I am looking into getting a NAS setup at home, but have to consider wanting it to just work and work for my family who are not technically advanced. They use computers fine, but being asked to open a terminal would require letter by letter instructions.
So my question, what is the current recommendation for a simple home NAS for files and video (family trips, etc) storage?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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Agree with the Synology recommendation for a simple starter. Though personally always recommend the 4 bay.
Also want to call out the importance of 4-bay vs. 2-bay. With 2-bay you get 1-drive fault tolerance in RAID mode, which is nice. With 4-bay, you can still opt for 1-drive fault tolerance and with SHR you can have 4 drives active (of varying sizes) giving you much more available space and making the upgrade path of storage significantly easier.
Dude I’ve gone full circle on this one, and I currently am on the Synology train and life is easy.
It feels like I’ve had a bit of everything at some point. Clarkconnect, Windows Home Server, straight Ubuntu, Unraid, FreeNAS, some garbage on my router…
… Synology stuff is super well designed, easy to use, and widely supported. I spent some time chasing privacy options, but other than that it has been zero hassle and high reliability.
It was a combination of factors, really:
- Not often, but often enough…I had some significant problems with version upgrades and would end up having to configure the whole system again from scratch;
- My hardware was getting pretty old. While pricing out an upgrade for it, I was surprised to find a more capable Synology for less (DS1821+);
- Remote backups. I have had a bazillion different solutions for off-site backups, and none of them have stood the test of time. The last one before Synology was a separate machine running Duplicati, pulling data from TrueNAS, and sending it off to an ODROID-HC2 running Minio. It worked sometimes. Hyper Backup on Synology is an entirely different world of ease and reliability–it has been flawless.
- I kind of got tired of TrueNAS as a hobby. I ran into and waited for resolution on bugs, had a bunch of customizations done from the command line that I’d forget about before the next time a version upgrade wouldn’t work and I’d have to start over, and just in general had to keep up my knowledge managing the thing (cruising the forum and subreddit). Synology isn’t as flexible, but I never have to deal with it…and that has been pretty nice.
I second the Synology, I currently have a 2 drive version setup as raid 1 with 3TB drives. It was super easy to set up, and I haven’t touched it in about 5 years now. Set everything up how I wanted and it’s worked flawlessly ever since. Granted, I set it up for myself, not for anyone with an aversion to technology. I much prefer to have a large amount of my data under my own control, plus I get to keep full resolution photos, videos, etc. without worrying about running out of space.
Plus transferring data over a home network is so much faster than through an ISP (at least with what’s available to me).
I use a 4-bay Synology. Works great. For video you could use Plex or Jellyfin.
