TLDR: Is there anything better than a QNAP for NAS, light VM and possible plex duty? Need time machine support.
Have a 2 bay QNAP in my office that has been reliable except for a disk that failed recently. Had 2 6TB drives but I'm really only using about 2TB of space so I bought 2 4TB drives thinking I could resize the volume and migrate the array to the smaller drives. I was wrong. If I want to continue using the QNAP then I'm basically starting over with fresh array and factory settings.
I really have no complaints with the QNAP other than I ask too much of it. It uses a quad core atom CPU and has been upgraded to 8GB RAM. I run a torrent VM on it which works well enough but I'd really like a box too run more. I'd also like Plex transcoding capability. The Atom will handle a single stream, mostly, but both the wife and kids tend to jump on it at the same time so I've been using my office gaming rig for Plex which seems wasteful since I only really play games on it (55" couch setup) on the weekends and the GPU heats up my office. Been contemplating selling the whole right anyway since any actual productivity occurs with a laptop.
Ran an Xpenology box for quite a long time which I liked but I never trusted it's "hacked" nature. I need reliable Time Machine support and just don't have the desire to mess with a linux VM on a windows server for this.
Does FreeNAS still require ECC? (I know officially yes) Any other alternative setups to look at? A built rig has appeal since I can equip it for Plex duties and knock out a few problems at once but my days of constantly "messing" with what is supposed to be a server rig are behind me. I just want the damn thing to quietly work.
Have a 2 bay QNAP in my office that has been reliable except for a disk that failed recently. Had 2 6TB drives but I'm really only using about 2TB of space so I bought 2 4TB drives thinking I could resize the volume and migrate the array to the smaller drives. I was wrong. If I want to continue using the QNAP then I'm basically starting over with fresh array and factory settings.
I really have no complaints with the QNAP other than I ask too much of it. It uses a quad core atom CPU and has been upgraded to 8GB RAM. I run a torrent VM on it which works well enough but I'd really like a box too run more. I'd also like Plex transcoding capability. The Atom will handle a single stream, mostly, but both the wife and kids tend to jump on it at the same time so I've been using my office gaming rig for Plex which seems wasteful since I only really play games on it (55" couch setup) on the weekends and the GPU heats up my office. Been contemplating selling the whole right anyway since any actual productivity occurs with a laptop.
Ran an Xpenology box for quite a long time which I liked but I never trusted it's "hacked" nature. I need reliable Time Machine support and just don't have the desire to mess with a linux VM on a windows server for this.
Does FreeNAS still require ECC? (I know officially yes) Any other alternative setups to look at? A built rig has appeal since I can equip it for Plex duties and knock out a few problems at once but my days of constantly "messing" with what is supposed to be a server rig are behind me. I just want the damn thing to quietly work.