Love your YouTube channel and website. I’m trying to decide between Synology and QNAP products. Which do you believe offers the best network client backup in a mixed environment of Mac and windows machines. Many thanks.

Dear Nas-guys,
We want to ask you advice about which NAS system we should buy. We are looking for a system which our android devices and windows computers can securely access from the internet and our home network. Preferably through some transparant special folder or drive-letter. We will be using the NAS for storing documents, music, short videos and photographs (we are passionate photographers). We want a system that can provide us with a means of backup to be safe for disk or device failure and hackers who take data hostage. Easy to manage and expand. We expect to produce about 0.5 TB/year.
With all the brands, drives etc. we can't see the forest for the trees anymore and we hope you could help us.

Morning, first time delving into this and currently use PC for Plex (TV/Film/Music). Want to move to NAS. Currently have 2x 4TB, 18TB and 1x 12TB Ext HDD with media (don't know what drives inside). Want to get the NAS and remove HDD's from external and install. Eventually want to get 2-3 16TB for final, then leave original media on externals for backups. Couple of Q's:
1. After looking at a few of your vids (1 being best for Plex 2023), been thinking about the Terramaster N4-423. Could this handle the 4 different drive?
2. Worried about what I've seen on youtube channel about this ransomeware. Sorry if being dumb, but could I not install my Norton Licence on the NAS to help protect? How often do the ransomware occur?
Thanks for any advice you can give

I am currently using an intel nuc running proxmox, I am using it for several VM and services including my Plex server. My current storage is a 12 TB external hard drive connected to the NUC by USB. I was looking into expanding my storage to five 18 TB hard drives on raidz1. I need advice on what would be the best hardware/software for me. One of the options I am looking into is using the zfs pool in proxmox while connecting the drives using some sort of DAS like the Sabrent drive bay, the other option I am looking into is using truenas, whether it be using a USB connecting DAS or some other dedicated hardware (need advice on the hardware). I would prefer to buy the hardware in phases but I understand it is difficult to expand the zfs pool, so advice on that would be appreciated. I can get the 5 hard drives for around $1500 so I would like to get any other hardware I need for about $500.

What software do i need to get my CD, DVD, Bluray collection onto my windows laptop then to my Synology NAS running DSM 7.1 and then stream to my Apple TV box / Sonysmart TV running Google?

DS 413J NAS will fail to boot (power button blinking blue and will turn off) and keeps turning itself off after successful boot

Power on and system will either boot successfully after multiple tries or after successfully boot it will shutdown itself without warning after 5 - 30 minutes of use.

I managed to temporarily power on the system and download a backup of the configuration a .dss file.

With this configuration file, is it possible for me to reuse and retain all my data from my disk drives?

I plan to buy a new DS423+ as the replacement, will this be compatible to migrate my DS413J configuration and existing drives?

If DS423+ is not compatible, what will be compatible to migrate using the .dss file and my existing drives without losing data.

Thank you.

Hello,

I am a bit confused and I was hoping you might be able to steer me in the right direction.

I am looking to buy a NAS for storage and Plex.
I am familiar with Synology, but I don't have a preference for the manufacturer.

I would like to get into 4K streaming. It is possible I could have up to 3x 4K streams at once.

I should clarify only 1 of those would be 4K in my home.
The other two streams might come remotely.
I believe I can set that so they only can remotely stream @ 1080p?

So this may not be an issue and only 1x 4K stream might be required.

I only need the NAS to be 2-4 bays.
My orginal plan was to go with 2x 16TB drives in Raid 1.
I will do a 1GB nvme drive if the NAS has the capability to do this for caching.

1GB to 2.5GB networking is all that is needed.

The main reason I am confused about all of this is because I have read a few articles I think one from Plex saying they recommend an i7 for 4k Transcoding.

Thank you for your help!

I decided to build my own NAS device because I wanted to learn the process. I purchased two WD-Red 500GB NVMe drives for the system, with the intention of using them as a mirrored cache pool. I am trying out Unraid and have been pleased for the most part. If I plug each drive in individually, each shows up in Unraid. However, when I plug both drives into the system, only one drive appears in Unraid. I've heard that Samsung NVMes don't have this problem, but I am hesitant to use other drives, since the Reds are specifically designed to work in NAS systems, while the Samsungs aren't. Do you have any insight on how I can make my current system work as expected?

Currently using a Drobo and looking to go to another mainstream Das device that has something like "traid" for lack of another term. I see several Nas systems have this feature but I really don't need a Nas. Something like the Drobo will work fine for me.
Thanks,
Ronnie

Hi there,
I was wondering if you could do a video on transcoding with handbrake on a Synology NAS? I'm currently running into a slight issue with my NAS. I have a ton of BluRays that I copied as mkv files to my NAS with MakeMKV. But those files turn out to be between 30-50 GB per file.

When opening handbrake in a docker container, I'm wondering what are the best settings to automatically transcode those video files, so that I can still play them with Plex on an Intel system like the DS423+. (some codecs are not supported) while saving a lot of data.

No worries, I have a solar array, so the electricity used is kind of for free. Because it takes quite some power to let the NAS transcode a video file.

Looking forward to your feedback and possibly a video on YouTube, where the best options are explained in terms of saving file size, while maintaining high quality files that play easily from the NAS.