Hi!
I'm looking into a NAS after wanting one for years so I can finally consolidate my various external drives full of data into one central location. I am a techie person but I am still a bit new to NAS stuff so I wanna seek advice of people more experienced.
Right now I'm looking for a simple budget 2 bay NAS to start out because my income is limited, and I plan to upgrade later on someday when money is better.
Right now I'm looking at the Synology DS220J as it fits the budget nicely. I'm a photographer and also shoot a lot of video, so I have a lot of media, editing projects, and other related files to store as well as general files.
The NAS will just be for storage and archival, any editing would be done on local storage and then stored on the NAS when finished.

I don't plan to use Plex or anything like that, I just need a simple file server since my Chromecast with Google TV handles all my content just fine in VLC without encoding. I might also use it for Time Machine backups from my Macs.

For drives I have loyalty to WD so I'd go with CMR Reds, likely 8TB, but with the finances I might need to stagger the purchases. Can I start with a single drive in the NAS and then add the second later and let it configure the RAID 1?

Do you think a DS220J fits my needs or should I look into something better? The low RAM amount makes me wonder about long term software support/security updates but I'm not sure.

Thank you!

I am researching getting a NAS for home use. It initially was for family photo backups from existing mycloud and current cell phones. I am into home automation and have been a cord cutter for several years streaming from YouTube tv, Netflix, Amazon, hulu, spotify family... I am considering trying Plex. I also have two ring cameras, but am planning on moving to an nvr and replacing the cameras. I am looking at a DS920+ for the main need of photo storage and main media storage location. Then adding separate PC/raspberry/nuc for the processing of plex and or nvr when needed. Is this a good idea or is there a better way? Looking for an economical, flexible, expandable option.

Thanks in advance

After watching some of your videos, I've purchased a TS-h973AX.
Now want to populate the 2x U.2 drive bays and decided to get 2x QDA-U2MP and install 4x WD RED NVMe SSDs in a RAID 10 configuration.
On a second thought I'm unsure, whether the RAID 10 configuration will give me any advantages in speed vs. a RAID 1 with 2 of the cheaper QDA-UMP adapters. If the ASMEDIA chip in the QDA-U2MP cuts the bandwidth in halve for each SSD the speed would be the same as the RAID 1 configuration.

Have you made any tests whether there is a difference in performance between a RAID 10 with QDA-U2MP adapters and a RAID 1 with QDA-UMP?

Thanks

I've just purchased a TS-h973AX.
Now want to populate the 2x U.2 drive bays and decided to get 2x QDA-U2MP and install 4x WD RED NVMe SSDs in a RAID 10 configuration for redundancy with best performance.
On a second thought I'm unsure, whether the RAID 10 configuration will give me any advantages in speed vs. a RAID 1 with 2 of the cheaper QDA-UMP adapters. If the ASMEDIA chip in the QDA-U2MP cuts the bandwidth in halve for each SSD this would be the bottleneck of the setup and the speed would be about the same as with the RAID 1 configuration.

Has anyone made tests whether there is a difference in performance between a RAID 10 with QDA-U2MP adapters and a RAID 1 with QDA-UMP especially in a TS-h973AX?

Thanks

Hi,

I have a 12 Bay Qnap Nas drive thats main purpose is to be a Plex media server.

The Nas has about 40TB of media on it & generally works great - But recently it appears to have an issue with its memory - of which I presume means the Ram memory.

Which results in the Nas then killing the Plex Media Scan , followed by the Plex media server being disabled & then I get a final fault - Failed to connect to the internet fault. And the Plex media centre is turned off etc.

This appears to be happening quite regularly when I even have the Automatic library scan options turned off.And is becoming very annoying

Hence i was wondering if you have any experience with this type of issue & can assist me accordingly - Even happy to pay you etc

I also have screen shots of the faults etc

Please let me know if you can assist

Thanks Lars

Not sure this got submitted the first time I tried. Apologies if it's a repeat post.

Hi! I hope this question falls within the scope of topics here.

I have a need to share photos on the web, potentially thousands, over time. I have a spare Asustor 6302 with two 1.8Tb Seagates drives and would like to set it up to serve those photos, possibly host a blog.

My concern is, as I am using a domestic broadband account and router, which has two other NAS devices and two PCs on it, that I'm putting those machines at risk if I activate the webserver on the 6302.

So, primarily, I am looking for the safest way of using my domestic broadband to share photos with the public. I don't want to use a photo hosting service like Flickr, and I have this gear sitting around doing nothing. I'm not ready to acquire some other kit, or get something like a second broadband account. I'm hoping to come up with a fix using what I've got.

First, I like to say; Thanks for all you videos!!! Tons to digest!

For contect: I'm moving on from two drobos a 5D and 5D3 bothe DAS. I have a TerraMaster D5 Thunderbolt 3 on the way that i will be populating with 4 ne Exos 7200rpm, 14TB drives. I'm on the Mac OS ecosystem and mostly use the drives for photos; some video; and iMac backups ( Currently @ ~ 8TB and backed up on a cloud service too). I've used DAS, because I edit photos directly fro the unit and have my learning programs with mp4's etc.
The two drobos; one with 4-4TB drives and the other 4- 10TB drives. I'd like to put these drives in a new enclosure for backups, possibly stored at a different location for safety. I really don't need or want to access via the internet, with security concerns too) , but weighing options of different options for another DAS or NAS? Since what I've seen on your YouTube channel, If possible, not get into a system locked into purchasing theri drives as I have them and Again; If possible still have a hardware controlled unit?! I'm on the fence about software controlled RAID enclosure, due to not having the ability for unit able to rebuild a drive without a connected computer. Please let me know your thoughts an recommendations on NAS vs DAS and good unites for the purchase. Thank you in advance for taking time to answer this email. Cheers!

Hey guys hope u are both doing well. I need a little advice regarding which drives to get for caching so this is the breakdown

NAS = TVS-872X (has 2x Firecuda 520's in the M.2 slots in RAID1 for apps)

QNAP QM2-2P10G1TA (Will be used as cache card)

My objective is to purchase 2x 500GB NVMe drives to be used in RAID1 for caching in the above mentioned QM2 card which only has 1000MB/s of bandwidth so I dont need to go crazy for the fastest drive.
Which drives would u recommend for caching purposes that wont break the bank given the 1000MB bottleneck but which should be just fine in terms of efficiency & durability?

Hi Nascompares,

I bought QNAP TS-464 weeks ago (this NAS was way over my budget, but I just love the hardware on this one)
Because of this, I can only buy M.2 ssd and RAM at the moment and use my 2 x External HD as storage via usb (all my files are here)
Could I get your advice on below?

I'm saving money to buy:
2 x M.2 NVme 2280
2 x 8GB RAM
4 X 10TB WD Red Plus

I'll mainly use it for Plex, photo sync, QuMagie, and personal storage.
For my purchase, I have options below:

Option 1:
2 x 8GB RAM
2 x M.2 NVme (500GB each)

Option 2:
2 x 8GB RAM
1 x M.2 NVme (1TB) - buy additional 1TB SSD later on.
Note: this 1TB is $18 cheaper than 2x 500GB

Option 3:
1 x M.2 NVme (500GB) - buy additional 500GB later on
1 x WD Blue 2TB 2.5" Internal SSD

Questions:
1. Is it possible to run QTS on just 1 M.2 NVme SSD? your article on this says that it requires two?
2. For my use-case, can I get away on just buying WD Blues instead? If I'm not going to do any heavy loads on this NAS?

Thanks a lot

Hey NC,

This might be a neat video idea.

Background:
I have a Synology DS2415+ (12-bay tower) that I had filled with 10 TB Ironwolf drives (minus 2x 1TB SSDs for cache). As is expected, I started having a few failures over the years, and Seagate's RMA policy is to send the next higher capacity drive that is available in stock. For two of the occurrences, they sent 12 TB Ironwolf drives. This got me thinking, I want to think long term about expansion as my needs have grown, but I wasn't necessarily at the 'upgrade platform' stage at the time. I stumbled upon a new hard drive vendor (might be a re-label) called Water Panther. Usually their prices are very good compared to Seagate or WD, however I see prices have normalized a bit across the board. Water Panther occasionally lists refurbished drives that have deep discounts.

I purchased 3 Water Panther DAS SATA drives, which claim to be compatible with NetApp disk shelves, Synology RS and RX series, etc. I can attest that my Synology 2015 DS platform with an ARM processor is happy with them (green checkmarks).

Semi recently, I did upgrade my platform temporarily to a 2021 Rack Station RS2421+ when they were brand new, only to discover the show-stopping drive lock; didn't even like my Ironwolfs (yes, I saw your videos on that topic). I did see a video recently regarding the slight loosening of restrictions on non-Synology drives.

If you think it is worth your time, could you do a video on Water Panther drives and how some of the new platforms handle them?

I absolutely love the management, applications and functionality of Synology. I'm anxious to upgrade to a platform with 10G+, a better processor and is rack mountable, but I don't know what to expect when I bring these drives over even with the loosening of restrictions.

Use Case:
Mostly home user, massive Plex collection, DS2415+ sitting next to a GPU backed Dell R720 running Proxmox. Since I don't trust Water Panther as much as IronWolf, I am using 2 drive fault tolerance and keeping a cold spare. With the price of the refurbs, I can't beat it. Anything critical is backed up to 2 cloud environments, anyway.