NAS shopping :?

[comandos]

Hi
I'm thinking of buying myself a prebuild NAS, primarily used for storage/media streaming (local and external) and torrenting. (1)
I’m looking for feedback on my remarks and any advice would be appreciated:

	Synology DiskStation  DS916+	QNAP TVS-471	WD My Cloud PR4100
Like	- Btrfs (it's not magic but will give me a heads-up) - apps - Warranty - VM ready	-cpu - VM ready - hardware decoding capabilities (for “Plex”)	- price - It’s WD (in a good way), -  Easy RAM upgrade - hardware decoding capabilities (for “Plex”)
Don’t like	- RAM upgrade - NO hardware decoding capabilities (2)	- RAM upgrade	- don’t know if it supports VM’s

Off topic:
(1) Selecting torrent on a computer and downloading it on a NAS
In the future maybe running VM’s off the NAS
(2) Been reading a lot of mixed reports on hardware decoding… What is going on here ?? Would I be better buying a powerful NUC and leave the decoding to it and run a Docker container on a NAS for everything else?

Best regards and thank you in advance

 

[unknownmiscreant]

9 minutes ago, comandos said:

Hi
I'm thinking of buying myself a prebuild NAS, primarily used for storage/media streaming (local and external) and torrenting. (1)
I’m looking for feedback on my remarks and any advice would be appreciated:

	Synology DiskStation  DS916+	QNAP TVS-471	WD My Cloud PR4100
Like	- Btrfs (it's not magic but will give me a heads-up) - apps - Warranty - VM ready	-cpu - VM ready - hardware decoding capabilities (for “Plex”)	- price - It’s WD (in a good way), -  Easy RAM upgrade - hardware decoding capabilities (for “Plex”)
Don’t like	- RAM upgrade - NO hardware decoding capabilities (2)	- RAM upgrade	- don’t know if it supports VM’s

Off topic:
(1) Selecting torrent on a computer and downloading it on a NAS
In the future maybe running VM’s off the NAS
(2) Been reading a lot of mixed reports on hardware decoding… What is going on here ?? Would I be better buying a powerful NUC and leave the decoding to it and run a Docker container on a NAS for everything else?

Best regards and thank you in advance

 

WD are very proprietary, and very hard to recover data from/upgrade (personal experience). Our WD NAS recently failed, and when I plugged the working disk into my desktop to pull the data off, I couldn't get it to work properly.

 

I have never looked at synology or QNAP. I currently have a Netgear readyNAS 312 (replacement for the WD.) In theory it can handle torrents on its own (through app support, think there might be something for plex). Although I have never tried any of this, I never torrent anything due to the inherent security issues, and don't use a media server. They don't come cheap, but ours has been functioning great. It is easy to swap drives etc, upgrade storage and has a great array of snapshot/backup tools that I use on a regular basis.

[comandos]

@unknownmiscreant: May I ask which one were you using (WD)?

[Deltaforce_501]

if you have needs regarding decoding I'm pretty sure there's a NAS style board on the market with an 8 core atom or something or rather and a crazy amount of SATA ports unsure of the price though or availability

[Dark]

I've used Synology and QNAP products for years and over the last 2 years I've migrated solely to QNAP.

 

Having owned WD and Netgear NAS products in the past, while they are suitable for minor NAS operations they aren't nearly as flexible.

 

I would recommend the QNAP without question with the Synology an easy 2nd, but I would not recommend the WD.

[comandos]

Thank you all