Easiest NAS solution, and best bang for buck?

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arachn1d

Gawd
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Jan 7, 2005
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I want to setup a NAS server. I'm a technical person and could setup my own server but I don't want to worry about reliability. I just want to a really good NAS system that can backup my Macbook Pro, and it's external hard drives, and also act as a Time Machine host.

I'd like to stream videos to my appletv/macmini, torrent, and do the usual stuff.

Any tips? I used to look at Synology as the best when I researched this two years ago but I don't know what's the latest and the greatest anymore. Also what are some good drives to pair it with? What would be the best raid setup?

My "cloud" backup is Crashplan, but I want something local for backup, and a fileserver because my external hard drives are full now.
 
I really like Synology's smaller NAS's.

I had used Netgears smaller units for VMware backup destinations until they decided to stop supporting NFS in the new smaller units so switched to Synology.

Synology's OS is also much nicer IMO but I do not use any of the additional features although I had tested AFP and it seems to work well.
 
arachn1d said:
I want to setup a NAS server. I'm a technical person and could setup my own server but I don't want to worry about reliability. I just want to a really good NAS system that can backup my Macbook Pro, and it's external hard drives, and also act as a Time Machine host.

I'd like to stream videos to my appletv/macmini, torrent, and do the usual stuff.

Any tips? I used to look at Synology as the best when I researched this two years ago but I don't know what's the latest and the greatest anymore. Also what are some good drives to pair it with? What would be the best raid setup?

My "cloud" backup is Crashplan, but I want something local for backup, and a fileserver because my external hard drives are full now.
Click to expand...

How much storage do you need and what is your budget?
 
mwroobel said:
How much storage do you need and what is your budget?
Click to expand...

I have ~2.7k of external hard drive storage that is almost full. So I'd say I need something like 5tb for room for growth?

Once I get my has I'm not sure what to do with the external drives either. Should I hook them up to NAS? Does that exist? Or should NAS just back them up?

Right now I have my Macbook Pro setup like this

Macbook Pro -> 2 External Data Hard Drives -> Backed up by 1 External (time machine)

So I have 3 external hard drives, and one backups the computer and 2 other drives.

I want to spend something like ~600 max.
 
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arachn1d said:
Since it's only 2 disks. Am I limited to the integrity?

What happens if one fails? What type of RAID do I do? That's the only concern I have with only 2 disks. If one disk fails I'd like the data to be safe, so I thought I'd need at least 3 or something.
Click to expand...

raid 1 (2 hdds)

raid 5 (3 or more hdds)

both have parity
 
Synology is awesome. The OS is the top notch with frequent (and useful) updates.

I have an HP microserver now, running whs2011. If it broke, i would get a 411 in a heartbeat.
 
Arcstorage provides the best NAS solution for the buck. They have a consumer NAS that holds 4 x 3TB drives and starts at $795. If you want something that has more expansion, you can move to their NAS Pro model, which provides more ram, SSD's, and 28 disks for total expansion.
The biggest reason is because they use ZFS as the base OS, which has many benefits over traditional NAS units. They also don't charge for licensing, so big win with Arcstorage.
 
That's really cool. Thanks for sharing that. Arc really has a nice bang-for-buck ratio and how they handle the features are very hardcore.

Because it's so enterprise driven, it seems to lack some basic things I'd like for home use: itunes server streaming, torrent downloads, and so on. If it had that I'd buy it.
 
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