Which Nas should I Buy?

[hbsterling]

From what I have seen, and correct me if I am wrong, best 4 bay NAS right now is the Synology 920+ and the QNAP TS-453D. I want a NAS for Plex and was wondering which one I should get and if there is another one I should be considering? I am leaning toward the QNAP because it is available and has 2.5 gb lan and pcie upgrade but would like to hear about other pros and cons.

[kkpatel87]

11 minutes ago, hbsterling said:

From what I have seen, and correct me if I am wrong, best 4 bay NAS right now is the Synology 920+ and the QNAP TS-453D. I want a NAS for Plex and was wondering which one I should get and if there is another one I should be considering? I am leaning toward the QNAP because it is available and has 2.5 gb lan and pcie upgrade but would like to hear about other pros and cons.

Would be inclined to make your own? I have had such great success with FreeNAS (or TrueNAS Core as it is known now).

[Master Disaster]

Synology's built in software (called DSM) is quite honestly the best experience I ever had when setting up a new device. Everything is fast, nice looking, very simple to do exactly what you want and most importantly it all just works. That's not to say you cannot delve deeper into the advanced options if you really want to. DSM is quite honestly amazing.

 

I cannot comment on QNAP however I will say one of the reasons I didn't go for one was because I hear the software is pretty slow, buggy and not intuitive to use but you are correct in saying its normally true QNAP devices come slightly better equipped than Synology devices do.

 

Feature wise I believe there's not too much difference between them, both support Plex, Web Servers, iSCSI, Torrent downloading and all the stuff you would expect so there's no much to choose between them here either.

 

Honestly the deciding factor should be your budget and which will fit best into your home setup because ultimately you'll be good with either one.

 

Oh and you'll hear that Synology devices only support 8GB of RAM, this is not true. You can only fit one extra stick in (the other 4GB module is preinstalled and hidden behind the shroud) and Synology say it only supports a 4GB stick but I have an 8GB in mine right now (making 12GB) with no issues at all.

[hbsterling]

9 minutes ago, kkpatel87 said:

Would be inclined to make your own? I have had such great success with FreeNAS (or TrueNAS Core as it is known now).

I did for a while but I decided to just go with buying a prebuilt one.

[hbsterling]

9 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Synology's built in software (called DSM) is quite honestly the best experience I ever had when setting up a new device. Everything is fast, nice looking, very simple to do exactly what you want and most importantly it all just works. That's not to say you cannot delve deeper into the advanced options if you really want to. DSM is quite honestly amazing.

 

I cannot comment on QNAP however I will say one of the reasons I didn't go for one was because I hear the software is pretty slow, buggy and not intuitive to use but you are correct in saying its normally true QNAP devices come slightly better equipped than Synology devices do.

 

Feature wise I believe there's not too much difference between them, both support Plex, Web Servers, iSCSI, Torrent downloading and all the stuff you would expect so there's no much to choose between them here either.

 

Honestly the deciding factor should be your budget and which will fit best into your home setup because ultimately you'll be good with either one.

 

Oh and you'll hear that Synology devices only support 8GB of RAM, this is not true. You can only fit one extra stick in (the other 4GB module is preinstalled and hidden behind the shroud) and Synology say it only supports a 4GB stick but I have an 8GB in mine right now (making 12GB) with no issues at all.

I guess I will look into the QNAP software a bit more since QNAP does seem to have Synology beat on the hardware side

[Dravinian]

Gamers Nexus has had two Synology NAS systems break on them, I would look carefully at their reliability to see whether they were just unlucky.

 

This is the deciding reason I went DIY in the end, not that it will be more reliable, but that I would at least know what to do when it inevitably broke and wouldn't be hamperd by someone else putting components together, I know where everything is...I put it there.

Also, I had an old PC which was easy to chuck in a 750D Corsair case with 12 HDD bays and 4 SSD bays, for future storage capacity.

[hbsterling]

5 hours ago, kkpatel87 said:

Would be inclined to make your own? I have had such great success with FreeNAS (or TrueNAS Core as it is known now).

Also, I really liked the small form factor hot swappable ease of the prebuilt NAS and I do not know a good price case that would be like that.