I’m looking into a sinology Nas solution for my Mac for file sharing as well as local backup. but what I’ve found is that their are so many options to choose from when it comes to hardware and capacity. Can someone make a good recommendation for me?
Synology has a NAS selector that might be helpful.
What all do you want to do with it?
- backups
- Plex?
- run Docker containers?
- vpn?
- etc.
I have a DS-918+, which has been superseded by the DS-920+. It works well for me, and has been chugging along for three years. I installed 4x WD Red 4TiB drives, which gave me 12 TiB of usable space, and the ability to recover if one drive fails (RAID 5).
Since they are three years old, I’ve started retiring the drives, and replacing them with 6TiB WD Red Plus drives. (I think they might be a little bit noisier than the Reds.) When they’re all replaced, that should give me 18TiB, with the ability to recover from one drive failure.
Primarily I want to:
- Transfer completed video projects
- Sharing between Macs
- Time Machine backups
- Plex
except for video projects, I am using my Synology DS918+ to do the same things you want to do. I am also running Homebridge on docker on the NAS
Like @fuzzygell, I don’t do video projects … guessing that as far as the NAS is concerned time to transfer depends mainly on your network capacity anyway. I do everything else you mention plus doing its own backups to a connected USB drive and to Backblaze, some cron jobs running my own programs (mostly Python) doing things for me, internal web server, WebDAV, Synology Drive (synching two macs), etc. Not on the internet. Works well. Having some experience in the Unix/Linux world over the few decades helps.
I’m running a DS420j with 11 TB of RADID5 disk (using less than 3 TB of that). Connected to power via UPS. I must admit I didn’t research it very much and only took what seemed to do the job from that available on Amazon.
DS920+ is a good NAS but don’t try to do video projects. If you want to use it as an active storage server from which you do projects you will need a 10G network for both NAS and computer. For all other intended purposes it is a good option.
I have a 10G network, 1621XS+ NAS and Mac Mini and still struggle with some video projects, so mostly bring the whole library local to my machine and store final and assets back on the NAS when I am done.
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I will second (or third) the recommendation for the DS920+. I just recently upgraded to that model, primarily because my older Synology was unable to support Docker. (Well, apparently it could have if I installed it manually, but frankly the convenience of having Synology maintain the packages and being able to auto-update was worth the expenditure for me.)
For the uses you have indicated, that model should do very nicely. I agree that I would not edit video directly from it, but for archival of completed video projects it will be fine.
You could also go with a similar 2-drive unit, but my preference was for 4 lower capacity drives to achieve a similar overall storage capacity compared with 2 drives each with a larger storage capacity, partly out of concern with reliability of the latest super large capacity drives and partly because of cost. I just had to replace one drive, and a replacement 8TB drive was less than half the cost of a 16 TB, for example.
So far I have only found the Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless), 4-bay; 4GB DDR4 used on Amazon, back-ordered on NewEgg, and not available on B&H. Is there anywhere else I should look?
Too bad that people that have them to sell are doing bundles that make no sense, like they are a PC.