I’m in. Which brands do you recommend?
Synology DS923+ is a great system. I use the 920+ and it’s been rock solid.
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Ok sounds good. Will research, would be great to just have a dedicated NAS connected with no drama hahah
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I also have this one. It works great, never had an issue with Infuse or anything else for that matter. If you can get a hold of the cheaper models, those will work fine too. You don’t necessarily need everything that comes with it if you’re just using it for Infuse.
If you are willing to wait to same some money, Black Friday usually will have NAS and drives on sale, but sometime before.
I’m looking at some used Synology units for sale right now, what kind of hard drives should I be looking for? I don’t trust Western Digital lol. I actually don’t trust SeaGate either but let me know your thoughts please
Well don’t know what to tell you there. Just do your research. Some drives were known to fail much more quickly (5TB). I have 4 WD NAS drives that are now 6 years old, still running fine. I guess you can get Toshiba and Synology drives. But also set up redundancy of some sort. Another thing you can do is add a couple drives of differing brands and/or age so that you don’t have failures all at once. If you get 4 drives, all from the same batch, you have a higher chance of failure. The WD NAS Pro drives have 5 year warranty, I believe. Also you can run drive compatibility through Synology tool. Give you some ideas.
I’ve been running Seagate IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS drives for years and have had zero complaints so far. You can (for example) buy 14TB versions of the latter for under $250 each.
3-1/2” NAS hard drives are generally rather robust so long as you aren’t throwing them around while they’re running. Start with a 4-bay server (plugged into a reliable UPS) and initially populated with at least a pair of drives using Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), and if one of those drives ever falters, you can simply swap it out with a fresh one and quickly continue on as if nothing ever happened.
I have been using a 1621+ with 3 Seagate Exos (3x18 TB) with SHR-1 and a 1TB SSD for two years now and have had no problem (recently added 2x20 TB but it’s too soon to give any real feedback). I updated the RAM to 64 gb to be sure Plex and other stuff would run smoothly (although I quickly realised it’s a gross overkill for my use).
If I’m not mistaken quite a lot of prosumer Synology NAS can be upgraded that way, including the DS92X mentioned above.
I don’t know if that applies to you but what I liked about Synology’s OS is that it has allowed me to start using a NAS with limited knowledge at the beginning while having guardrails that probably prevented any castatrophic actions on my part.
The size of the community using these products is also a plus when starting.
I have also heard good things about QNAP but have never used one.
As drives go, I went with Exos drives as they’re enterprise-grade (so-says Seagate anyway) with a five-year warranty and were cheaper than IronWolf Pro at the time.
Other than that, as FLskydiver said, I strongly suggest you get a UPS even if it means starting with less storage space or a smaller NAS. Don’t skim on that.
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This is the way
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I have two Intel x64 6 Bay QNAP NAS‘s, there are a lot of apps available for this platform. Smaller 2 Bay versions have the same features
I use WD Red 4TB drives with 3030 days of runtime, WD40EFRX
I would DIY to save serious money. If you can house a tower, get a Fujitsu: they are energy efficient, cheap and have many SATA ports. Then you can install the OS of your choice (I have unRAID) and have ultimate flexibility.