NAS for Macintosh system

[Enquiries]

I am upgrading from a Drobo before it dies, and want something that works with the Mac OS and programs as well as Time Machine.

No experience with NAS

[ed]

The simplest and most Mac friendly choice is Synology. They offer the smoothest Time Machine integration, the cleanest macOS SMB support, excellent photo and file apps, and very little day to day maintenance. In your price range, the recommended models today are the DS1525 Plus or the DS1825 Plus. The five bay gives you plenty of future expansion and redundancy, while the eight bay gives you even better long term storage without needing to replace drives later. Either system can start with the thirty two gigabytes you want and can grow well beyond that.

These systems also have fast enough CPUs for indexing photos, running media servers, and handling multiple Mac backups at once. Time Machine works flawlessly. You simply point each Mac to a designated backup folder and Synology handles quotas, snapshots, and retention automatically.

If you prefer something more powerful and more flexible, QNAP is the next strong option. Their TS 664 or TS h674 models give you better hardware for the money, faster processors, and more upgrade paths. QNAP also works with Time Machine but the learning curve and interface complexity are higher. If you are comfortable dialing in a few settings or want more capabilities later, QNAP gives you more raw power.

If vendor lock is a concern or you want complete control, a UGREEN DXP4800 Plus running TrueNAS is another route. TrueNAS gives you maximum data integrity, open source storage, and excellent Mac SMB performance. The trade off is that it requires more setup and ongoing understanding than Synology, so only choose this if you enjoy tinkering a little.

For your starting capacity of thirty two gigabytes, you should realistically plan for around forty eight terabytes raw or higher so you can use a safer RAID layout. Four bay is the minimum I would recommend for long term Mac backup and storage. Five or eight bay is ideal because you add drives later rather than replacing everything.