We have 15 year old (approx) ReadyNASes that seems to be getting to end of life and the disks are failing. I read the Synology thread and saw the recommendations for Mac Mini solutions with attached storage.
What kind of drive enclosure and drives do you use with a Mac Mini solution?
I recently discovered that SSDs can lose data if not powered on for a while. This makes me think (reluctantly) that at least some HDDs would be better for backups.
I got a 4 drive enclosure from OWC. My drives are Seagate Ironwolf some of which I took out of my Synology before I sold it.
I’ve never had much luck using a Mac as a NAS, for some reason I always tend to end up fighting with drive disconnet and sleep issues.
I gave up and went with a Terramaster F4-424 Pro NAS and installed Unraid on it as a replacement NAS OS and it’s been rock solid.
+1 on OWC. OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad Four-Bay 3.5" Storage Enclosure OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad Four-Bay 3.5" Storage Enclosure: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories
I held off buying DAS (Directly Attached Storage) for years as I couldn’t find a unit which was quiet as it would live in my bedroom. But this is whisper quiet. I installed it with 4 x 8TB Seagate Barracuda drives.
The only downside is that out of the box it doesn’t come with RAID 5, you have to buy OWCs Softraid for another $149 up front and $75 a year therafter but to buy DAS with RAID 5 is far more expensive anyway. The software RAID is fast enough though.
Probably not a popular solution, but I’m on my 2nd QNAP NAS because the first one lasted me 10+ years and was rock solid. The transition from QNAP 1 to QNAP 2 was seamless and I haven’t had an issue in the ~2 years I’ve been on the new one.
This WunderTech video offers some opinions, which you accept or reject, but it also has some good fact-based points worth considering as you research your options:
I don’t need the fault tolerance of Raid5 so a JBOD container was fine for me. With a mixture of 4 and 8tb drives, Raid5 would be harder to implement.
Interesting, so even with magnetic drives you are not getting any noise?
It’s not noiseless, but it’s not noisy. I can sometimes hear it when lying in bed, but I don’t find it disruptive or unpleasant.
at a normal working desk, I doubt it would register for most people.
I can confirm this.
I have this unit as well, with four spinning disks under my desk. I can occasionally hear it, but only if there is nothing else going on. Most of the time I either have music playing, or I’m on a Teams call, and it is not noticeable.
There are a lot of factors that go into your choice. I switched from Synology to TrueNAS for easy expansion and to be able buy replcacement and upgrade parts at my local Micro Center store.
For TrueNAS, you build a PC with many hdd slots, but an HBA card, and a bunch of drives. Then you create storage pools with various levels of redundancy and even a cache disk if that makes sense for your use case. I also installed a 10G NIC in mine and I keep it in my basement for cooling and noise management.
The software is free and has support for running applications in docker and virtual machines if you are interested in that.
That is just one of many options. You can watch youtube videos about it or read the docs to learn more.
Synology - two tidbits:
Personally, I won’t be buying Synology again.