I am thinking of adding a NAS to my home network.
It will be primarily for audio and storage of photographs.
I would be interested to hear recommendations on which commercial NAS would be a starting point,. (say 4 or 8TB with simple RAID)
I would also be interested to hear recommendations on DIY with something like a Raspberry PI,
buy or build let me know
thank you
QNAP or Synology, better than messing about with a PC or Mac.
ATB, J
Agree, at least with my IT skills!
It’s also important to have a reliable backup strategy, not just RAID. No doubt that can be done in a DIY version, but it’s pretty straightforward to set up with QNAP or Synology software.
Roger
Yup - Synology is what I use. Easy enough to set up and operate as long as you are prepared to prepare and read the tutorial stuff on the choices you need to make. I’ve set mine up to back up key things (all my photos and personal documents for example) into the cloud. I use Synology’s M2 cloud service for that. I use Photos to directly backup all photos from my phone. And Synology’s Drive product to sync my laptop and other computers files for backup too. Once setup it all works continuously. I use a 1522+ currently which I replaced my 918+. I’ve set the 1522+ up with Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR). This gives me protection from a 2 drive failures. I have 5 bays and 5x 7.3 Tb Hard drives, the fault tolerance gives me 21.8Gb of addressable storage. There are choices here that give you tolerance for a single failure and give you more storage - hence my recommendation that you do your reading before you start setting it up. It’s not hard, it just takes a few hours to understand what you are doing at the beginning.
I also run Plex on it - for my ripped DVDs, and you can also run Roon or another music server on there. I use Roon, but run it on a computer connected to my big TV so I have the UI to play with when I’m in my living room. Roon does run fine on the Synology also, that’s what I used to do also.
I agree, best not cobble together a make do job, k.i.s. (s) and go for Forum Favourites Synology or QNAP loaded with Asset UPnP or Minimserver.
My preference is Synology and the simpler to use Asset.
thank you everyone for your time to reply - I shall have to make an investment in both time to read and money, but it sounds like a buy is better than a make
You can do it with a PI, but you will need a RAID hat, custom enclosure etc. and backup to cloud via some sort of script or prepackaged utility. Some detailed tech knowledge.
OR
Buy a Synology which does RAID and incremental cloud backup OOTB and takes 30 mins to setup. No tech knowledge really required.
Asset uPnP for media serving duties.
I would highly recommend the diy route, something like a an HP micro serve gen 8 to 10 would be perfect. I picked up a gen 8 for 250 second hand. Specs wise smashes qnap et all.
But of course need to get your hands dirty. I put Open Media Vault on it, but my main server runs Unraid.
Price to spec, off the shelf is not even in the car park of the ball park.
Synology here. And roon on macbook pro. Unless you want to play with the tech in depth I would recommend commercial route. More important is backup approach. Don’t rely on raid.
Considering what the OP is using the Nas for, the lowest speced Qnap and Synology available is way way way over specified.
But 4 times the cost of a HP, reaching back to my point.
You’ve paid £250 for a second hand HP micro, you can buy a new 2 Bay qnap for £250 or a single bay for £150.
A 2 bay qnap is weedier than a garden weed! Its all very well looking at right now, but at least thing a little bit into the future.
That may be an issue for a general purpose NAS, but for holding a music store and running a UPnP server the cheapest QNAP or Synology is fine.
I use a single bay nas that is over 10 years old. It streams hires and is barely ticking over in terms of memory and cpu usage.
People can log into their nas, take a look at the performance monitor and judge for themselves.
I have 3 Netgear ReadyNAS units, which I have acquired over the last 15 years or so. And are just for storage serving purposes.
The oldest, a low powered Duo, is limited to 2TB drives, which I run in RAID1.
The other two are also 2-bay units with Intel Atom processors with more memory. Both have dual Gigabit connections, in adaptive load balancing mode (from the ReadyNAS Pro models)
One, a Ultra Plus, is my main NAS with 2 x 10TB drives in RAID1
The other, a Ultra, is for backup, running 2 x 8TB in RAID1 also.
There are scheduled backup jobs running from the Main NAS to the Backup units.
So my 8TB music library is mirrored over 4 disks.
I also have a 12 TB RAID0 volume in a USB enclosure, which provides an ‘offline’ backup.
I have a couple of single USB disks, so other data is backed up and mirrored over 3 disks.
The separate 2-bay units give resilience with independent back plane, power supplies, networking etc.
All units are on a UPS to protect against mains power issues.
I would have run LMS on a NAS when I started streaming ‘08/‘09, but moved to Asset on a dedicated RPi2, and then to Roon on NUC, running ROCK.
I also run volume comparison checks to ensure the backups are copies of the master version.
I would not look to build a NAS DIY as the commercial products are good, the firmware/software is proven, easy to use and reliable.
Well ok, at the very least avoid Synology who are driving their business down the inshitification route.
I built my own NAS. It took me a few attempts to get it right, but it was worth the effort.
The albums stored on my NAS are ripped from CD or purchased from the likes of Bandcamp. These sources (CD. Bandcamp) serve as the primary backup. Additionally, these albums are stored on a USB hard drive, kept separate from the NAS as a secondary backup.
This makes the NAS itself quite simple. It’s run by a tiny computer like a Raspberry Pi (but not a Raspberry Pi) which has a 2TB NVME drive attached. All the albums are stored on the NVME drive.
As for software, I use Ubuntu Server. The albums are accessible to Linux and Windows applications, including the streaming systems I use. There was a bit of a learning curve in getting things configured in a way a Linux sysadmin would approve of.
The all-up cost of this was maybe NZ$500.
A two bay Qnap here has been storing documents, photos and of course FLAC music (using Minmserver) for 10 years. It even acts as an NVR monitor with two outside cameras.