Need help on NAS solution

[checkmate007]

Over the years, my collection of external hard disks have gotten larger, with a number of smaller drives. As it was getting difficult to track the files on these drives, I plan to get a NAS with 4TB (for each drive in RAID 1).

 

Currently, I am split between the two options right now:

1. Synology DS516J with 2 x WD Red 4TB (US$514 equivalent)
2. WD My Cloud Mirror, Gen 2 with 2 x WD Red 4TB included (US$370 with ongoing promotion)

There are a number of things I want to clarify and ask:

• Will I be able to access the files on these devices using Windows Explorer or Finder and use a normal media player such as VLC to play videos off it smoothly? (1080p FHD)
• Which of the two would you recommend considering the price of each?

[jwworker201]

11 minutes ago, checkmate007 said:

I plan to get a NAS with 4TB (for each drive in RAID 1).

I wouldn't go for an RAID 1 Setup, I'd go straight for something RAID 5 like because it brings in more security for you.

 

13 minutes ago, checkmate007 said:

Currently, I am split between the two options right now:

1. Synology DS516J with 2 x WD Red 4TB (US$514 equivalent)
2. WD My Cloud Mirror, Gen 2 with 2 x WD Red 4TB included (US$370 with ongoing promotion)

You can do way more with the Synology box so I would go for that. But have you ever thought about building your NAS by your own and running unRAID or FreeNAS on it? Would be more powerful, more flexible and way cheaper. But if you want to go for an prebuilt solution go for the Synology even if it is more expensive. 
 

16 minutes ago, checkmate007 said:

Will I be able to access the files on these devices using Windows Explorer or Finder and use a normal media player such as VLC to play videos off it smoothly? (1080p FHD)

I am personally not that experienced with prebuilt solutions but that should be fine on both devices. The encoding happens on your playback device and not on your NAS (at least if you don't run Plex with transcoding on it). Throughput should also be doable with full Gigabit speed on both devices.

Hope this helped  

[lufihengr]

19 minutes ago, jwworker201 said:

I wouldn't go for an RAID 1 Setup, I'd go straight for something RAID 5 like because it brings in more security for you.

 

You can do way more with the Synology box so I would go for that. But have you ever thought about building your NAS by your own and running unRAID or FreeNAS on it? Would be more powerful, more flexible and way cheaper. But if you want to go for an prebuilt solution go for the Synology even if it is more expensive. 
 

I don't want to hijack checkmates' thread, but I am in a similar situation.

I am looking for a nas and maybe I should go DIY. But I have no idea what hardware to use. A normal itx board? Or one with xeon embedded maybe? Dual socket? Discrete raid car or no? I only need a couple/few TB of storage, and it needs to be quiet and small, since it will have to be placed near our dining table or in my bedroom.

 

 Any suggestions?

[jwworker201]

43 minutes ago, lufihengr said:

I am looking for a nas and maybe I should go DIY. But I have no idea what hardware to use. A normal itx board? Or one with xeon embedded maybe? Dual socket? Discrete raid car or no? I only need a couple/few TB of storage, and it needs to be quiet and small, since it will have to be placed near our dining table or in my bedroom.

Basically it depends on your budget and usecase. If you want to use it just as an NAS, any fairly new Celeron board will do (or maybe something with an Pentium). If you want to run FreeNAS you need at least one GB of RAM for every TB you want to run but you don't need an discrete RAID card, FreeNAS is pure software RAID as well as unRAID etc. will be. I personally have an Parity Array on my Windows Server 2016 Machine but it's similar to the system unRAID uses. 
I was in a similar situation because my NAS/Server needed to be silent as well. I have settled on BeQuiet parts for cooling and the only thing you can hear are the hard drives (which is fairly silent) - I am using WD Reds @5400 rpm. 
If you want just PM me and I can give you further advice  

[checkmate007]

1 hour ago, jwworker201 said:

I wouldn't go for an RAID 1 Setup, I'd go straight for something RAID 5 like because it brings in more security for you.

 

You can do way more with the Synology box so I would go for that. But have you ever thought about building your NAS by your own and running unRAID or FreeNAS on it? Would be more powerful, more flexible and way cheaper. But if you want to go for an prebuilt solution go for the Synology even if it is more expensive. 
 

I am personally not that experienced with prebuilt solutions but that should be fine on both devices. The encoding happens on your playback device and not on your NAS (at least if you don't run Plex with transcoding on it). Throughput should also be doable with full Gigabit speed on both devices.

Hope this helped  

RAID 5 isn't really an option for me since the jump in the price from 2-bay to 4-bay NAS enclosures are quite significant.

 

What exactly do you mean by you can do more with it? I only need the basic functionality such as:

• Moving and copying files onto/from the disk
• Playing videos from the devices in real time without copying onto local disk

[jwworker201]

12 minutes ago, checkmate007 said:

What exactly do you mean by you can do more with it?

You can run web servers or can set up your owm cloud via owncloud/nextcloud for example. Or run Plex on it if I recall correctly. But if you just want to transfer files the WD should do as well; I can't tell you how reliable the device is. I only worked with DIY methods and Synology before. 

I personally would prefer an DIY solution but if you want something which just works and you don't have much effort with (and is fairly cheap) I think the WD thing will do the job.