What NAS drives do you like?

[Ratt]

I'm thinking of buying a little 2-bay Synology NAS for the house to use as a simple photo backup solution for my wife's iPhone and Macbook, and need recommendations on what brand of drives everyone likes. Not looking to break the bank, around a hundred bucks for each drive.

[BP]

I use a WD mycloud device. It's pretty easy to use and has been reliable so far. I also have an old HP homeserver with swappable drives and it wasn't easy to use at all.

[abecx]

Red WD NAS drives, long warranty, I have 20 of them, only 1 has died and I bought that one used.

[LS1Goat]

WD MyCloud is my NAS.

Simple, inexpensive, and easy to manage. It's very reliable and the built in Twonky DLNA Media Server works really well. No problem streaming MakeMKV Blu-ray (I own) rips, even the one's I didn't bother to HandBrake.

I have a WD Elements external drive of the same capacity plugged into it and I have the MyCloud configured to create a backup of all my data once a week. The phone app works fairly well.

[Ratt]

I appreciate the MyCloud suggestions, but I'm trying to set up a Synology NAS, so I just need to know what NAS drives people like, as they generally come as diskless systems.

I'll check out the Red WD NAS drives, abecx, thanks.

[Rafa]

Red WD is what i got for my synology nas

[Ratt]

Thanks. Fuckin' pricey, but you get what you pay for I guess.

[abecx]

Thanks. Fuckin' pricey, but you get what you pay for I guess.

Green drives are too slow and careful to be raided. They have a higher tolerance for retrying failed sectors because they dont come with many spare ones.

Red drives are quick to mark a sector bad and write the data to the disk because they have a lot more spare sectors. This is what you want in a NAS drive if its going to be raided.

There is also some firmware difference but its mainly fail/retry timers.

[Gasser64]

Green drives are too slow and careful to be raided. They have a higher tolerance for retrying failed sectors because they dont come with many spare ones.

Red drives are quick to mark a sector bad and write the data to the disk because they have a lot more spare sectors. This is what you want in a NAS drive if its going to be raided.

There is also some firmware difference but its mainly fail/retry timers.

I'd like to get your opinion on the best bang for the buck, off the shelf setup. Something where I ain't got to do dick but hook it up to the network. I've seen the storage boxes, but I want to try to do better on the price. Which one would you say is the cheapest, but still worth owning?

[LS1Goat]

I'd like to get your opinion on the best bang for the buck, off the shelf setup. Something where I ain't got to do dick but hook it up to the network. I've seen the storage boxes, but I want to try to do better on the price. Which one would you say is the cheapest, but still worth owning?

You're looking for a plug 'n play NAS that's cheap and off the shelf? That's already been described twice in the above posts.

[Gasser64]

I was asking him because he

[abecx]

I'd like to get your opinion on the best bang for the buck, off the shelf setup. Something where I ain't got to do dick but hook it up to the network. I've seen the storage boxes, but I want to try to do better on the price. Which one would you say is the cheapest, but still worth owning?

I would recommend building your own. I use my file server to also do plex. Those off the shelf NAS units typically have weak ARM cpu's that dont work well with transcoding and other types of high cpu, as well you can add shit to it like a 10Gb network card and other shit you probably wont use.

I have a u-nas.com case and I went the micro atx route instead of the mini itx route so I could have more pci capabilities.

[Sgt Beavis]

Abecx has a point about building your own. However, if you are going for off the shelf, I would suggest looking at QNAP. I’ve been using them for years and they keep getting better. They use Intel chips and they are constantly updating their OTS operating system. They amount of functionality they offer is very impressive too.

I use mine for as a cloud file server but its main purpose is to be the storage back end for my vSphere lab. They have 2bay and larger devices and one can even be used as a VMware ESXi server to run virtual machines.

I’ve had mine for SEVEN YEARS and they still support it with QTS updates. It runs like a champ. I’ve never replaced the hard drives either, but I’m using seagate 10K enterprise drives that usually experience much heavier loads than I can put on them in my lab.

[abecx]

QNAP's are bad ass, I was going to get one of those, but couldnt find one for the price range I wanted to spend that had 8 bays. If I were to get a NAS unit, it would be without a doubt the QNAS. Hell, I even had one in my shopping cart once or twice to purchase before backing out.

[Ratt]

Abecx has a point about building your own. However, if you are going for off the shelf, I would suggest looking at QNAP. I’ve been using them for years and they keep getting better. They use Intel chips and they are constantly updating their OTS operating system. They amount of functionality they offer is very impressive too.

I use mine for as a cloud file server but its main purpose is to be the storage back end for my vSphere lab. They have 2bay and larger devices and one can even be used as a VMware ESXi server to run virtual machines.

I’ve had mine for SEVEN YEARS and they still support it with QTS updates. It runs like a champ. I’ve never replaced the hard drives either, but I’m using seagate 10K enterprise drives that usually experience much heavier loads than I can put on them in my lab.

So the main reason for doing what I was doing is so that my wife can back up her millions of pictures on her iPhone to the thing over WiFi, instead of to iCloud or Google Drive. As she edits them frequently on her Macbook, I figured having them stored locally on a NAS instead of in the cloud would make her life easier, as it would be easier for her to organize them and move them around. I chose Synology because of the DS Photo app that they have that works natively with the NAS. Does QNAP have something similar? I will admit that I looked at QNAP diskless systems, as well, but didn't dig deep enough to find out if the same sort of technology exists for them as it does for the Synology boxes.

*Side Note: The NAS would be used for my own file storage needs, as well, such as machine image storage, etc., so it was a two birds with one stone scenario. Also, this exercise is now futile, as she's shot down the idea of me building a $500-$700 home NAS in lieu of spending $10 a month for Google Drive space, but I still would like to build one eventually.