seems to be “new shit” everyone wants so there’s plenty of options. And even if I stayed with “trusty WD Red” it’d still cost less to buy M.2…
Another benefit (for me) is its form factor. I don’t have a lot of space. Classic 2-bay NAS size is “perfect” for me, apart from its bay limitation. That’s what’s so tempting on Asustor. Either Nimbustor with 4xM.2 or even Flashstor with just 6xM.2 are quite a small devices (compared to what regular 6-bay would be) which is a big plus for me.
