Discuss: Synology DS920+, DS220+, DS720+ and DS420+ NAS Drive Revealed

So I am thinking of either getting a 2 or 4 bay drive NAS ( Asustor or Synology) if its 4 bay I might half fill it until I have the cash to get 4 drives.
My needs are:

1. Easy to use UI for me and my colleagues to transfer music session files and film session folders around the states. ( I do music and film production so these files can get big fast, and they live all over the place)

2. Use as a video/photo media server/stream for my TV, and mobile phone

3. Decent protection, quality, and access as I plan to leave this running while I tour and such

4. Not too expensive, hopefully between $200- $450

I also am not too sure what raid does in particular other than having more drives means your data gets corrupted less often?
I just want a simple to use, easy to upgrade NAS(eventually) that can do those above. Since I have a low budget I was leaning towards Asustor 6302 or the Synology DS218

Hello Robert,

first of all greta thanks to all your videos. I am listening to you since the start of the COVID crisis. Now after all I understand already I am still so overwhelmed by the many options available to start.

Yes, I want to get rid of all my only storage. Currently I have a 4 TB external drive connected to my Xbox. (Actually only using areound 2TB max storage tehre

Then I have a 2 TB external storage for my files including pitures, videos, and audio books.

On top of that I have two TVs. One is HD one is high quality Sony Bravia 4K smart TV.

Now this is what I would like to cover to get things started. I would love to save a much money as possible.

I also know noone works for free, so I would of course buy my stuff over your affiliate links also in the future.

So here is my dream set up.

1.
I would like to store all my pictures and videos with my NAS. Because of what I heard from you and the options to use live pictures, my tendency here is Synology I believe. But as I would also like to autosave all pictures from TWO cell phones onto the NAS (sync like with Google Fotos app) I am not sure if this would be the best fit.

2.
I want to store my collection of audio books. Not sure if this is also supported in PLEX, but sure it is

3. STEAM Games. I watched a video where you said it is possible to store and play all steam titles, I would love to be able to utilize this. But this is not a must if it costs too much.

4.
I want to be able to play on both TVs. The box would be next to one TV and the other can be also connected via HDMI cable.

5.
All files should be accessable through the internet via app of browser

6.
most of my movies will be max HD so I do not think I need too much space. 2-4 TB should be enough

7.
I would like to have a way to upload my files to the drive fast. I once had a NAS drive and the only way was to upload via network wich took FOREVER for so many GB. So by any means, an USB upload would be a great luxury.

8.
I am not looking for any kind of raid if this pushes the price up too high for the cost of less space.

I hope you kind of understand my setup now. This is my first real PLEX NAS so it can be for starters. And small maybe a bit slower. Mostly there will be only one media playing. It is more about centralized and independent (payed storage with Google and Apple for comfort reasons in the past)

Hope you can help.

Many greetings from Berlin, Germany.

Kash

Hello,
Does qnap also have an app to install magento 1 as it is in synology? If so, what would be the best thing for us. We're talking about copying the store magento 1.9 to our NAS for test purposes.
qnap tvs-472xt
qnap tvs-672xt

Hi,
Keep looking for a NAS device usable for personal data storage(photo, movies, work projects) but also surveillance camera recording. When I aloust decided to but DS218+ a Surveilance camera specialist tells me that using a NAS for noth this task will distroy the NAs in max 4 year(due to IP Camera recording). Is this info true? Should I use sonething else? The camera model are DS-2CD2F42FWD-IWS.

Hi Rob,

My name is Andy Johnson. I hope this finds you well and that you and your family have fared well throughout this Pandemic. First let me start off by saying I really enjoy your YouTube channel and appreciate all the information you put out on it and your website. I've been researching different NAS and POE cameras to build my own surveillance system for my personal home for a while, but I fall down a rabbit hole of research and end up with analysis paralysis and would love to get some feedback from you. I have already purchased (1) Linksys Business LGS318P Switch to provide power to my future POE cameras and (2) TP-Link EAP245 V3 Wireless AC1750's for Wireless Access points (info only if you need to account for watts used by POE ports on switch left over for cameras during your analysis of my situation).

NAS:
I've been devoting most of my research time over to Synology because they seem to have the best software for surveillance. I’ve been looking at the DVA 3219 because the analytical learning is something that is very desirable to cut down on the false positive alerts the system generates. I have read some reviews that sinology has admitted that there is a flaw in their AI in this system and it does not work as advertised as of now but I’m not sure if that is completely accurate and wanted your thoughts on that. Are there any other Synology models that I should look at that could give me what I want?

Storage Media:
I’ve been looking at the WD Purple 12TB drives but I’m not sure if this is overkill or how many I should buy to give me the footage retainment that I want.

Cameras:
I want the best resolution possible, so I’ve only been looking at 4K 8MP cameras that are H.265 compression compatible. Ideally, I’d like to have (5) outdoor cameras. Two for the back yard, 2 For the front yard, and 1 for the front door with audio. Ideally two of the outdoor cameras would have PTZ capabilities but all have great night vision and have clear visibility up to 50 ft for both day and night. For the front door camera, I haven’t been able to find a quality POE doorbell camera that is affordable that has the features I want. I follow another YouTube channel called “The Hook Up” and he had some POE cameras that he reviewed and recommended the Annke C800: https://www.annke.com/products/c800?variant=32361983148171#description but I’m not sure if that is compatible with the DVA 3219. It’s an ONVIF camera but it appears that if it’s not on Synology’s APL, that the highest compression that it would be compatible with would be 264. Thoughts on that?

Other budgetary needs:

1000ft CAT6a Plenum CMP rated 23AWG cable Estimated cost $300 USD

CAT6a connectors $20 USD

Can you think of anything else that I need to consider for hardware?

Thanks in advance,

Andy

Hi Robbie,
First off let me start off by telling you what a phenomenal web site you have !!!!!!!!!!!

I just bought an Nvidia shield to use as my client hooked up to my router via gigabit ethernet cable so I think I am set on that side

I was wondering I have a pretty powerful desktop that is on all the time
it is an I7-2700k clocked at 4GHZ, 32 gig of RAM, running WIN 10 PRO on a 500 gig Samsung 850 EVO,with a GeForce GTX 750 Ti no games are played on this machine
I am currently using this machine as my plex server and it is working out well

Most of my video files are either 1080p or 720p which look good on my 50" Panasonic Plasma TV

As far as number of streams and transcoding I will be the only one watching, it is not shared with anyone or any mobile devices basically just streaming to my TV

I have all of of my movies and media stored on a SINGLE 8 TB western digital RED in a USB 3.0 enclosure shared through the above mentioned desktop...I do know if that drive fails all is gone in an instant....that is why I am looking to upgrade to either an ethernet gigabit NAS (RAID 1) or a USB 3.0 DAS with hardware raid as well
my concern is are there any performance issues between a DAS vs NAS as far as streaming speed...currently there is no lag or buffering at all..the desktop stays on 24/7 with no issues and I am ok with that

It would be very helpful if you can recommend a particular NAS and DAS to help me make up my mind decsion

for the DAS I was concedering the QNAP TR-002 but I am not sure ???
and for a NAS i am really not sure

My budget is around $700 for the enclosure and another WD 8TB RED

Also what about the NAS going into sleep mode and waking it up ??

sorry for the long questions but I am kinda of unsure of which way to go I want to do this right the first time ..........Thanks in advance for your help......Stu

Hi! I have watched several of your videos and really appreciate all that you do. We currently have a 3-host (with failover) ESXI 6.5 setup (with vsphere 6.5) with about 25 VMs running on it. Only a few of the VMs are high volume traffic of large case files of a small department and the rest are smaller duty microsoft sql servers along with our organization-wide windows file server. Some of these VMs are very high priority for public safety functions so we are quite uptime-dependent. We have been running our vsphere environment via iscsi into our Infortrend DS1016 SAN unit. This unit has been OKAY for the five years we have had it deployed but it has lost two controllers in the time being. Being that it has been done under service contract, we never know what the exact cause of the failures are. We have been thoroughly unimpressed by the units' inability to truly be a high-availability system it is advertised to be, controller replacements have now twice required the whole SAN to be shut down in order to match up firmwares of the two controllers, etc.

We are really hoping that a Qnap ES 1686DC unit can hold out and be a better solution that a typical SAN that normally comes with extremely expensive service contracts and warranties. The included software licenses, functionalities, warranty, etc of a QNAP system is very enticing.

We would love to hear from the experienced just how enterprise these enterprise qnap systems really are and if the iscsi latency of these units is feasible for a well working VM server environment.

We do plan on utilizing our 10gig core switch to pair the hosts and QNAP together via teaming or bonding if need be. We are also interested in running SSD cache on the QNAP itself. What we do not know is if a cache drive failure can take down the storage volume or not, I would figure that it being dual controller, if one of the SSDs fail in a controller, operations continue as normal.

Any input we can obtain about the enterprise qnap products used mostly as an ISCSI datastore for a VMware environment would be so helpful. Thank you.

Discuss: NAS History - Synology USB Station 2 from 2010

Which is better?
1. A HTC (Home Theater Computer) running as a PLEX server and player, mainly for digitizing music CD collection to playback through home network, adding a few available 1TB drives

2. A new 4 bay NAS central PLEX and data server for a number of household computers.