4 bay NAS advice

Seamu$

Hi folks,

I've been considering buying a NAS for a while & had settled on the Zyxel NSA325 but am now thinking that to future proof to some extent I should go for a 4 bay setup. Currently have about 3TB on various devices & external drives so need to get it all together and backed up etc. With the way video footage from phones in particular is building up I'm thinking I'll probably need 2 x 4TBs minimum and have both mirrored.

I'm not an advanced user so my requirements are fairly basic - basic storage & backup of important photos & videos as well as films & music, access data from laptops, phones & tablets around the house, serve content to media players connected to TVs & a music server. I see reference on other threads to Plex, Sabnzbd, Couchpotato, Sickbeard, torrents etc which I will look into further in the future.

I know Synology devices come highly recommended by many on here, but I'm looking at the price difference between the entry level D-Link and a similar Synology and just wondering would the D-Link be sufficient for my purposes or is there a good case to be made for investing the extra money for the Synology?

Would be probably popping 4TB WD Reds into this, although I see 5 & 6TB drives available now. Would existing NAS units be able to take this higher capacity drives?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

dango

Just so you know the NSA325 won't transcode for plex. I would make absolutely certain that whichever one you go for can before buying. I haven't done much research into other models but avoid ones with Arm based CPUs.

Seamu$

Thanks Dango. Did a quick search & this seems to suggest there might be a suitable add-on for Plex?

Ste-

That would mean Plex will work on the server but it won't transacode anything.
For example a chromecast will only play certain files. your server will have certain files. if the file on the server isn't a certain format the chromecast won't play it. If your server supports transcoding the server will transcode it into a format the chromecast can play. if you server doesn't support transcoding it won't play. but it can still play the filetypes the chromecast supports natievly.

hope that makes sense.

Seamu$

Great, thanks Ste. What about xbmc, that shouldn't have any issues playing movies from the NAS which are in a variety of formats - avi, mkv, mp4 etc.?

I suppose I was mainly wondering if there are any known major limitations on this D-Link box that should put me off going for it over a Synology.

Ste-

you're right, Kodi should play pretty much anything thrown at it.
But does every bit of hardware you have support kodi or any file format you throw at it ? will it in the future ?

Seamu$

Ste- wrote: »

you're right, Kodi should play pretty much anything thrown at it.
But does every bit of hardware you have support kodi or any file format you throw at it ? will it in the future ?

Don't have a lot of hardware yet, the media player plays any format I throw at it from a portable external hard drive connected to it. It's got built-in wifi so should be ok, but that wouldn't be a dealbreaker if there are a few it can't play from NAS.

2 HP Touchpads have DLNA so I think they should be ok as well.

Any hardware I add in future I would presumably just have to ensure it can support the file formats. Will probably initially just add an android box to the TV & that should be ok - I see D-Link have a few android apps also.

ED E

Plex is god. Its worth it.

Get a NAS with a proper CPU and OS if you think plex is something you want. It'll have twice the working life of a low end ARM embedded unit.

Also consider the RAID options each unit supports. You only really want to use RAID1, RAID6 or RAID10, but in a small unit with only 4 bays they arent great. Probably should select RAID1 for a pair of 4TBs (to give 4TB usable) or RAID10 on four 4TBs giving 8TB useable.

6TB drives dont make sense yet, price per gig wise. 8TBs and 10TB on helium are also roadmapped but they wont reach economies of scale for a little while.

Seamu$

ED E wrote: »

Get a NAS with a proper CPU and OS if you think plex is something you want. It'll have twice the working life of a low end ARM embedded unit.

What would you suggest? What would you consider a proper CPU?

ED E wrote: »

Also consider the RAID options each unit supports. You only really want to use RAID1, RAID6 or RAID10, but in a small unit with only 4 bays they arent great. Probably should select RAID1 for a pair of 4TBs (to give 4TB usable) or RAID10 on four 4TBs giving 8TB useable.

That's interesting, thanks. I'll have to look into the RAID configurations more, I thought that under RAID1 one HD mirrored another so if I ended up with 4 x 4TBs I'd have 8TB usable.

Thanks

ED E

Seamu$ wrote: »

What would you suggest? What would you consider a proper CPU?



That's interesting, thanks. I'll have to look into the RAID configurations more, I thought that under RAID1 one HD mirrored another so if I ended up with 4 x 4TBs I'd have 8TB usable.

HP had an "NL40" I think it was called, there was a big thread here on it, that was decent. I built my own based on an Avoton octa core(overkill for you most likely).

RAID 1 straight halves what you put in as you've suggested. RAID 10 does that twice, then "joins" them. Lots of these units push RAID5, which looks nice, but is obsolete with modern large SATA disks.

CreepingDeath

Seamu$ wrote: »

Hi folks,

I've been considering buying a NAS for a while & had settled on the Zyxel NSA325

I have the Zyxel NSA325 (version 1 ) and it's 2 bay. I think their new NAS540 is 4 bay.

The NSA325 is a single core 1.6Ghz ARM processor, and won't transcode anything for you. I think the new 4 bay one is dual core.

But that aside, I am still happy with the NSA325.
For basic NAS storage, running a SubVersion server, ftp server, torrents plus a torrent blacklist firewall and I could install FFP for a load of other utilities.
Eg. I also was able to get it to record a stream from an IP camera as a poor mans security camera/timelapse photography.
I'm also trying to setup "OwnCloud" on it, as DropBox wants to start charging me.

I was also able to get my Amiko Alien 2 satellite set-top box to access it, to directly play any video files it could. ( works 95% of the time, but the odd hi-def file won't play ) But that's down to the satellite box.

I did install FFMPEG and was able to get the Zyxel NSA325 to transcode a file, but certainly not in realtime ! I just left it running for a while and came back many hours later.

I'm not sure if the new Zyxel 540 is Arm CPU based, and if all my old utilities would still work on it though.

If a NAS drive had a powerful GPU to transcode in realtime that would be sweet. Something like a new quad-core Raspberry Pi in a NAS enclosure...

rcanpolat

Best bang for your buck is to go custom. I'm running a readynas here and my next build will be custom. I can build a transcoding machine cheaper then a off the shelf nas