Mac Mini or Synology?

[blackgold]

I am currently looking for my first NAS and am trying to decide between a Synology DS223j with 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB HDDs (RAID 1) or a 2018 base Mac Mini hooked up to a LaCie d2 Professional 14TB External Hard Drive. With the Mac option I would create alias folders of the data on a 4TB external hard drive that I already own as a sort of mock RAID 1 setup until its full at which point I'd switch to a second d2 or 2big. What I am looking to backup/store and features I'd like are:

 

- Documents

- Photos

- Music

- Movies

- Time Machine backups

- Security cam footage (not necessary up front as this is a future project)

- Parallels snapshots

- Google Takeouts

 

- Streaming content both while home and away

- File hosting (ideally)

- Remote Desktop capabilities

- Automatic downloads of files in cloud services (i.e. DropBox, GDrive, OneDrive)

- Security

 

I've done some research and read other forums only to be more conflicted. As a Mac aficionado, my preference is the MM route. I do not know much about networking but I have stumbled my way through a Synology NAS setup in the past so it'd be familiar territory setting another one up. I'm also open to the idea of other setups in a similar price range.

 

Thoughts?

 

[NavyCobra1417]

I can't speak to synology as I've never interacted with any of their products; but the Mac mini route sounds quite interesting.

[Electronics Wizardy]

I'd probably go Synology. Works well, nice web interface, and gereanlly works better for nas tasks than mac os.

 

The 2018 mac mini is about to not get support for new mac os versions, and you can run linux or a different os on it, but at that point save money and buy the dell/hp/lenovo minipcs.

 

 

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, blackgold said:

 

Thoughts?

Id also go the NAS route. Because its designed to do what you need to do and probably more. I have a QNAP NAS and it can do more than Ill ever use.

 

Also like @Electronics Wizardy stated, its likely that Mac Mini is about to be put out to pasture by Apple. MacOS Sonoma is the latest Mac OS version and the 2018 Mac Mini is like the bare minimum of Mac Mini's needed to run it. So the next OS will likely drop support. Ill be honest Im surprised Apple has provided support For Intel devices as long as they have.