I currently have an old Synology 4bay NAS with two 2tb WD Red drives installed. The 415 has failed i.e. there is no power to the unit. I have bought a second-hand 918+ - can I do a straight swap of hard drives to the 'new'NAS from the old one (presuming the hard drives are ok)?

Your related YouTube guides are great help - thanks. I have just purchased a new Qnap TS-253D NAS J4125 and also 2 x 12Tb WD Red NAS drives. I have a few questions in respect to QNAP Photography, Indexing, Sharing.
1. Presently I have a seperate folder for Photos / Music and Videos. Would it be better to create seperate Volumes rather than folders on my new hdd?

Presently I organise my media by creating folders by Year and then sub- folders labelled by date and event i.e. E:\Photos\221012 New Qnap. This works well for me.

2. When using PhotoStation or QuMagie, when creating new Albums, does it create a new folder on the disk or is this just code used by the QuMagie app?

3. When indexing and working with the Apps, do they in anyway impact or physically rearrange the files on my hdd?

4. The same question for the Qnap music and video apps?

5. I usually work with Cyberlink Power Director for film production. Will Qnap media have any impact on this?

I ask these questions as many years ago I let my Mac iTunes sort my media and my goodness what a mess it made as it mainly reckognises English & USA artists but does not cope with music artists from other parts of the world.

As I have a large photo/video archive, and am in the process of digitizing VHS cassets, (producing films), I really domt want to mess up many years of hard work developing a structure for my data.

Your comments and advice will be much appreciated. THANKS!
Brg, Rolands

Hi there,

I have had a Readynas 314 for 7 + years now and was just about ready to upgrade. When I realised Netgear are out of the market I definitely knew I had to upgrade.

I will get QNAP or Synology but I'm wavering between the hardware vs software argument of those two brands at the moment.

What I'd like is your opinion on how the Readynas OS compares to QTS and DSM? I have been okay to navigate my way around Readynas and haven't had any issues I couldn't overcome without some internet sleuthing. I'm able to give things a go and learn as I go but I'm not super technical.

I will definitely try out the test OS they offer but wouldn't mind an experts opinion on how they compare.

Leaning towards the TS-664 at the moment...

Thanks for your help.

Hi, I've been watching a lot of videos on your YouTube channel, which have helped a lot but I still have some uncertainty. Having experienced a HDD failure on a previous laptop I'm looking for some data security for files, photos, music, games. These will come from iphones, PS5, PS4, 3 laptops, 1 desktop, all within the same household. I'm leaning towards the DS1522+ but without all the drives populated initially, I can add more over time. I was looking at RAID 5 or SHR. I want to avoid using any cloud services for backup and keep it in house so I am unsure what the backup solution would entail. Do you think what I've described in my wish list is a reasonable scenario? Any advice welcome. Thank you, Dave

Do you have any info on this drive for the ps5? Literally not a single video on YouTube about it nor can i find anything on google about it. Not a single customer review either. Theres a product page on seagate site and best buy. That's it.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6520526.p?skuId=6520526

https://www.seagate.com/products/gaming-drives/playstation-gaming/game-drive-m2-ssd-for-ps5/

Hi. I am looking for a couple of hard drives for my my music recording studio, so noise level is very important. In looking at the WD product brief document, I found that one of the quietest drives is the WD Red Plus WD60EFPX with 256Mb cache (Acoustics (dBA) - Idle: 23, Seek (average): 27). I also see that it is CMR and not SMR.
In examining the model number I think I understand everything except for the RPM/Buffer Size digit which says P = Intellipower. Is this ok, or is there any disadvantage or advantage to this? Would R = 5400 RPM with 64 MB cache be better?
Thank very much for your informative YouTube videos. Cheers.

Is there a cheaper NvME drive for caching than the SVN3000 series from Synology with power loss protection and same or better performance? (iops, TBW)

Kingston has one NvME with plp but the performance is not as good.

Thank you

Trying to decide if the ds720+ would be a good fit for a backup nas and a digital signage content management system. Does the memory need to be upgraded to 6 gb? Do i need to add ssd's? Is there a better choice? Appreciate any suggestions or comments.

Hi mate,
I've been following your videos for quite a while now. While the Plex tests always give a good insight, I have one problem which maybe you know which NAS is working.

Enabling PGS subtitles completely uses all CPU resources on my current NAS. But would one with a GPU chip solve this issue on 1080p?

Looking forward to your advice.

Best regards,
Dennis

And keep up the great work.

Hey thanks for all your videos, it's really helped after researching for 6 months on what would be best for my very first NAS. The QNAP TS-664 finally arrived last night and it's ready to be populated, though I can wait for Black Friday sales so not in a rush to buy drives at the moment.

Use cases will be file server (home and business), media/Plex server, surveillance, backup, scratch, and eventually virtual machines. I plan to utilize it all!

The NAS will be connected to my home network (TrendNet 2.5gbe switch is up and running). Once the QM2-2P10G1TB is back in stock, I will add a 10gbe link between my primary machine and the NAS for faster transfers.

I also care more about redundancy and safety nets rather than parity/striping. I plan on using an m.2 drive cache for higher transfer speeds. Of course I will still have scheduled backups to external drives for offsite. (3-2-1!)

My question to you is regarding drive configuration and if the following setup would be ideal, or if there's a better way to do this:

Bay 1 & 2 - a pair of WD RED 12TB (RAID 1) as primary file server for both home and business use. This pool may be designated into multiple volumes.
Bay 3 & 4 - a pair of WD BLACK 8TB (RAID 1) as media server (audio/video/photo/Plex).
Bay 5 - one WD PURPLE 8TB to drive two or three IP home surveillance cameras. Redundancy not important here.
Bay 6 - one WD GOLD 16TB that would house all backups (macOS Time Machine, Windows backup as well as copies from the RED and BLACK drives.)

m.2 Slot A - WD RED 1TB for write-through caching, to make up for the lack of parity/striping
m.2 Slot B - WD BLACK 1TB for scratch disk to use with photo/video editing software

The QM2-2P10G1TB extension card with 10gbe also has two more m.2 slots, both of which would be populated with Samsung EVOs, one to hold temporary gaming data and the other to hold virtual machine disk images.

Have I gone off the rails here or does this sound like a reasonable solution to handle all my use cases? Thanks so much for your insight!