My QNAP T231 NAS is getting a bit long in the tooth. It was never the fastest when I bought it 10 or so years ago (it was cheap, has an Arm V7 processor and 512mb of RAM)
It is mainly used for streaming films to my telly and backing up (& viewing / listening to) photos, music etc (these are also backed up elsewhere)

It has a 1TB HD in there (there is provision for 2 drives but I only ever got round to filling one slot) and this is getting full. I could add another drive, put up with the slowness and carry on but am also concerned that a HDD that has been constantly plugged in for 10 or more years (bar a house move) isn’t going to continue working for ever so am starting to look for an upgrade.

Budget, as ever, is non existent, but I guess I want something with more processing power & more ram. Needs to be reliable (this one has been rock solid), smallish (current one is slightly bigger than 2 desktop HDDs), quiet and be able to just sit next to my router and chug away 24/7. Remote access (away from home network) would be a nice to have but not essential, doesn’t need to be wifi enabled (will be an ethernet cable into my router and another into the tv)
Storage wise, I’m guessing SSDs will be more reliable, quieter & faster but more expensive?

It’s many years since I paid much attention to computer stuff (always used to build my own desktops, now I just use a cheapish Chromebook) so am very much out of touch. Any recommendations to look at much appreciated 🙂

I’ve got a budget QNAP (ts-228a) with 2x 2tb drives running mirrored RAID. I’ve also got a usb HDD plugged in for automated back-ups.
I didn’t bother with SSDs.

To be honest, I find it frustratingly slow at doing even basic tasks.

If I was to buy another one, I’d be getting something with more oomph.
I have contacted QNAP about how slow it is (3days for a virus check) and the response was basically that it’s a budget device and so not very fast. I ended up turning the virus scan off, as the general consensus is that it’s low risk if everything is coming through the computer and that has adequate virus protection.
I’d probably also err towards Synology as my understanding is that their OS is a bit more user-friendly if you are not an IT-Whizz.

Build your own. You’d get a powerful system for less money.

I recently sold a Qnap TS-251 Silentnas pretty cheap (didn’t sell on the classifieds here), bought an upgrade, much more up to date Qnap… and regretted spending the money on it.
I’d check ebay for a 251 if money’s tight, should be able pick one up cheap. Great bit of kit.
I should’ve gone with the 251+, but oh well.

much more up to date Qnap… and regretted spending the money on it.

For what reason?

I’m using a second hand Synology DS214 Play. Mirrored 3TB WD Red drives (I think these are 5400rpm?), it plays 4k HDR movies over my local network no problem. SSDs would be an expensive upgrade and only needed if you want it to be absolutely silent I think.

Synology. But be prepared to spend if you want anything with any umph. The interface is very nice, and the OS is very configurable once you dig into it. On to of that you can SSH into the box and do pretty much what you like with it (as long as you’re familar with a linux shell). It also runs Nginx with a reverse proxy which is pretty nice.

I have mine running a couple of websites with LetsEncrypt setup to renew on a set interval – I also use it as a Plex server for home entertainment. I did try to use it for backup, but backing up 400GB+ over the network was taking forever … so instead opted to just use a 1TB USB3 drive plugged into my Mac.

I’m not making as much use of it as it’s capable, as you can set it up with mail servers, DNS servers etc.

For what reason?

It’s not that much better! Performance, though the spec is much higher, hardly any noticeable increase in speed. It’s capable of a newer O/S, so there are apps I can run that I couldn’t before, but i only really use Plex and Qmusic.
But, main thing is it’s so much noisier. Gone from a very quiet system, to this thing that gurgles away all the time. When it’s working, like playing music, it’s loud enough that I have to turn the music up to hear it.
(Yeah, it could go up in the loft, but I’d have to piss about wiring it in.)

I’ve got a Synology something or other that I inherited from the FIL. Whacked a couple of 2TB drives in there. Works fine as a media server with the TV pointed at it and also as a network share for all the laptops.

Wouldn’t bother with SSDs in a NAS as I doubt you’d see significant performance benefits unless your NAS is a high end bit of kit. Even then I’d guess you’d meet the limits of your network speed.

Another Synology (DS220+) user here, OS/UI is great, two drive bays, reasonably quiet, and if you go for a model with an Intel CPU (not ARM) then you can as well as install lots of good apps, use Docker and run virtual servers if needed. I use Docker with Pi-Hole for DNS ad-blocking which is brilliant.

Another long time Synology user here (I currently have a DS918+ but I’ve had one since 2011).

I’m only a very light user of mine – but what it does, it does brilliantly.

I have my plex library on there, and it runs plex media server – so all media is available via the excellent apple TV app/phones/iPads etc whether a laptop is open/awake or not.
I’ve been running plex on it for 5 years maybe – and in that time I think the appletv hasn’t been able to immediately find the server twice? Each time there had been a silent software update overnight and the thing just needed restarting, which was done via the phone app after being alerted by batfinkjnr that Peppa Pig wasn’t working

I use if for a timemachine target for my macbook backups. Timemachine throttles pretty well, so it rarely interferes with anything else using the wifi.

I also use Synology Drive as a dropbox alternative, in anticipation of dropbox gradually dropping all the freeloaders (hello!).

It’s capable of so much more, but the primary use case was that I wanted something that was set-and-forget for plex and time machine….. and it does that extremely well.

As others have said, Synology’s value is in the friendly user-interface. The Qnaps are supposed to be better-value spec-wise, but less good interface wise….. although that’s only what I have read.

Mine is a 4 bay, which means I have 1 drive redundancy – and that’s extremely valuable. Maybe once every 2 years it’ll send me an alert to say one of the HDDs is about to shit itself, and I just order another and swap the bad one – takes about a day to chug through the rebuild – but then as good as new.

For the new year I think I’ll get backblaze set up, and have it back-up overnight

Ta for all of the info 🙂