Network Attached Storage (NAS): What It Is and Why You May Want It

[brucek]

Different strokes for different folks, but for people who are serving a whole household there is a lot to be said for a small, quiet, reliable, supported device that can be turned on once and will literally work for years with no further attention.

Yes, my main PC and the two prior models are all "more powerful" (although is power in excess of requirements truly relevant?). But my main PC gets rebooted, I want to reinstall the OS, or do whatever else I please without hearing screams from another room because the movie stopped.

No one is recommending this (and for good reason), but years ago I put a windows pc at the center of my home theater including media serving functions. What a nightmare. I didn't use it every day and it seemed like every time I had a special occasion, I had to go in early to deal with software update issues, driver issues, etc. No thanks.

 

[Paul Dougherty]

Single drive redundancy with no detection+correction of bit rot seems like a pretty good way too lose data long term.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Have to agree with the "build your own" option... The real expense is the actual hard drives - as it should be!

Easier to cool as well - HDs don't have to be as closely crammed together as they would be in a normal NAS.

 

[krizby]

I would just buy a new simple home NAS from WD every few years or so, once the NAS is almost full I just buy new one, copy everything from the old one and give the old one to my relative. That solves all the reliability issues and I can get new NAS at reasonable prices. For home usage the dual bay WD EX2Ultra is more than enough...

 

[dob_1]

I used an old first generation i7 machine that I replaced. It had older memory and can take up to 5 drives. Open Media Vault is a Linux based NAS that was free and better suited my needs than FreeNAS. Set it up myself, been running perfectly for 4 years now. Serves all screens and computers in the house via the home 1Gbs network.

 

[theruck]

Get a HP microserver with a 10GbE card and turn it into a nas

 

[Digitalzone]

Get a HP microserver with a 10GbE card and turn it into a nas

Option I forgot, the cheapest 4bay Synology 512MB RAM and 2core ARM costs the same as HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 with 8GB RAM and 2 core x86 Opteron.

 

[itgee]

Option I forgot, the cheapest 4bay Synology 512MB RAM and 2core ARM costs the same as HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 with 8GB RAM and 2 core x86 Opteron.

This server may give my next diy NAS biuld a run for it s value. but I will still contemplate on it

 

[MasterFig]

NAS market is in a state of absolute disgrace. You cannot find a single small NAS that would support or let you add 10Gbe Ethernet. They force you to go for a humongous 8-bay+ unit before they even let you upgrade it to 10Gbe, by paying them extra money for a proprietary 10Gbe extension card. It is an absolute shame! Damn monopoly and price fixing.

Buying a NAS that's limited to just 1Gbe is a waste of time and money today. Even 2 HDD-s in RAID 0 can reach 400MB/s in read speeds, while 1Gbe Ethernet caps it at a measly 110MB. And if you are buying a 4-6 bay NAS, your speed will be nearly 10 times slower, thanks to the lack of 10Gbe Eithernet, and inability to add one thereof.

In the meantime, the same a-holes boast 2.5GB/s read speeds on an 8+ - bay NAS units, equipped with just 1Gbe Ethernet, while those really require 40Gbe Ethernet + SSD cache drive to let you see the speeds they claim. Clowns.

What people really want these days, is 2-bay, 4-bay and 6-bay NAS units that come with 10Gbe out of the box. But there isn't even a single one anywhere in the world!

I have maxed out 8TB (RAID-1) on my Synology DS218+, and I cannot find anything good to upgrade it to, because there is no worthy upgrade option available today. I would have been happy to just swap drives for larger capacity ones, if the unit's un-upgradable 1Gbe wasn't so damn slow, but unfortunately it is, and so I do not see justification in spending more money to stay on such prehistoric performance. Damn shame, Synology.

You sure didn't look very hard! There are a number of 4 bay units that have or that you can add 10Gbe to (check QNap)

 

[jeyare]

NAS market is in a state of absolute disgrace. You cannot find a single small NAS that would support or let you add 10Gbe Ethernet. They force you to go for a humongous 8-bay+ unit before they even let you upgrade it to 10Gbe, by paying them extra money for a proprietary 10Gbe extension card. It is an absolute shame! Damn monopoly and price fixing.

Buying a NAS that's limited to just 1Gbe is a waste of time and money today. Even 2 HDD-s in RAID 0 can reach 400MB/s in read speeds, while 1Gbe Ethernet caps it at a measly 110MB. And if you are buying a 4-6 bay NAS, your speed will be nearly 10 times slower, thanks to the lack of 10Gbe Eithernet, and inability to add one thereof.

In the meantime, the same a-holes boast 2.5GB/s read speeds on an 8+ - bay NAS units, equipped with just 1Gbe Ethernet, while those really require 40Gbe Ethernet + SSD cache drive to let you see the speeds they claim. Clowns.

What people really want these days, is 2-bay, 4-bay and 6-bay NAS units that come with 10Gbe out of the box. But there isn't even a single one anywhere in the world!

I have maxed out 8TB (RAID-1) on my Synology DS218+, and I cannot find anything good to upgrade it to, because there is no worthy upgrade option available today. I would have been happy to just swap drives for larger capacity ones, if the unit's un-upgradable 1Gbe wasn't so damn slow, but unfortunately it is, and so I do not see justification in spending more money to stay on such prehistoric performance. Damn shame, Synology.

1. more important point regarding the 10Gbps availability is this question - what is my expected operation regarding the NAS? Then you will find answers, that except professional video creating and Machine learning operation your 1Gbps NIC is enough.
Few examples:
- NAS as Plex server. Mostly at client side you can find TV (100Mbps), tablet (limited by quality of WiFi, frequently deeply under 1000Mbps), laptop (1Gbps ethernet card, same as tablet for WiFi), ... Then here is no way utilize more than 10% of the 10Gbps LAN.
- Photography editing - SD card to NAS import directly by SD card reader to NAS (USB 3.0), creating of photo catalogue import of 1000RAW files (30MB/RAW) up to 2minutes with 2x1Gbps in LAG (every single Synology plus series has LAG support), photo edit process don’t need speed of light (even for 50-segments of panorama) because you will use internal SSD scratch disk and direct save to NAS. For such heavy environment you can utilize 10Gbps LAN only for 16%.

Finally cost of:
- NAS with integrated 10Gbps NIC is >50% vs NAS with 4x1Gbps NIC
- upgrade - PCIe card 10Gbps NIC is more than really fast 1Gbps managed switch for 48ports. Be sure what kind of card you will purchase, because PCIe 4x is really slower than PCIe 8x
- 10Gbps SFP+ transceiver module is really costly (half of the cost for managed switch) and frequently primary bottleneck of the 10Gbps implementation (inappropriate HW compatibility)
Conclusion:
NAS and LAN 1Gbps environment (managed switch with LAG) in 95% operation case still doesn’t reach limits of perfect operation.
Don’t be hurry with the 10Gbps as primary choice of your NAS.

 

[jeyare]

And I think lots of consumers are in the same boat as myself, using NAS for heavy media content, like 4K movies, first of all. Those average 30GB in size, and using them while at 110MB/s speed is a torture, which is caused by 1Gbe Ethernet, and nothing else.

This is wrong,
when you are streaming the content between NAS and client you don’t need 110MB/s speed, because your stream of the such heavy 4K content can’t utilize such speed, frequently compressed by h.265. Just few percentages from the entire 110MB/s.

 

[jeyare]

You sure didn't look very hard! There are a number of 4 bay units that have or that you can add 10Gbe to (check QNap)

Agree, people can’t spend time for a research, then they have wrong evaluation. What it worse, then they share such knowledge across internet as single source of truth.

 

[jeyare]

Finally - NAS is not just storage. It’s even more - it’s server for your daily operation. When you will discover added value of Docker containers or another virtualization in your NAS, you will get many interesting services (Bitwarden, ...).
It’s your own private cloud, your heavy and secure backup center, ...

I have many of NASes in my operation (home and business), more than 10y.

 

[krizby]

Finally - NAS is not just storage. It’s even more - it’s server for your daily operation. When you will discover added value of Docker containers or another virtualization in your NAS, you will get many interesting services (Bitwarden, ...).
It’s your own private cloud, your heavy and secure backup center, ...

I have many of NASes in my operation (home and business), more than 10y.

I just get a NAS so that I don't need any HDD in my PC anymore , well for now that is. Once my kid is older she will discover a life time of contents in my NAS to indulge herself...

 

[Ben Myers]

Reads like a promo piece for Synology, which IS very good, BTW.

 

[Ben Myers]

Just run freenas or something why go through the hassle of buying a glorified pc box for storage. The software support is the only benefit to these

The Synology boxes use ARM processors, not exactly the world of PCs.

 

[TheDevopsGuy]

The Synology boxes use ARM processors, not exactly the world of PCs.

Well, debatable lately since they're "trying" to bring them over to the desktop market. Anyways I'm an ***** in this subject but imho any device with a chip inside is a computer to me.

 

[LNCPapa]

I've got a full Synology DS1511+, a full Synology DS2415+, and a Threadripper server with an 8 disk software RAID (hw controller died) and I'm still constantly running out of space. I'm over 200TB in and I've got to figure out a more scalable solution to my digital packratting. I blame this partly on the fact that optical drives aren't really a thing anymore and partly on the fact that I'd be too lazy to grab a disk anyway.

 

[DasHip]

NAS market is in a state of absolute disgrace. You cannot find a single small NAS that would support or let you add 10Gbe Ethernet. They force you to go for a humongous 8-bay+ unit before they even let you upgrade it to 10Gbe, by paying them extra money for a proprietary 10Gbe extension card. It is an absolute shame! Damn monopoly and price fixing.

Buying a NAS that's limited to just 1Gbe is a waste of time and money today. Even 2 HDD-s in RAID 0 can reach 400MB/s in read speeds, while 1Gbe Ethernet caps it at a measly 110MB. And if you are buying a 4-6 bay NAS, your speed will be nearly 10 times slower, thanks to the lack of 10Gbe Eithernet, and inability to add one thereof.

In the meantime, the same a-holes boast 2.5GB/s read speeds on an 8+ - bay NAS units, equipped with just 1Gbe Ethernet, while those really require 40Gbe Ethernet + SSD cache drive to let you see the speeds they claim. Clowns.

What people really want these days, is 2-bay, 4-bay and 6-bay NAS units that come with 10Gbe out of the box. But there isn't even a single one anywhere in the world!

I have maxed out 8TB (RAID-1) on my Synology DS218+, and I cannot find anything good to upgrade it to, because there is no worthy upgrade option available today. I would have been happy to just swap drives for larger capacity ones, if the unit's un-upgradable 1Gbe wasn't so damn slow, but unfortunately it is, and so I do not see justification in spending more money to stay on such prehistoric performance. Damn shame, Synology.

Duude.. Where' ya from?
They have them already, and they're from a brand called Asustor. Support the underdog and buy them, eh? I just bought one for a great price (Cheaper than the other "Big 2").

I KNOW they have 10GbE in 4 bay, and I believe they carry them in 2 bays too in some models. They also have models rocking the 2.5Gbe x2.

 

[Squid Surprise]

You can buy the add-on PCIe card for most Synology NAS as well...that has 10Gbe as well... I did that with mine