Hello,

Ive been going back and forth reading all of your reviews. I am at the very beginning of my plex adventure. I have 2 (10tb Iron Wolf Drives) from an existing nas my neighbor built for me running truenas and I hate it. So i've decided to compare the DS224 and the DS423. I think I would like to stay cheaper at the moment, and wondering if I should buy the 2 bay nas or the 4 bay nas. I am not sure if I should just use the 2 (10TB) drives I already own, or buy the 2 bay box and go high with the drives to make it last for quite awhile down the road. Any info you can share would be most helpful. It is going to be a single person using the NAS.

I was wondering if you had a good build list for this project.

I Built the Jonsbo N3 NAS ($599 Intel i9 Erying TrueNAS SCALE Build)

Hi
For my first NAS server I’ve bought a second hand QNAP 453D 8G (massive thanks for your QNAP set up video collection) and am looking to buy drives for it, either four 2TB or three 3TB. I’ve been looking at 2nd hand drives from CeX, eBay and Marketplace as they are half the price of new ones but a lot of them have dates of 2017 or before so is it a false economy? None of the adverts state how many hours they’ve done. When I get the drives what’s the best way to check them?
I couldn’t see a way on YouTube to search within your channel to see if you’ve covered this on a previous video so if you have please could you give me the link
Thanks for any help

Hello.

I am in a rural area of TN and an old building and I am opening a restaurant. It was suggested I go with a SIM router instead of the local internet carrier and I am trying to research what I will need to support the POS system along with possibly having another option for customers to join.
These are the requirements for the POS according to the company.

Guaranteed download of 3/1.5 up per device with the register itself needing 10 down/5up and has to be plugged in.
WiFi signal strength of a min of 60dBm in all areas...1200 SF area.
WiFi network should be at least WPA2 AES encryption
Avoid connecting equipment to internet router/gateway from your ISP. and
Best Practices would be to set static IP addresses on your periphial hardware or other devices not hardware to the payment system.
These are the things it says. Can you help with a recommendation that is economical for a start up that will fit in a tight budget. Thank you.

I apologize in advance to abuse of everyone's kindness, this is going to be a long post. I thought about contacting directly Asustor but I do not even know what to start asking...

Let us start from the very beginning.
Although it is not my daytime job, for a personal project I take lots of photos, in the region of thousands per month, all big RAW Sony files (.ARW, about 50MB/picture), plus 4K 120fps videos etc. It is a 35TB archive at the time I am writing.
I wanted to have this huge archive available all the time, also remotely, so relying on a NAS was a no brainer for me.

In 2020, just like everyone else, I had much time to spend at home so I made the big step.
I bought an Asustor AS5304T and populated it with 4 Seagate Ironwolf 16TB. I also changed the preinstalled RAM with 2 Crucial DDR4 2400 4GB.
NAS is connected in link aggregation to an unmanaged switch Netgear XS508M, which is overkill probably but I wanted something futureproof. That switch was connected to a Synology router RT2600ac at that time, now it is a Synology RT6600ax. Router is connected by cable to a "home gateway" (that is how they are called here in Japan) that is given to me by the service provider, and it is a modem router Aterm BL900HW.

I have never been able to do what everyone else do with their NAS. It works, fortunately no major issues, but I was never able to achieve what I wanted. For instance, right now I cannot see my photos remotely, or access them via VPN. Yet the NAS is up and running...
I keep ADM and all of the apps updated to their latest versions. Sometimes things work, sometimes they just do not.
I can access to it with my MacBook (via Wi-Fi) or my PC (ethernet) when I am at home, I store my photos there and that is it.

One thing I was never able to achieve is allowing the NAS to enter automatically hibernation mode or sleep mode. Never once. And I know I could just check which process is preventing it to enter sleep mode, but when I tried I got a list so long that it seemed endless to me. At about midnight NAS supposedly should go into sleep mode, but when time arrives I just hear HDD access noise for about 10 minutes and then nothing happens. Four years, never once. Even if meanwhile ADM was updated, NAS switched off and on etc.

EZ Connect is set, I can access my NAS via nas-name.ezconnect.to but I cannot find my NAS if I check with nas-name.myasustor.com (either with HTTP or HTTPS, and whatever port I add at the end).
Similarly, if I opened AiMaster I can access my NAS remotely, but if I opened AiFoto it tells me it is unable to connect and to check if NAS is up (it is), if Photo Gallery App is installed (it is), if EZ Router is enabled (I guess it is) and if Photo Gallery App's port is open (I do not know which one that would be, in the past it used to work anyway).

Opening Photo Gallery via EZ Connect is just meaningless. I do not know if connection is too slow or NAS not powerful enough but I do not see thumbnails (only a very few, mostly videos and some JPEG, RAW are supported but I see only old ones), so I do not even know which files to open.
Sometimes it almost seems like NAS has not yet caught up with all the thumbnails although years have passed.

I tried to setup an L2TP/IPsec VPN following exactly Spacerex's Youtube tutorial, but it does not work for me. This time, ADM tells me that last DDNS update is a success (after many issues due to the two routers), but my Windows laptop shows me an error: "The L2TP connection failed because the security layer encountered a processing error during initial negotiations with the remote computer".

So many small issues that make my experience at using Asustor NAS not very pleasant to say the least...

Dear Robbie,
We have 140tb of the rarest medical conditions recorded in 8k 12bit raw, but we have the files on random HDDs; my data storage is terrible.
Some of the files are on an old TB2 QNAP DAS (tvs682t).
We plan to shoot another 100tb this year at a minimum, and I will need space for proxies and audio too.

Priorities are
1. ZFS (presumably with truenas scale, however I’m unsure about its TB support)
2. High speed ingest from 5x8k raw cameras +1 4k raw camera, plus drones/audio recording
3. Yearly/6 monthly drive pool expandability
4. WD ultrastar 22tb drives (only trust ultrastar)

We fully expect to pay for your advice, and would like to support your business with our purchasing if possible. Eventually, I wish to bring medicine in to the 21st century given the current state of our NHS, but that’s a whole other discussion for another day.

Thank you for everything you do for the community!

Kind regards,

Russ

I have a DS423+ used primarily as a Jellyfin media server. I selected this model as I thought (hopefully not incorrectly) that the CPU was suitable for server side transcoding. However, I am noticing that certain .mkv files (I believe HEVC 10) are causing 80% or more CPU load during playback. What am I doing wrong? 

I have Jellyfin installed through the community app store (as opposed to docker). Maybe my Jellyfin playback settings are the issue? Is there a software tweak I am missing to optimize my setup? 


Settings: 
Hardware Acceleration - Intel QuickSync
Enable Hardware Decoding for:
   - H264
   - HEVC
   - HEVC 10bit
   - VP9 10bit
   - Prefer OS native DXVA or VA-API hardware encoders
Enabled hardware encoding
Allow encoding in HEVC format
Enable VPP Tone mapping
   - VPP Tone Mapping brightness gain: 16
   - VPP Tone Mapping contrast gain: 1
Enable Tone Mapping:
   - algorithm: BT.2390
   - mode: auto
   - range: auto
   - desat: 0
   - peak: 100
   - thread count: auto
H.265 encoding CRF: 28
H.264 encoding CRF: 23
Deinterlacing method: YADIF
Throttle Transcodes: Yes


Appreciate any help I can get!

Hello. I really enjoyed the video you made. Is there any compatibility problem when upgrading the hard drive to 16 TB? How many TBs do you think are the limit? I want to upgrade to 16TB. Of course, if possible. What do you think about this?

example]WD RED PRO NAS 16TB

I would like to upgrade to the maximum upgradeable capacity.

Thank you for reading my question.

I have a DS220j with 2-4TB drives in a RAID 1 now and I really do like it. Going for the home user with family photos and videos and wanted something with a little more HP and capabilities that will be required for the next 5 years. There will be a promo coming up where I can get the DS923+ for $480, same price as the DS423+ and I have the same question as the guy did below in your review of the DS923+ but was not answered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrzIwe42xA
Synology DS923+ NAS Review - Hardware, DSM Apps, 10GbE, NVMe Storage Pools, Plex & EVERYTHING Else!

Thank you very much! -Terry


@daze874
1 month ago
I want to use this server to share photos and videos with the family. The videos are not movies just videos taken from a camera. Android and IPhone. Should i look for a model that has video transcoding or will this server be enough for that purpose. Im concerned about the video sharing the family would probably like to view the video before deciding to download it.

Adobe Lightroom for cataloging, photoshop for processing. Presently, ReadyNAS 314, 4 x 4Tb RAID 5, 7.4Tb used 2.58 free. appx 5Tb for 65,000 images, rest is documents & 110,000 mp3. I add appx 10,000 images p.a. Processed files can reach 7Gb due to layers. My workflow, import RAW files using LR to 500Gb NVMe drive in date folders, do processing, then folders ( inc saved PS files) moved to NAS. Occasionally I reload a file from the NAS,a 7Gb file takes 6 minutes to load. I have Intel i9=13900K, and Z790 AORUS ELITE AX , (2.5Gbe lan connectivity). I have watched a dozen or so of the YT videos and found myself favouring the DS 1522+ 4 x 6Tb Ironwolf.
But: 1) should I add the network upgrade, cache memory & Synology ram, & would I benefit from their drives?