Does anyone have any of the newer ones?

I have one of the older ones, but never found it particularly good at what it promised, are the newer ones any better?

Or any other recommendations for some kind of home storage?

I have one but am struggling to work with a Sonos one.

What did you want it to do ?

I use mine as a NAS for my Sonos system. Connecting to the library can be a little convuluted as you need to connect via the whole network string and not a drive letter.

Synology is basically the best when it comes to home NAS. There are arguments for/against and vs other competitors like QNAP etc. But in the interests of brevity, Synology are the best.

I’m not an IT wonk, and I’ve had one for over 10 years for storage, backup and hosting my media library – absolutely zero issues, and zero ball-ache setting it up.

So yeah, Synology

Edit: I have no idea if it works with Sonos

Synology are the best

They are good at what they do but can be a bit limited. There isn’t a way to run a pi-hole on one easily as one example. There also isn’t an easy way to run a LetsEncrypt certificate on them to secure the outside connection. Synology would prefer to sell you an expensive annual renewal.
I get to play with both QNAP and Synology (home and work respectively) they have their advantages and disadvantages though there’s a lot of you tube info teaching you how to do things. QNAP have the advantage with online learning as there are some quite good walk-throughs posted by their staff.

I’ve got a QNAP and find it a real ballache.

I’m not massively computer minded but can find my way around most problems, but find the QNAP really hard to set-up and run.
I was hoping to use it for more than I actually do, but can’t be arsed spending hours trying to work it all out.
I’ve basically put all my photos/docs on it & have it set to sync the photos from my phone. For that it is OK, and it very rarely gives me any issues.

I bought it as all the reviews reckoned it was the best entry level NAS, but I didn’t realise this meant I still had to have an IT/Networking degree to get the thing working.

From my understanding, Synology is a bit more user-friendly in that regard. I keep debating swapping over & giving one of their devices a try.

I had the original mycloud and it worked brilliant for years for what I needed.
It’s now not supported so I bought a Synology ds120j.

It’s definitely more complicated but has a lot more features.

I have one of the newer ones that I use as a media server for Plex, it works pretty well. The issue I had was that I wasn’t able to partition it to use some as a backup space for apple time capsule and some for media storage. Other than that it’s fine, but I know it’ll die one day without any warning and I’ll curse it, just like the previous one did.

I have one but am struggling to work with a Sonos one.

@binman – have you tried this?

Out of interest, what are you lot all using a NAS for?

I have one for Plex. When it works, it is OK. I wish I could just access it like a drive.

I’m not sure I would get another one but not sure what the alternative is.

Out of interest, what are you lot all using a NAS for?

Time Machine backups
File storage (including my own Dropbox type thing)
Plex server

I’m using mine for storing technical drawings and documents from my laptop, accounts stuff from wife’s laptop and general photo backup from mobiles.

Handy when I’m at a client and can share documents/drawings.

I’ve had a few nightmares with WD produces, the latest being an update that now makes my sonos system not speak to ‘my cloud’ drive. @frogstomp solution isn’t available on my drive so I’m currently not sure what my options are (other than move away from igital stuff to actual cd and records again). the drive was only used for sonos library storage (my sonos system is older – i don’t want any new features just to be able to stream my own library as it worked for almost a decade).

I’ve found WD incredibly frustrating over the years, when i have a bit extra cash, I’ll definitely look at other options

Out of interest, what are you lot all using a NAS for?

I wanted to store all my photos on it mainly, and to be able to access from any device. and to back photos on it from mine and the wifes phone. Mainly.

I checked and have around 650GB of photos, i’m not paying cloud storage money for that!

Cougar
Full Member
Out of interest, what are you lot all using a NAS for?

Basically storage. I took the 750Gb HDD out of my laptop and swapped it for a 256Gb (I think) SSD to speed it up. Made a massive difference.
I did some digging around and a NAS drive seemed like a fairly simple way to store all of my photos and random documents. I have it set-up to back-up automatically to a removable hard drive & it also syncs with my phone to back-up any pics I take on there.

When I got it, I did have ideas of setting up photo albums that I could share with friends and family; especially photos of my daughter that the grandparents could access. But, I could never get that working, so gave up on it.

I’m sure there are better ways, but this seemed like a good solution at the time.

Cheers all. It wasn’t a loaded question, just interested. I’m broadly of the opinion that a NAS is the wrong solution in a lot of cases, I was hoping to have my mind changed.

I checked and have around 650GB of photos, i’m not paying cloud storage money for that!

How are you backing that up?

How are you backing that up?

Older WD My cloud and an external hard drive.

I was thinking a NAS is a bit elaborate for what I want, but not sure what other options there are apart from cloud storage.

Cougar
Full Member
Cheers all. It wasn’t a loaded question, just interested. I’m broadly of the opinion that a NAS is the wrong solution in a lot of cases, I was hoping to have my mind changed.

I’d be interested to hear what a better solution would be.
Happy to get rid of the NAS drive if I could.
Cloud? I’m wary of ending up with all of my files on a server somewhere & then the price starts creeping up to maintain that level of storage. Perhaps unjustified or paranoid, but a concern nonetheless.
And cloud would need a back-up anyway, so that would still result in regularly plugging a hard drive into the laptop to back-up to…? Or something similar?

If you have an Intel CPU based Synology NAS, getting Pi-Hole running is a five minute job. There’s an easy how-to on Mariushosting.com

Out of interest, what are you lot all using a NAS for?

Just to store all my old CDs I burnt about 15 years ago. And the feed for my Sonos library.

Out of interest, what are you lot all using a NAS for?

Similar question. I can’t really imagine myself needing to access all my files from the edge of the world so AIUI NAS would be the wrong solution for me and a DAS might be more cost effective. From reading elsewhere I’ve seen a lot of problems reported with the WD MyCloud so I’m interested to see if any alternatives are mentioned.

and a DAS might be more cost effective

Excuse me for being a bit numb, but what’s a DAS

Direct access storage… essentially putting an extra drive(s) in your PC or in a box directly attached to a PC, as in it’s not networked in and of itself.. You could share it on your home network but if you want to access it on the road or from remote PCs on other networks it’s more complicated/problematic than a NAS, you have to ensure the PC it’s connected to is always powered on for one.

A portable USB hard drive would probably qualify as DAS, for example.

I’d be interested to hear what a better solution would be.

There might not be one. Where I’m coming from really is that for a while it seemed that “get a NAS” was a one-size-fits-all answer to everything.

If you need more storage then maybe an extra drive in your PC is a better option. If you need a backup, maybe a USB3 HDD is a better option. If you need to access files from your phone as well as a laptop then maybe public cloud storage is a better option. If you want a middleware VPN then maybe a Pi is a better option. If you need to load it up with apps then maybe a microserver is a better option. If you need centralised home storage with multiple people accessing it at once, and have high availability in the event of drive failure, maybe a NAS is the best option after all.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Used to have a WD Sentinel until it died. Now have two synology 2bay NAS drives, one is live, the other is a backup of the live one. That backs up to an external USB drive.

Use them mostly for photos, and also key docs for the business and personal. Drives mapped from both my PCs and my wife’s laptop. I upload pics to Lightroom from SD cards, and plug phone in over USB to upload pics from that

Synology much superior to WD MyCloud i think. Tried to set MyCloud up for a mate to save his and his Mrs pics, and the phone auto-upload was a pain and never really worked.

I use PCloud lifetime 1 terabyte as my backup for all PCs, phone and laptops. As yet Sonos won’t connect so keeping the WD for now.

Where I’m coming from really is that for a while it seemed that “get a NAS” was a one-size-fits-all answer to everything.

It was on here! It certainly seemed that everyone who asked about storage of digital media was told ‘get a NAS’.

I bought a WD My Cloud, I couldn’t really get it to work properly, other than as a Time Machine backup, then one of the drives in my Mac Mini failed, took it to the Mac reseller I bought it from, and not only had the Mac’s drive had failed, the My Book hadn’t been working properly and had just stopped backing stuff up! They managed to recover about half of the music I’d ripped and quite a lot of photos.
I’ve now got two 1Tb robust drives, I’m just waiting to get the resources together to buy a 2Tb SSD to replace the 750Gb drive and get the two external drives set up as a software RAID, mirroring each other so if one fails again at least I’ll have a second backup.

I’ve still got the WD, I suppose it could have another drive put into the case, but I just don’t trust the thing anymore.

@frogstomp

I have one but am struggling to work with a Sonos one.

@binman – have you tried this?

@frogstomp, thanks I had got that far, but your post embarrassed me into trying again, it worked this time when I typed the path in properly. Only 4 years late 😁, it works now.

I can listen to all my tunes (in FLAC) while washing up now.

If I could delete the ‘twonky server’s link / service I would be complete.