Qnap or Synology

Thanks.

You will find a large number of very satisfied Synology users on the forum.

Wat had a bad experience that goes against the experiences of others. I had a very professional & fast response to a question I raised over a 3rd party UPnP issue so can only speak as I found it to be for me. 

IMO there is not much to choose between either make, both are well regarded by all streamer makes & forums & rate in the top end of similar priced NAS. 

Thanks. I will check on Australian market, price is very similar, around 200 AUD

I'm not sure that there is any better support in one geography vs. another.

I own both . . . and find them quite similar.  I have no clear preference.  My only recommendation is to buy the most processing power and onboard ram as you can afford.  And good hard drives.

Thanks.

it should normally not matter when you have sufficient ram and good hard disks on board, while they finally all will fail at some time.

I have owned a couple of Synology and they have been faultless and easy, but ive not had a QNAP to compare. If however your thinking of getting an Aurender then get the QNAP, apparently this works with the Aurender. 

Six of one, half a dozen of the other....

I don't know those two models, but :

Make sure you get hard drives 'endorsed' for the model - note you can get 6TB disks nowadays

Think about your space needs now and future to ensure you won't need a bigger hard drives soon rather than later - 700MB per lossless CD rip. More if you are doing 24bit+ et al

Think about how you are going to configure the drives - space can be lost based on RAID choice.

Check whether the RAM can be upgraded or is fixed - you need min 512MB, more if streaming.

If you are going to store all your music/info on this device, you still should get a 'backup' standalone drive and back up monthly ( or weekly)

I personally use QNAP and have had no issues.

Guy raises some very good points, i didn't notice that the two models you mention are only 2 bay units. I would suggest you look at 4 bay units.

I originally went for 2 bay and had to upgrade to a 4 bay unit. The reason, if you run 2 bay you will probably run them in mirror raid and therefore you only have half your capacity of HDD space.

Most NAS only accept 3 or 4TB drives so you would need say 2 x 3TB HDD to give you 3TB space.

If you had a 4 bay unit you can buy quite cheap 2TB drives and if you run it in raid 5 this will give you 6TB of HDD space as you will lose one drive in the raid.

I don't know on QNAP, but on Synology you can just hot swap one drive for a larger unit, say 4TB, and it will automatically assign this extra storage space for you.

Any way its just my opinion. Just keep in mind that a NAS with either mirror or raid 5 is not a means of keeping your data safe, if the NAS crashes you can lose the lot so keep additional backups.

Good luck

Graeme

Agree it makes sense to get a four-bay unit - a little more money, but the golden rule of computing is you'll always need more storage eventually:-)  Either way, get WD Red disks if you're buying HDD.

But I think RAID isn't that useful for consumer use. It's designed for businesses to maintain up-time in case of certain types of failure, but the reality is that some failures will affect both disks anyway. Even if not, swapping a disk to another enclosure is fraught. Worst case, people who don't understand RAID might think it's a back-up, which it isn't, and end up losing everything. I would stay away from RAID, save the money, and take regular, full back-ups to an external hard disk or another NAS. 

My personal approach is to sync my laptop with the NAS, which enables me to maintain a full copy of the NAS and also play my music when on the move via a portable DAC and headphones. I then take a full back-up to an external hard disk every now and then. I don't keep anything off-site, but I figure if the house burns down I'll have bigger things to worry about.

I use Syno (with Minim) and it's been perfect - zero issues at all, does what it says on the tin. I believe QNAP can make the same claim. The bigger difference is with third party server software - if you like Asset (and Naim does) then you'll need a QNAP, which is probably what I'd opt for if choosing today.

I set up my Synology 2-hdd model in raid, but when I bought a 2-hdd model QNAP I did it as jbod.  For home use, if you backup regularly, I'm not so sure that raid is needed and of course it does halve your total storage.

+1

I do almost exactly the same; rip (dbpoweramp) on PC, sync over to the NAS, then copy over to a portable drive once in a while.  Plenty of redundancy.

I use a bottom of the range single drive QNAP (112?) and Twonky (...yes, I know) and it's worked pretty much flawlessly for 4 years.  I tried Asset, but the indexing seemed to go awry rather randomly.  Never got to the bottom of that, life's too short.

If I need more space I'll swap in a 3x bigger drive for less than the price of current drive 4 years ago.  I would buy storage when you need it, not for what you might need in a year or 2.

If the whole thing gives up I think I'll go for Rasberry PI, or similar, next time.

Hi Guys,

As you might expect I've had plenty of exposure to NAS's over the years.

My *OWN* NASs (that I personally own and use myself) are:

1) a Synology DS1813+ (with 8 x 6Tb drives) used for storing my BluRays and DVDs,

2) a QNAP TS-412 (4 x 4Tb drives) used for storing my ripped CDs

3) a NetGear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 (4 x 2Tb drives) used for storing my personal data, files and photos

4) a NetGear ReadyNAS 102 (2 x 6Tb drives) used as an offsite backup of the NV+ and located 75 miles away in the roof of a friends garage. This replicates the NV+ remotely automatically.

Sat behind me here at work are my big 8 bay Synology, various 2 bay NetGear ReadyNAS (Duo v1, Duo v2, RND102), WD MyBookLive Duo, QNAP TS 212 and a Synology DS-212J.

A NAS is only as resilient as how it recovers from a failure - I've set up many 10's of ReadyNASs over the eight years I've been here and have only had *ONE* that has failed due to hardware (unfortunately a good friend of our MDs) and that failed very shortly after purchase - NetGear supplied a new unit very quickly and the drives were swapped over from the old unit to the new unit very easily and it was back up again with no hassle and no need to set anything up again so for me that was a positive...

It's interesting to see the discussion on RAID ... in a *TWO BAY* NAS I would always mirror and in a four or more bay I would RAID5 - yes, I know it's 'wasting' space but storage is cheap in comparison to the time involved in ripping the discs in the first place and / or restoring data to a NAS (my 42Tb NAS takes almost three weeks to do a complete backup).

NOTE : **RAID IS NOT BACKUP**

My backup is done to a couple of rather evil home-brewed servers that used to be my main and backup servers and they have 37 and 34Tb of storage in them respectively ... they wake up once a week and snapshot any changes that have been made to the NASs and then go to sleep again.

NOTE : **RAID IS NOT BACKUP**

For use as a NAS on one of our servers we *ALWAYS* recommend NetGear ReadyNAS, QNAP or Synology as they 'just work'.

I would always recommend getting a NAS that has the drives in caddies so that when a drive fails (as it will at some point) you can swap out the failed drive easily. (It might sound silly but we have had people removing the wrong drive from units that you have to take apart to get to the drives.)

If you are running any sort of RAID (rather than mirroring) then don't buy cheap 'desktop' drives to save a few pounds - one of the 'facilities' offered by the WD "Red" drives is that they have Time Limited Error Recovery enabled on them so that if they hit a read error then the NASs RAID controller doesn't stall ... similarly don't be tempted to use WD Red drives in a normal PC or desktop enclosure as the TLER functionality will make your drive more susceptible to reporting unrecoverable read errors (this is not an issue with RAID).

If you are wanting to use a NAS as a UPnP server then I have to say that from my experience across God knows how many customers and installs I will *NEVER* want to trust a NAS manufacturers standard supplied UPnP server. My personal 'go to' in this case is usually Asset UPnP and - as there is a build available for QNAP - that would usually push me towards a QNAP NAS as being an appropriate solution when you are going to use the NAS itself as a UPnP server as you can install Asset on the NAS itself.

An alternative to Asset would be MinimServer (MinimServer is available as a nice easy install on Synology and there are downloadable versions for several other NASs too) *BUT* MinimServer isn't as easy for someone who is non-techie to install / configure / maintain (IMO) as Asset is.

I have used both Asset and MinimServer (but not extensively) and have had no issues with either - I just come down on the side of Asset for being just a bit more 'polished' and accessible for a wider range of abilities.

Hope that helps...

Phil

42tb. Wow.

Never mind 3 weeks to back up, I reckon it would take over 15 years (8 hours a day, 7 days a week) to listen to it all!

Agree that my shoestring approach is probably only appropriate for more modest collections.  I can backup overnight. Pathetic.

Remember that the 42Tb NAS isn't CDs or music ... that's 'only' the 12Tb QNAP.

Phil

I really rate minimserver but agree that it can be tricky at times. That said, you get great help on the Minimserver forum. If I had a QNAP I'd probably use asset.

I think people look at RAID the wrong way. As Phil says its not a backup. Its about up time. If in a RAID setup you have a drive fail, your NAS and music is still available to you. 

You can organise a new drive, install it and all the time your music is available to you.

Ive not worked it out and cant recall, but how long do you think it will take 2TB of data to copy across.

to me the cost of one drive ain't worth the hassle

Great info Phil.

Foxman, if the drive you are copying to has a USB3 connection it should take less than 12 hours - depending on the file size/quantity.  As soon as it starts copying, it should tell you roughly how long it will take.  Normally I start that sort of thing in the evening and let it run overnight and it's done by morning.

Guy, yes you are probably right. My point is just that RAID keeps you running, not having to wait for a replacement HDD to arrive or waiting for your music to be uploaded again.

I would imagine there is more of a chance to create an error when copying thousands of files across USB than there is for an internal RAID to rebuild itself. thats a huge assumption on my part.

Very roughly, backing up my Synology DS213J seems to take about one minute per GB. That's backing up file-to-file (no compression or cleverness) via ordinary USB, direct to a pretty standard, three-year-old Toshiba external hard disk. I don't do this often as I sync it to my laptop, but every now and then it's worth being sure.

I think RAID works well and is no hassle. It can be a benefit for sure. It's not essential though - I'm no less secure for not having it - and the inexpert can be misled into thinking it's a back-up.

Hmmm ... USB3 *SHOULDN'T* in itself be slow ... it could be that the implementation of USB3 on your host device isn't very good? Wouldn't be a Mac by any chance? (I'm suspecting so if you're mentioning Thunderbolt - my 2014 i7 MacBook Pro is not exactly blistering on USB3 and I do wonder whether that might not be completely coincidental give that Apple certainly appeared to be trying to push Thunderbolt for storage over USB...?)

I have a number of USB3 drives (and USB3 SATA caddies) and *TYPICALLY* get a good solid 80Mbytes/sec real world when I'm transferring from even a pretty low spec Windows 8.1 mini PC (a 1.5GHz i3 Acer Revo RL80 with 4Gb RAM) over Gigabit LAN to my Synology...

Thanks - hope it helps...

Phil

I do the same into a hard disk from the Synology USB-3.  

I haven't timed it as I tend to get it going & walk away,  but thinking about it one minute per GB is about right.

RAID is all well and good, but only protects against single drive failure, and only then if the implementation is OK.

My only "unplanned outage" so far has been a failed firmware update on the NAS for which RAID would have been no help.  Luckily my primary backup was on the PC next to it, so I simply started a UPNP server on the PC and left it on while I fixed the NAS.  There was no loss of service, so no particular hurry to get the NAS back up - I think I just re-synced over the network which probably took an age.

RAID is essential for enterprise grade transactional systems where you need a live mirror or you lose business data.  The only transactions on my music collection are CD acquisitions or downloads (which I think I've realised are woefully infrequent) so I couldn't justify RAID.

Not necessarily - on a decent NAS you can implement RAID to allow for two drive failures if you wish - it's just that on a four bay NAS then this is't really practical.

 I don't really agree that RAID isn't justified here although I do understand your thinking on it...

The way I see it is that most of the people on here have jobs ... we get paid for our time ... there are obviously retired people on here too and I'm sure there might be one or two that don't need to work but at the end of the day our time has a value.

Whether that value is monetary (i.e. I get paid by the hour so if I'm not working I'm losing money) or purely lifestyle (i.e. I want to spend time with my kids / wife / HiFi / car / sleeping etc.) it still has a value.

For example I'm banging around in an '06 Renault Megane while my TVR engine is rebuilt - I had a bulb blow so I Googled for what bulb I needed and bought a set ... then I Googled for how to change the bulbs as you can't get to to back of the lenses from the engine bay - as soon as I read "Remove the appropriate front wheel..." as the first line of the instructions I decided that it was worth re-buying the bulbs again at Halfords and paying them £20 to fit them ... for me, my time and the hassle involved was worth more than the £50 or so extra that it was going to cost. 

Only you can decide whether the value of the penalty of your music going inaccessible for a while is worth the additional hardware cost of running a decent NAS with an extra drive or two.

Only you can decide whether the value of the penalty for losing *ALL* your music and having to re-download or re-rip everything is worth the additional outlay and effort of backing it up.

Phil 

I originally had a QNAP something-or-other but got fed up with it so just used it for Time Machine backups. QNAP stopped supporting it so I bought a Buffalo thingamabob for the same purpose. Then I fancied running a PLEX media server so I could access my movies and music from another place so I bought a QNAP HS251. Quite a neat thing and seems to work OK but my depressingly slow broadband meant I couldn't access stuff remotely so it became another backup device.

My music's stored on a WD Thunderbolt 6 TB HD & the other day, whilst messing about with a HD I happened to find in a drawer, I inadvertently formatted the WD disk instead. Silly me. However, the Buffalo NAS happily restored the 3 or so TB of material in about 12 hours.