Recommendations for NAS Storage solution

[MonoStable]

Looking to buy a NAS Storage device and it seems there's a lot of debate between some of the brands so I wanted to ask for recommendations.

I recently started to record a lot of video on my DSLR, usually short length videos at 1080p. I edit on my laptop and desktop and I'm just getting tired of wasting time transferring files back and forth, I would like something to make editing in premiere easier.

I was thinking of going with the synology DS218j but seeing all the options with like ram and LAN ports I figured I would ask as I didn't want to get something and then later regret it.

Ideally I'd like something like this:

- at least 2 drive bays
- affordable
- can easily access and dump video/photo/music
- I might use it to stream video to a TV but that's not too important for me.
- access storage remotely

I get confused because I don't know how things like RAM and multiple LAN ports and USB ports start to add to the equation, It will only be used by me, my GF might use it to backup photos/videos from her phone but no heavy use.

 

[TarpitCarnivore]

It's always cheaper to just build your own, esp if you have spare parts. I personally don't like two bays because your rather limited in space offerings, but budget can be tight.

Synology make good products and their software is pretty great. They have built in tools to handle sync to Backblaze or Glacier (these are 'cold storage' solutions) which makes it super easy to do off site back ups. No NAS will be powerful enough to handle any actual transcoding and if it can do it, it'll be extremely limited in just how much it can do.

RAM is necessary if you plan to run A LOT of applications on there (think webserver and such) but if you're just doing bare metal backup you'll be fine with most default offerings. Multiple LAN ports are not necessary as that serves more a SMB need where they may look to do bonding in order to improve throughputs. USB is good if you want to quickly backup to USB devices.

 

[theSoularian]

I have a Synology DS 218+. This one's a bit pricier though. 218j is more of a budget friendly version. For backups and only some media streaming, it might be good enough for your needs.

 

[VolumeTank]

I agree with TarpitCarnivore It's always cheaper to build your own. Also you will have better hardware to work around. I just recently purchased the Synology DS 218 and the QNAP TS-251+ and neither one was capable to do what I want it. Don't get me wrong they are both great products, specially the QNAP. For what you are trying to do I will recommend to build your own FreeNAS. I have a series of video that I'll be posting on YouTube about these products so far I upload the Synology Video.

This is the hardware parts I use for my custom FreeNAs build:

ASRockASRock Fatal1ty X470
AMD RYZEN 5 2400G Quad-Core 3.6
2X 8GB DDR4-2400 Balistix
16GB OPTANE memory M.2PCIe
2X 4TB Seagate IronWolf Pro Drives

Best thing is that you can always add more storage to it, and you will be able to do what you want with out the need of Trunk Port( Dual Lan Ethernet Port ) that would be only required if multiple user are going to be connected at the same time doing some heavy work. I have my connected to the on boar NIC (LAN PORT) to a 1GB Ethernet connection and it works just fine. I do some Video Editing, Photoshop, Illustrator etc. In order to have better performance I crate proxies on my 4K footage and good to go.

In the future I'm planning to upgrade the Ethernet connection to 10GB speed through SFP instead of 10GB T-Base which is RJ-45 backward compatibility. Also I would add more RAM in order to add an SSD for cache and it should be more than enough.

 

[MonoStable]

Thanks all for the replies, I had not considered building my own NAS I'll definitely look into that option this week.

I agree with TarpitCarnivore It's always cheaper to build your own. Also you will have better hardware to work around. I just recently purchased the Synology DS 218 and the QNAP TS-251+ and neither one was capable to do what I want it. Don't get me wrong they are both great products, specially the QNAP. For what you are trying to do I will recommend to build your own FreeNAS. I have a series of video that I'll be posting on YouTube about these products so far I upload the Synology Video.

Click to shrink...

I'd love links when you get them uploaded.