1 yr. ago • 89%

Any recommended products for Network Attached Storage?

Hoping to set up a general location to throw files.

It might be used as a storage dump for Plex too..

Recommendations?

Edit: the synology recommendations have won out. Went with the DS923+. Thanks for all of the thoughtful recommendations!

40 comments

If you want the best UX and polish, Synology

If you want something rougher around the edges, QNAP

You can always look into building a solution with something like unraid, truenas, or OMV

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- If choosing Synology look into the Plus series (f.e. DS723+) or you end up with ARM CPUs and lose many of Synologys software goodies.
  Their Active Backup for Business software is a nice way to backup the household machines as an example.
  As you enter packages in this list you will see which models are supported:
  https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages
  
  5
No mentions of TrueNAS (used to be FreeNAS), so I'll throw that one out there.

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Seconding this because my current NAS is dying and I'd like to relocate my LEGITIMATELY OBTAINED MEDIA COLLECTION somewhere else.

Plex seems cool but last time I tried it I couldn't get it to categorize my non-english movies and shows correctly.

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- I haven't explored Jellyfin's categorization, but could that be an alternative? It's FOSS
  
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  Their metadata provider system by default only has The Movie Database (TMDb) and Open Media Database (OMDb) but they got plugins for more:
  https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/plugins/#official-plugins
  
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- I've had some heartache with Plex's categorization system too, on English language content nonetheless..
  
  I cant imagine the pain of making it work for foreign content.
  
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  I haven’t really had issues accessing and categorizing my LEGITIMATELY OBTAINED MEDIA COLLECTION on something called Jellyfin. They outline their file structure clearly, but even without it, it does a good job generally.
  
  If you go the route of installing Truenas or OMV as others have suggested, it’s pretty easy to get it up and running!
  
  0
Are you looking for a turnkey product or are you open to building your own?

My vote would be for ZFS+Linux, otherwise Synology is pretty damn good.

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- Knowing my track record for completing projects.. turnkey is probably best for me. Haha
  
  Seeing a loooot of recommendations for Synology
  
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  Yeah I think you can even get ZFS on some of their products. (I like ZFS) 😄
  
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I have two NAS Solutions, both using raspberry pis running OMV. First one is a single external USB hard drive acting as a buffer when it downloads my legitimately obtained media before transferring its data to the second NAS running two USB hard drives running RAID 1 for deep storage and streaming.

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- How are you connecting the two drives to the Pi? Do they have external power supplies?
  
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  The single drive can power itself through USB. The other server with 2 drives have their own independent power supply. Look up WD EasyStore to get an idea of what kind of model they are.
  
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- Can you link something that explains this more?
  
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  I just followed these tutorials and it worked quite well.
  
  Single HDD storage setup
  
  Raid 1 storage unit
  
  0
I always rolled my own Debian servers on microitx boards. I found a cheap synology a few years ago though and gave it a shot.. I'm a convert for sure. They fully live up to the hype and are absolutely worth the price.

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- Permanently Deleted
  
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  It's *nix under the hood. You can run docker images really easily on it for extra functionality. I doubt the DSM tooling is open.
  
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- Thanks! Seems like a lot of people (both here on lemmy and elsewhere) recommend synology
  
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Built one with Proxmox with OMV on top.

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I recommend Unraid. Especially if you want to host a bunch of dockers as well.

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- Minor nit here - “docker containers” or just “containers” because “dockers” are pants.
  
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  3rd world idiot here. Docker pants like in clothes, was in a mall when I read your comment earlier and I spent a fair bit of time thinking up a response to your comment, but the joke's on me. Just installed requestrr in a minute from the gui in unraid. For some of us, this is awesome. I used to run a Fedora 14 samba server for many years, slowly working my way up to 17 or 18 until my initial partition (bad) choices made me look for something else. Can't remember how long it is now, but my same Unraid server has been running for ever. Drives growing, motherboard changing, ram & cpu upgrading along the way. Yes, it costs 70 dollars or something up front, but in time and energy saved for me, it has been an amazing ride.
  
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I could actually recommend the synology DS220J. super simple, cheap, can run your plex server on it so it's not tied to your main pc.

You'll outgrow it quickly but you'll know exactly what you want in your next nas or if you want to build one instead.

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- The J can barely run Plex
  
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  you can run plex on a potato as long as you don't need to transcode anything
  
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  My (albeit, somewhat older) j model hits 100% cpu just logging into the web UI. Synologys are nice, but definitely stay away from their budget models.
  
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Never setup a nas but if I was to get one, I would use truenas since it is foss.

For fireproof and waterproof nas systems, check out iosafe. Not sure if truenas will work on them however.

https://iosafe.com/

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- TrueNas is just the software isn't it? Which hardware to go with?
  
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  Yes, it is the OS of the nas. I do not know what hardware will work for it. I only played around with truenas in a VM
  
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- Plenty of FOSS ways to set up a NAS. I'm going for Debian with ZFS myself, I prefer custom solutions as they are almost always more flexible than "NAS OS:es".
  
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  What software do you need when using debian? Just ZFS as a file system?
  
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I used a raspberry pi with OpenMediaVault

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