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!

Hi, I'm wondering what the best way to backup our work computers would be. I've looked into a synology rackstation but ABB doesn't backup macs and could work around that with Time Machine. Is there a better way of doing this?

Hi,

I’ve been watching your YT videos with a huge degree of confidence and if you have a dash of spare time, I would like to know your thoughts on my backup conundrum:

I am a photographer using the Canon R3 mirrorless camera and currently have 6Tb of photos plus 4Tb of other stuff on my hard drives. Photos are being added to the drives at around 500Gb to 1Tb per year. I have previously suffered from major hard drive failure in the past so I’m now quite concerned about backups. I know we should have 3 forms of backup: 2 onsite plus one offsite and those onsite should ideally be in different formats. So my setup is:
1. Drobo DAS 5D3 (updated with a Samsung mSATA 250Gb SSD card) with 5x Ironwolf Pro 14Tb in each slot and dual redundancy. It is partitioned with 10Tb resevered for backup and the rest (28Tb) is for data.
2. Synology NAS DS1621+ (updated with 64Gb Kingston ram as per your video, with two Synology 400Gb M.2 NVM cards and with the 10GbE card) set to SHR2 with 12Tb, 12Tb, 16Tb and 16Tb Ironwolf Pro hard drives plus 8Tb Barracuda hard drive. Total actual space is approx 29Tb.
3. 8Tb Ironwolf Barracuda in housed in a powered external enclosure that lives in my laptop bag with just the photos on it. I’m fully aware that this is not an ideal solution but my Amazon Prime account is being closed by Amazon in the near future. I don’t want to pay for an annual cloud subscription as current prices are around £80/2Tb so this would cost me about £2400/decade. I am happy to eventually buy and use single 18Tb drives in an external enclosure that can remain at a relative’s house and be backed up once a month.

The reason for my (eventual) question is that following Drobo’s liquidation, they have written to me stating that the 5D3 will not be compatible with the forthcoming MacOS Ventura upgrade. I do keep my system up-to date where possible but don’t want to never update the system because of the Drobo incompatibility issues so assuming the Drobo will not work when the system is eventually upgraded to Ventura and unless you know otherwise, this will mean writing off the Drobo 5D3! I could sell the Drobo 5D3 but not the drives) on eBay or similar to recover some funds. On the assumption that it’s written off, I’m now in the market for a new drive enclosure. I do like the Drobo because it’s very simple and very fast. I also like the Synology because it’s reasonably fast and I can access it anywhere in the UK/world (so long as I have access to the internet). Both enclosure above have the latest firmware, have dual disk redundancy and both allow me to backup my MacBook Pro (plus the other MBPs in the family) to the DS1621+ and my MBP to the Drobo.

So could you recommend a different drive enclosure, eg, Asustor, Buffalo, D-Link, QNAP, TerraMaster, WD, Zyxel, etc that has 5 or 6 slots and can be DAS or NAS or a newer, better format. I’d be looking to insert the five 3.5” hard drives from the Drobo into the new enclosure giving me around 30Tb of storage space (including dual disk redundancy). I would then copy the files across from the DS1621+ NAS drive. Time to copy the data from the DS1621+ to the new enclosure wouldn’t be an issue but I’d expect it to take a few days. I do like a feature on the TerraMaster NAS drives that allow you to export data using their USB-C and HMDI sockets. The Drobo 5D3 is rather noisy whereas the Synology DS1621+ is considerably quieter. My new unit would be in the living room so needs to be as quiet as possible. The budget for the new enclosure is around £1000. The ideal unit is another DS1621+ or a DS1621XS+ c/w USB-C and HDMI output sockets similar to the TerraMaster but I believe it should be from a different manufacturer. Spec, noise and performance are more important than cost.

Do you have any suggested drives? Feel free to turn this into a YT video for the benefit of other Drobo users!

Regards and many thanks

I am thinking of getting a NAS to store my photos (backup) along with having a system where my photos on my phone can upload as getting them off my iPhone to the PC can error.
I understand that Synology have a phone app that acts like Google Photos - do this (or any NAS system that offer a photo app for phones) have an upload limit of videos/files ?
If there was a power outage whilst the NAS is in use, would it corrupt the drives, or would it be able to recover?
What NAS would you recommend for home use in 2022?
I have a 4TB hard drive on my PC where all of my phots are. I understand that RAID gives various options; primary and then a back copy or the first drive; also, I see one where it has a copy on a drive and across 2 drives it splits is ... If you could give your views on the best RAID , that would be really helpful too.

Hi!
First of all Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and experience via your insightful YouTube channel!

I need to do something new with my photo collection. I have close to 100.000 photos on Photoshop Elements. The catalog is also exported to Google Photos for sharing and easy access. I would like to get rid of My Google account.

I keep folders per year/owner/month of photos. My photos are stored on a PC with a NAS backup.

I share my Google account with my wife, but would like to share it with my kids and other family members with access restrictions. They can see whatever they like, but I don’t want them to edit/delete photos. Additional functions, like comments that I could accept or reject would be welcome.

I am on a Ubiquity UniFi LAN/WLAN with a 500Mbps symmetric Internet connection.

I have been waiting for a new DS92x+, but have now decided (almost) to go for a TS-464.

Do you have any advice on my forward path?

Best Regards
Einar Rossavik

Hello.

I already have an ITX pc built into the NZXT H1 case and my motherboard has 2.5Gbe port + USB 3.2 gen 2.

NAS solutions in my country are very expensive.

I was wondering if I could get a 4 bay docking station that has USB 3.2 gen 2 support and connect it to my existing PC.
Then use a VM for any NAS OS and setup RAID 5 and use my PC as a NAS server for all the other computers on my Local Network.

Would love to know your thoughts?
Pros? Cons? Speeds?

Hello

I currently own a QNAP TVS-471 which has served me well until recently as a home/plex NAS. However it has been hit by the recent DEADBOLT exploit and I am now having doubts as to whether to stay with QNAP. I am wondering should I stick with the QNAP I currently have or should I wait for the DS923+ or change now and get the DS920+. The NAS is used for home use documents and backup, bust mostly PLEX.

Thanks in advance
Ewan

I come from 2 bay DS213 and one of the slot has since become unresponsive. I was doing Raid 1 on the NAS previously and now with just 1 Slot working, I cannot achieve redundancy of my data.
initially I thought it was the HDD that broke down so I ordered 2 new HDD without checking the warning, only to find out the slot was the issue. I end up now with 4 HDD.
with that I thought I might as well upgrade to 4 slot NAS to make use of all the HDD. my use case now would be mostly an iCloud replacement to back up my photos of all my family iPhones. also as a media server for videos and music. my current DS213 is really slow with photo station. takes forever to load an album or to load a video. making it really unpleasant to use. I hope the new NAS would give better loading speed. I am also planning to run home assistance with the Synology NAS as a HomeKit hub. I am looking at long term and future proofing because I believe this NAS do last long time and getting the best now will definitely keep it relevant for longer. will this 920+ fulfil my use case and should I wait for next upgrade. at the moment I am really not in a rush to get a replacement NAS too.

Hi there,

I'm new in the NAS world, so it's probably a pretty basic question I have ^.^

So, I got a Sinology DS220J with 2 X 4 TB seagate ironwolf Drives and got it setup. I chose SHR, then created 1 pool, then 1 volume and "assigned" my 2 drives to the volume. (not that I completely understand what all of that means btw)

Everything looks fine, but I'm not clear whether my data are redundant (aka stored on both drives) or not. One very important use case for me is to make sure I don't lose my data. So, my questions are:

Are my data backed up on both drive? Is it safe already? And how can I double check that?

Hope that makes sense and feel free to ask more details if needed.

Guys, great ressources you are providing. It has been extremely useful already and given the depth of NAS technology, I feel it will keep on being useful. Big thanks!