Talk to me about NAS stuff

The Napkin

wise ass al kaprielian
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Jul 13, 2002
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It's time for another tech question with Napkin! Yeah!

I want to buy a new NAS for home. Will be connecting 2 computers (PC and mac). Mobile isn't a priority but I assume it'd work too?
Want to use it to store pictures and some small videos.
Potentially would like to store my music and stream it from there.
Willing to spend money to get something good but like anything don't want to waste money, ya know?
Can't emphasize enough that the most important thing is ease of use. I want to buy it and connect an ethernet cord and have it just work. I don't want to have to play with it. I don't want to have to figure out settings. I want to be able to click it on my laptop and move stuff to it without thinking about it.

I'm thinking about this? (WD 8TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage) (or maybe a bigger one)

the Pro series? (Is it worth the upgrade? What's the big difference?)

any other brands I should be looking at?
Synology seems good but I have to buy the drives separate?

Thanks yo
 

cgori

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Oct 2, 2004
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I have a Synology, it's great. But I don't think it quite meets your plug it in and have it just work test, it's more of a thing for tinkerers / IT-type people, since it's basically a swiss-army-chainsaw gadget.
I use it to store and stream my music. And then as a place to backup my laptop and desktop. It can do a bunch of other stuff - video transcoding, stream movies and whatnot.

The 2-drive-bay version of Synology is on sale at Newegg right now: https://www.newegg.com/synology-ds220/p/N82E16822108743 (I guess their sale price is the same as Amazon's price) - installing the drives into it is not particularly challenging, I think you clip the two plastic things on each one and slide them into the trays (it's been a while since I did this, so I'm going on memory). Setting it up wasn't really difficult either, but it's not completely plug-and-play, this is a pretty fancy piece of gear. You have to define users and passwords, at least, and decide which apps to enable (music, file sharing, backup, etc), and how to partition the storage (if at all - one big pool is generally better, in my opinion). I happen to like the WD "Red" drives, but the newer ones have some potential issues - this is probably the exact kind of stuff you don't want to have to think about though.

I would be surprised if either of those WD devices couldn't do what you want, but I don't know anything about them specifically. What I'd pay the most attention to is the Mac + PC support.
 

santadevil

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I too love my Synology, but I don't believe they have one where you can just plug and play, so likely not what you are looking for

I'm running a DS 1512+ (2012 model) and I just swapped in new drives last year (the initial set I had were all at 60,000+ hours on them) to expand the storage and also added in an additional memory module, but it's been rock solid and once I had it set up, it's been pretty forgettable, in a good way
Took me maybe a few hours to get it going the way I wanted it to work for me
 

The Napkin

wise ass al kaprielian
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Yeah, wirecutter is my go to and where I saw the Synology in the first place. It's just I can do the ordeal of getting it going but honestly I just don't want to deal with it. "a few hours to get it going" isn't my head space right now, ya know?

I'll likely go with the 12TB version of the WD in my first link. Mainly just wanted to chat it out of my head and make sure it wasn't garbage.
There's no reason it can't live with pc and mac together in harmony that I can see which is loverly.
 

SoxJox

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Dec 22, 2003
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Rock > SoxJox < Hard Place
I've heard Naval Air Stations can be pretty expensive - especially exercising imminent domain to gain possession of the land. And don't even ask about FAA airspace clearance, man oh man.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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I've heard Naval Air Stations can be pretty expensive - especially exercising imminent domain to gain possession of the land. And don't even ask about FAA airspace clearance, man oh man.
I dont know about any of that. I'm just confident that Illmatic is one of the best albums ever.
 

foulkehampshire

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Feb 25, 2007
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I have a 4 bay Synology DS 920+. I can’t really say enough about how great it is, the user interface is very straightforward and it’s jam packed full of useful features and in-house apps.

I do agree with the time it takes to get past the initial configuration and learning curve involved, however once you’re past that it’s very smooth sailing. Could be a bit overkill for your needs, however.
 

saintnick912

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Lil NAS X is selling satan's storage cube, which will curse your files.

I've had a couple of Synology over the years, currently a 416+. The previous oe was destroyed in a freak flood but I was able to transplant the drives and recover everything. I've swapped out the drives once since, when one failed, for bigger models, and it was pretty seamless. I have it configured to back up some folders to a cloud account.
 

santadevil

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I've had a couple of Synology over the years, currently a 416+. The previous oe was destroyed in a freak flood but I was able to transplant the drives and recover everything. I've swapped out the drives once since, when one failed, for bigger models, and it was pretty seamless. I have it configured to back up some folders to a cloud account.
Which cloud account. I haven't done this yet and I'm starting to want to for our personal pics and files
 

saintnick912

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Which cloud account. I haven't done this yet and I'm starting to want to for our personal pics and files
I have a Google Cloud (GCP) account with a Nearline storage bucket. On the Synology I'm using the S3 compatibility API on GCS to do the write. I'm sure it's not the simplest or most cost effective, but I already had a project with billing set up there.
 

santadevil

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I have a Google Cloud (GCP) account with a Nearline storage bucket. On the Synology I'm using the S3 compatibility API on GCS to do the write. I'm sure it's not the simplest or most cost effective, but I already had a project with billing set up there.
Cool, thanks for the info
 

Scott Cooper's Grand Slam

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Jul 12, 2008
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It's time for another tech question with Napkin! Yeah!

I want to buy a new NAS for home. Will be connecting 2 computers (PC and mac). Mobile isn't a priority but I assume it'd work too?

Thanks yo
Bump. How's this working for you, Nap? I'm looking at a similar setup for myself.

We'll be connecting two computers (1 Mac, 1 Chromebook).
I need ~1 TB to store ROMs and backups. She needs ~3 TB to store backups of photos and videos
 

The Napkin

wise ass al kaprielian
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I threw my hands up, kicked the can down the road, and did nothing about it.

every now and then I look back at the WD My Cloud EX2 ones but just haven't pulled the trigger. indecision may or may not be my problem.
 

saintnick912

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Bump. How's this working for you, Nap? I'm looking at a similar setup for myself.

We'll be connecting two computers (1 Mac, 1 Chromebook).
I need ~1 TB to store ROMs and backups. She needs ~3 TB to store backups of photos and videos
I'd buy a 2-bay with a couple of 6TB drives in mirror mode. That way you'll get full redundancy, and those are super cheap these days.

I recently bought a 5TB USB drive, and I'm messing around with the best way to back up my Synology to it. The internal USB Copy app seems to be the best option, you can have it do a differential write and the backup contents are the regular files and not some proprietary archive format. If I can get it working well, I may shut off the cloud backup, which is quite expensive.