I’m looking for a NAS at home.

One that:

– can be mounted as a normal network drive in Windows (got to be as a transparent as possible for the missus)
– can also be accessed from iOS devices.
– is nice and quiet with power-saving modes (as it will spend most time idle).

Other possible features:

– media server (DLNA? Plex? What’s good?) Be great if it worked with Alexa.
– iTunes Server (mostly just for backing up various iOS devices)

Any suggestions?

Any other features I should be looking for? (Never had a NAS before)

I set one up using a raspberry pi, also runs plex and pi-hole, bit fiddly to set up but runs fine

Synology and Qnap are both well regarded.

You can get a cheap model and put a drive in them for not too much money.

I have a Synology DS214 Play, picked it up used as they’re quite pricey new. It’s very easy to set up, has apps for iOS and Android and a built in media server – though it can run others too.

I use mine for streaming video, storing large files, backing up my PC and downloading without leaving the PC on.

The ‘play’ versions of their models support video transcoding (compressing and converting the format of the video before streaming it, to reduce file size and require less processing power on the playback device). You may not actually need this depending on usage but if you primarily want it was a media server it’s worth looking for.

As far as noise goes its near silent in standby mode, you can hear the disks when they spin up but they would be easy to swap for SSDs if the price ever becomes reasonable for mass storage.

I’m using a QNAP TS-251+ with just a single big drive at home. The software allows both SMB and AFP connections so seamless for both Windows and OSX/iOS devices. I’m using Plex for media serving as the iTunes server is a bit basic and hasn’t been updated for many a year.

At work we’re using a Synology 216+ II which works well and is easy to administer.

If you’re planning on transcoding with Plex make sure the processor and memory are up to the job otherwise your film will stutter and pause like it has Tourette’s!

freenas plus a bunch of disk.

wd mycloud does everything you’re asking of it there, at very little additional cost in addition to a bare drive (probably not much different to the cost of a rasberry pi solution, and a load less hassle)

Nas4Free plus a load of disks

I’ll second the WD MyCloud. I’ve had a 3TB one for about a year.

Spends most of its time sitting idle behind my telly, plugged into my router.  As soon as I connect up to it wirelessly via laptop, or open up the app on my phone it springs into life.  It’s in the living room so I can confirm it’s very quiet in operation.

Appears as a network drive in Windows (no experience of Apple stuff I’m afraid).  I have a few shares set up on it, so each member of the nobbingsford clan has their own place to store stuff.

My phone automatically uploads every photo I take to it, from wherever I am.

As I remember, I paid about 60 quid for it as a refurbished unit direct from Western Digital.  I back it up every now and then to an old external HDD I have spare, do if it does ever conk out I don’t lose everything.

Dead easy to set up too.  Basically just plug it in.

Get one!

other suggestion – it might be worth seeing if your router already offers a NAS drive. My old (free) one did basic sharing, and my current (posher – runs WRT of some kind) has everything on your list I think. just plug in a usb HDD

Another Qnap owner. Play all my music off it, some films via Plex, but moving to an app called Videostream as it supports more formats and Tv programmes than Plex (its a Chromecast app)

The Qnap apps for backup, folder syncing and music are really good. Newer Nas than mine support their fast search and some other stuff that looks really good, but I can’t afford to upgrade, unfortunately. Still, my old Qnap Silent Nas is great for what it does.

+1 WD My cloud, not that sophisticated but does everything I need

I would avoid freenas and nas4free unless you know or are prepared to learn about ZFS and are happy​ using a command line with no manual to upgrade or fix problems. They are also have quite fussy hardware requirements (ZFS again) and are more fiddly when a disc fails (because they don’t come with nice hotswap hardware and disc failed lights).

That said if you are a geek then nas4free on a HP microserver is a well trodden and fairly cheap route. But not as cheap as sticking a usb drive into your router.

Bought a Synology 218J a couple of weeks ago after quite a lot of internet research. Took a little while to sort but I´m there now. Seems perfect for my needs

+1 for Synology

Another one with the Synology 218J.  I did a lot of research (including the ‘free’ options) and it came down to this and the QNAP equivalent.  Just finished sorting it out, which took longer than I expected but overall works well.

At first I thought “why are the Greek suddenly the goto people for IT knowledge?”I mean, we all know blessed are the Greek, as are the cheesemakers, but they aren’t renowned for their IT skills. Then I re-read the OP title.

Anyhoo, I’ve got a Synology DS114 which has been great: It will only take  single drive but you can get 2,3 or drive versions. QNAP versions are probably just as good.

Synology for me and my mates and family. They’ve all been good and reliable with no problems over several years of ownership.

With the Synology kit what are people using to reliably sync / backup files from Windows PCs (ideally with some sort of version history to protect against ransomware / user cock-ups). Also is anyone further backing up any content from the NAS into a cloud? I see Synology has add-on package support for stuff like Dropbox and Amazon Glacier.

Lastly for a 2-bay unit I can start with a single HDD and then add in a second for resiliency/capacity (I know it’s one or the other) without having to remove and re-add any data?

I’m not in the office but when I’m next in I’ll make a note of the back-up software that we use for the PC.

QNap has it’s on Qsync and backup software. Qsync is a marvellous thing for sharing stuff on different computers around the house.

(& probably over the WAN, but not needed that yet)

Qsync is a marvellous thing for sharing stuff on different computers around the house.

A lot of them seem to have these sharing or syncing applications. What do they actually do that isn’t achieved by just having it mounted as a network shared drive? Do they handle conflicts and versioning or something?

With the Synology kit what are people using to reliably sync / backup files from Windows PCs (ideally with some sort of version history to protect against ransomware / user cock-ups)

Veeam free windows backup agent<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”> is worth a try.  Their commercial software, customer support & users forum are excellent, plus there’s an option to back up to Microsoft Onedrive if you already have that for some additional protection.</span>

A lot of them seem to have these sharing or syncing applications. What do they actually do that isn’t achieved by just having it mounted as a network shared drive? Do they handle conflicts and versioning or something?

Literally syncs the drive/folder contents between computers and the NAS. Update files/delete files/add files on one computer and it’s replicated on the NAS and then the other computers.

I find it very useful with my music stuff. Obviously can still access the files without a network connection, which wouldn’t be possible on a shared drive.

WD Mycloud

Simple to use, phone access to your drive from wherever you are in the world.

Local accounts for whoever you want access to all done via a webapp

plugs straight into router

does streaming (I believe)

Bookmarked

WD Mycloud here as well for the last 3 years.

Easy and simple to use. I posted a PSA a few months back for these as WD were selling recertified them cheap.

Things I like are:

Access it from anywhere with the app.

Send files or photos to family or work from anywhere

Give different users access to different parts of the drive.

Stream content to a smart tv.

Automated data back up (can be tricky to set up)

Photos from mobile automatically backs up to the Mycloud.

When I was first looking for a nas drive I wanted  a synology but couldn’t afford it at the time so I got the WD Mycloud. Haven’t regretted it yet.

in the tradition of answering a different question, why do you want a NAS?  I ran one a few years ago but in the end it was more hassle than it was worth.

Unless you’re working with very large files, or have a very slow internet connection, then Dropbox or Google Drive are a much simpler way of backing up and sharing files and Photos.  They also give you back up that defends against your house burning down (or getting broken into and your NAS being stolen). And they deal very well with people using laptops away from home.

For media server duties I just have a desktop computer that’s always on (or wake on LAN) that serves up the iTunes library and some video but that’s ever less important in the age of Spotify and streaming video services.

Music and Video is backed up to an offline hard drive but that rarely changes so only gets updated about every 6 months (along with an OS TimeMachine backup – if all your files are in the cloud doesn’t much matter if the OS backup is a little out of date). I’ve just noticed you can now buy a 128gb SD card for £20 – will likely move my music back up to one of those.

Literally syncs the drive/folder contents between computers and the NAS. Update files/delete files/add files on one computer and it’s replicated on the NAS and then the other computers.

But why would you need local copies of those files if they are all on a shared network drive anyway?
Or is it more for laptops that may want to have local copies when for when they are not attached to the local network?

why do you want a NAS?

Fair question. I want reliable centralised storage (with RAID redundancy) on the home network so that we can access the same files from multiple devices. That way I can view our photos, videos and music via tablets, phones, TV, laptop, PC and Pi without consuming storage on each of those devices. Also we have a ton of documents and presentations spread over multiple devices, USB drives and dusty old laptops that I’d like to rationalise into one place.

I could probably do that all with a cloud solution instead. And I see some advantages to that, but it would mean paying a yearly sub, putting up with latency and/or using local storage for working copies. Plus I think I just irrationally prefer to have control of my own data.

I’ll probably still use some kind of cloud-based system to back up the NAS so it is safe in the event of fire/theft/etc.

The WD solution looks pretty good for a luddite like me, all I want to do replace my physical media (CDs and DVDs) with a digital box to free up shelf and drawer space.  I am running out of disk space so need a new drive so the incremental cost of a basic NAS is pretty small and a lot less than 1 year of cloud storage.  We do stream TV (just bought an Amazon Firestick, which suits us far better than Chromecast) but not music and unlikely to.

+1 for the WD MyCloud. I can access it from PC / Web / iPhone whenever I need to and it just works, which is a great accolade for this kind of stuff as I don’t want it to always be a faff.

I’ve even centralised my iTunes library so whatever laptop I’m using can access the same library – great for listening to music at work when the Mrs is using Spotify.

Not turned on the photo backup yet but it seems a good idea to me. I currently use Google for that so no pressing need.

Seems as good a place as any to ask, what are the options for a cloud based NAS backup?

We backup our current Synology 112J using an external HDD but we’re looking to upgrade the NAS to a 218 since the old one is struggling a bit and we’re hoping to run Surveillance through it.

Quite like the idea of an off-site backup.

I could probably do that all with a cloud solution instead. And I see some advantages to that, but it would mean paying a yearly sub, putting up with latency and/or using local storage for working copies. Plus I think I just irrationally prefer to have control of my own data.

I think that’s increasingly irrational.  a bare 2 drive synology NAS is about 150 plus 2x2TB drives at £60 each?

Cloud storage costs have come down massively –  2TB from Dropbox is £80 a year which compares really well with the cost of running your own NAS.

Yes, you want video locally but Dropbox will let you selectively sync what you want for each machine.  Eg, if you filed your documents by year you could have all the current stuff on all your machines but the archive just online.

Our photos are on iCloud.  You can select for each device whether to have full or just browse copies on the device.  Actually works really well.

Music and video doesn’t change that much do doens’t really need RAID (a cold backup is enough)

it was more hassle than it was worth.

Yeah. I guess the hassle of a system running away in the spare room, backing itself and my computers up, syncing files without a thought and costing nothing since the initial layout 3 years ago, is way too much for some. Must be those updates it requests once every few months, where you have to click, Accept… Killers they are lOLz.

Ive just replaced an old pc with a laptop. Im thinking of ripping all my cds again as flac and never ever going near itunes again. Which of the above options would be best for someone with very limited technical knowledge (but still offer a RAID set up?) Are QNAP easier to set up than synology? Really I want something I can plug in and just start dropping files onto

There’s really very little in it. Synology marginally more stable, QNAP better value for money.

We had both, the QNAP ftp server could be unreliable but that’s unlikely to bother you.

Trouble with anything simple is that hard drives with identical workloads tend to die at the same time, so RAID isn’t as awesome as you might hope (had an 8 bay Synology lose two more disks in the time it took the first failure to rebuild once. It’s replacement got a mix of ages). That’s why we ran one of each.

My knowledge is quite out of date, these days I buy storage from AWS.

Yeah. I guess the hassle of a system running away in the spare room, backing itself and my computers up, syncing files without a thought and costing nothing since the initial layout 3 years ago, is way too much for some.

I’m sure they’ve got a lot better/more powerful.  I bought my old QNAP to run Squeezebox server, back up and fileserver.

the server was much less responsive than running off a PC, back up software was flaky and fileserver functions were not integrated into operating systems enough the the family used them (and as soon as people are saving stuff on desktop you’ve lost).   Dropbox for files “just worked”

Unfortunately if you’re ‘in the cloud’ you’re reliant on someone else’s computer not your own with all the worry about data security that entails (back-ups not hacking). Those of us using Office 365 have been having fun with shonky email access since Monday. It may be back today, I’ve not checked.

Synology marginally more stable, QNAP better value for money.

Ooh…really?

Wasn’t going to mention this.. but Synology – regular drive death? that improved now?

My Qnap, stable as you like, includes a few power cuts. Synology was only running for a year and lost 2 drives. Brother’s Synology used to include regular drive crashes too…

Also the apps, might’ve changed over the past few years, but Qnap much more user friendly and simple to set up.

How does the enclosure affect drive reliability?