I have a 3 bay QNAP at the moment with 3 2tb drives running raid 5. I want to expand up to 4 drives and want to replace the really slow TS351 I have (QTS runs like a dog on this even with 16gb memory). I want to expand to a 4 bay nas but have nto got a lot of money to do it with. I am opent to ideas to perhaps NAS's which are a little older or available second hand that are 4 bay.. Ultimatly I would go for something like a TS-462/4 but costs are too high really. I hate terramaster with a passion as I had a 2 bay one of those and it was forever screwing up when an update was applied and you needed a degree in Linux to fix it or loose or your data. open to ideas to be honest for a cost effective solution. I do have an matx motherboard and intel i5-6500 on it that I could use for a server but I think I would struggle with the set up of a something like trunas for example and it's size would just be prohibative too... Regards Darren

Great channel, I find it useful!
I am thinking of getting the UNas Pro. 1 thing I really want to to self host my own photo cloud and Plex server. Is it even possible to do that? If I want to use immich, I need to can I download and use docker? how about Plex?
There is almost nobody talking about this use case. I have the basis of a unify network infratstuctre at home now, I use UDR, a unify POE switch, a unify Mesh router etc. So I thought I would try to continue with more unify gear rather than get a Synology

Hello my nactua fan stop working after a little while. 1 works one stops any way around it ?

HEY MY FRIEND


Hope everything is ok with you Robbie....
I was thinking of buying a used 4bays (or bigger) NAS and upgrade the mobo..... should I buy a QNAP or SYnology (or other brand) ...which is easiest to change motherboard on ??
I want a mobo with PCIx 8x or 16x so I can install an GPU also

best regards

Andreas Wassén
sweden

Hi there!

I have had a simple HTPC running pretty much constantly for the last 10 years, maybe longer.  It wasn't much - started out as just a box under the TV with a few DVDs of mine I converted, and grew to all the DVDs, then BluRays, etc., and along the way became headless and the kids streaming from it more and more as they grew up.

Unfortunately, the box gave up the ghost on me a couple days ago, and I thought this might be the time I can finally persuade the wife (read: get permission from  ) that we should update to a more robust NAS-type system, with plenty of room to grow the storage, and maybe start backing up our PCs to it, all the photos and videos from our phones, as well as it continuing to be a streaming system.

Now, never having setup/bought/built a proper NAS device before, I headed to the NAS Compares Youtube channel to try to absorb some info about what to do... and, my goodness, there was a lot of info there!  Kinda made my head spin, tbh.  But what I came away with (rightly or wrongly), was that building my own was probably going to hit that sweet spot of still doing what I want, but maybe saving a few quid... or maybe I really liked the video with the Jonsbo N2 and N3 and just wanted to build one using that case?  

So here's the main things I want:


* Lots of drive potential so that I can easily add drives as I go (and can afford to)
* The ability to use different sized drives so I can add ones (even small ones) that I might be able to get my hands on around the house
* Emby server (like Plex) with hardware transcoding
* Supports potentially four people on the local network viewing files/stream media at the same time, and maybe a couple people remotely
* Can have docker containers running (eg, Emby, but also maybe a web server like nginx, PHP, Go, Python, so that I can run some sites/apps I'm working on, photo viewers, vpn server, or anything else that grabs the fancy)
* Be pretty forward thinking - would love to just set it up the once, and other than adding more storage if I want/need, just have it do its thing for the next 10+ years like my old HTPC

From the videos I saw, it seems like UnRAID would be a good choice for the software, and I was going to go for the Jonsbo N3.  I have a couple 6TB drives now, and would like to get them added without losing any data, so would probably set up the server first with a larger drive, copy everything to it and go from there adding the 6TB drives, and then a second large drive for the parity drive... with thought that I can then go to, say, six data drives and two parity drives.

But I find it hard to really pick hardware, and although the nascompares.com/guide/recommended-jonsbo-n3-nas-builds-for-300-500-1000 page was helpful, a lot of the prices were not as cheap as they once were?

So playing around a bit on PCPartPicker, this is what I came up with; is it totally bonkers, over the top, and I don't need anything like that at all?

Case: Jonsbo N3 (8 bays or longevity)
PSU: CoolerMaster V750 SFX (I've had some really cheap PSUs in the past burn out, but also didn't want to throw hugh amounts of cash here)
Mobo: ROG Strix B760-I (gives me two M.2 slots and 4 SATA 6Gb, and DDR5)
CPU: i5 14600K (QuickSync for hardware transcoding and iGPU)
Cooler: Noctura NH-D9L (Seemed reasonable for the CPU?)
RAM: Crucial Pro DDR5 (I know it's not ECC, but figured the DDR5 offers a little bit of extra protection built-in)
Extra SATA adapter: M.2 to SATA3.0 Adapter Card (as the mobo only has 4 ports and I want to eventually be able to use all 8 slots)
Cache drive: Crucial P3 Plus SSD 1TB M.2
HDD: 2 Seagate Ironwolf Pro's @ 16TB (one as parity, one to go as data to compliment the two 6TB drives I have)
OS: UnRAID Unleashed (figure after a year, I can either extend the license or upgrade to the lifetime one)

All in all that's about £1300, which is honestly more than I wanted to spend, but figure if it lasts my like my HTPC did, then it's only like £100/year, which makes it a lot easier to swallow.  

But being someone that's only put together desktop PCs before, maybe I'm looking at this all wrong and maybe I'm not watching enough of the videos!  But that being said; any thoughts on that list?

Many thanks!

I bought an Asustor Lockerstor Gen 2 after watching your review.

As you recommended in your first setup video, I disabled the admin account and set up several users on the NAS.

I have set myself up as an admin user with full read and write access to all folders.

I then set up a mapped network drive from the new user account I set up for myself.

The mapped network drive will only allow access from network attached PCs if the root admin account is active. If I disable it (as recommended for security), I cannot access the mapped drive.

What am I doing wrong!?

Grateful for advice,

Kind Regards,

Bruce

Hi Robbie,

I am interesting in buying a 4 bay Synology Nas. I have a large video, music and e-book collection and want to be able to have access where I am. I have watched several of your videos and am going to subscribe but I still don't know quite yet what is best for me. I have a Plex pass. I have windows and Apple OS. Don't know if Synology DS423+, 923+ or 1522+ is best for me. Any advice that you can give will be deeply aprreciated. Thanks in advance for taking the time out of your busy schedule to answer me. Have a nice weekend. Yours truly, Rick

I have built my NAS on
1. HP Intel® Xeon® CPU duell E5-2640 v3 @ 2.60GHz

2. 96 GiB DDR4 Multi-bit ECC

32 TB Storage (4 - 4 TB WD 5400 rpm CMR drive,
2 -8 TB Toshiba 7200 rpm CMR)

3. 1 TB ssd 2 NVME and 1 SSD drive

OS - Unraid 7.

The only issue I having is a problem witiowait.

I'm not sure how to resolve, identify the disk(s) causing the wait status.

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.

I following you on YouTube, this where I found this link.

Hi Ed & Robbie

Love the channel, it's been a goldmine of information.

I've been running a DS216+II since it was new and am conscious that it's getting a little long in the tooth (although upgrading to 8GB RAM helped to get DSM 7 working to an acceptable level). That said I'm not sure how long before Synology make it EOL, hence looking for a modern upgrade, but seem to be spinning in circles trying to work out where to go from here.

It's used as a fileserver for my business (1 user) and backup for music and video production files (although I don't edit videos on it), photos and apple devices (iOs & Mac). With the recent news about Apple's ADP being removed in the UK it has made me think a little more widely about what data is held in the cloud versus just storing on my own NAS. Aside from backup apps and cloud sync (G Drive/Dropbox) I don't run much on it, although I'm not averse to looking into that at some point.

I'm thinking of moving to a 4 bay and have been looking at the 423+, 923+ as well as Asustor's Nimbustor 4 Gen2 which is currently a similar price to the 923+. Whilst I'm happy with DSM, I'm concerned about Synology's gradual move away from Home/Small Business as well as their comparatively weak hardware (1GBe networking compared to 2.5GBe with the Asustor) and really want a NAS that will last me for a good few years to come. Obviously sticking with Synology would have the advantage of being able to pull my disks straight over, although with my backups there's no reason why I can't setup a new system from scratch. 10GBe isn't really something I'd be getting close to saturating with mechanical disks, although the option of M2 drives in the Asustor might provide future proofing if coupled with the 2.5G ports.

I guess it's possible that with my lighter needs that this weaker hardware will be more than sufficient but I just would like some guidance in case I'm missing something.

Thanks!
Si

Moving away from Apple iCloud so need nas for storing files,documents, photos,video form various family devices worldwide iPhones,iPads etc etc