What NAS to buy? Budget is about €1000 with drives

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

Hi all,

i am a little bit stuck with buying a NAS, my first NAS actually.

My current situation is that i filled in a lot of gmail accounts with contant pictures, videos etc.
This i need to lower down, and don’t want to pay for extra storage each year. So an NAS would be the solution.

i am looking for the following 3 Synology NASses.
DS920+ (benefits hardware transcoding PLEX, only with PLEX PASS. I will never buy subscription)
DS923+
DS1522+
The reason why i choose Synology is, because of the Software/security. Where QNAP is for the more professional users, knowing what they are doing. And the security is less on QNAP compared to Synology.

The other two are basically the same, but the DS1522+ is a 5-bay NAS where the DS923+ is a 4-bay NAS as his predecessor.

i will do the following with the NAS.

  • run some VM’s Server Datacenter 2022, maybe an local AD-DS to have.
  • backup our both external hard drives
  • backup our smart devices like smartphones, tablets etc. (from google drive to our own cloud solution)
  • running some home-lab stuff like Pi-hole, HA etc would be great in docker
  • needs to be easy to setup, with synology connect you can use the apps like Synology Photos etc, and backup pictures directly to your NAS.
  • Download, ripping some movies and have the opportunity to watch it would be great.
  • Will add 4 UTP cameras in my house, so will need to buy two extra device licenses (heard that it is better working with extra vlan (different port on the NAS the software with the cameras? is this true??)

so it will also be connected to the WWW. of course this needs to be secured as well. this i will see some specific YouTube.

If i don’t buy the PLEX PASS i cannot use hardware transcoding anyway. So this basically removes one device from the list? or the DS920+ is still a great device to buy?

My budget is about 1000€ including drives at least 4. Here in Germany.
I dont want an DIY system because, you never get the bells and whistles and the easiness what you get with an NAS.

thank you in advance…

2

AMD Ryzen R1600 and 8GB of memory is not going to be enough to run VM’s very well if at all. Also in my recent video about securing cameras I discuss why it can be a bad idea to run your camera system along with your important data https://youtu.be/ApQf0CgnGfk

But the answer is yes, you can do restrictions per interface for access on a Synology.

3

In this case the DS920+ still will be a better solution?

Of course the DS923+ and the DS1522+ can be upgraded to 16GB and 32GB memory. Running VMs will of course be at a later stage.

Because I still cannot decide what will be a good solution. And data is stacking up and up.

If I don’t use the plex pass it would be useless to buy the 2 year old DS920+? i want to know will it really impact me watching movies. Later on. I am not a heavy movie watcher.

So still better to have an external DVR? For

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4

Synology was my first NAS a while back and I agree with @LTS_Tom, I wouldn’t try to run VMs natively on it because it just doesn’t have the CPU/memory needed. You could buy a used server for a couple hundred dollars and configure your hypervisor to use iSCSI to the NAS. This would offload the compute to a different appliance and let you get the feature set you are looking to get from the Synology.

5

Here’s my thoughts for what it’s worth, I have a couple of QNAPs for a few years and some synology bays prior to that.

I’d say buy a unit with as many bays as you can, you need a 2nd backup of your data ideally on another device, but in the short term it’s ok on the same device. Any data you can’t live without buy a USB drive and stick it on that and put it in a cupboard.

Usually the more bays, the more network ports and camera licenses, it might work out cheaper to buy more bays, rather than more licenses and a network card.

Usually the vm performance sucks, depends on the processor and ram, but don’t expect much. I’d buy a cheap desktop and throw on Proxmox and it’ll be much better.

On my main NAS I use seagate NAS drives, on my backup I shucked USB hard drives and just use them to keep costs down, so far I’ve only had one HDD failure, the QNAP wouldn’t read the drive because it had a few bad sectors. I could still use the HDD in another non-critical machine, so 8TB didn’t go to waste.

I have cameras, QNAP is great for managing these, the app works on the phone and the features are all pretty handy. I haven’t come across another solution that is much better. Having that 4th NIC allows me to put the cams on a locked down vlan. I can just dial home over the VPN and access my cams, I get my alerts as I let that traffic out of the WAN but nothing else.

Personally, I wouldn’t expose the NAS to the web, you’re just asking for trouble, it’ll work until it doesn’t. Much better to setup OpenVPN and access your home network.

Some of these NAS’s allow you to put multiple NICs in an aggregation if you have 4 say, handy if one connection fails or you have heavy traffic on your network.

I’d advise allocating more budget to the NAS unit, then buying HDD’s as and when you can afford it. The last couple of years the prices have been eye-watering, I bought 2 QNAP’s 8 bays for £640 new off Amazon, you won’t ever find those prices again. So yeah try an get a good deal if you can.

Ultimately I ended up using my NAS for data storage and cameras, all my other applications run in vms on another box in Proxmox.

6

When I had my Synology I backed everything up to AWS Glacier and it was a really cheap offsite backup solution. https://kb.synology.com/en-my/DSM/help/GlacierBackup/help?version=7

7

I was checking some nascompare / spacerex YouTube video’s they are not talking that much about running VMs.

Also to point out. Having an extra desktop, server next to the Nas would be a huge electrical bill because of the consumption. The ds1522+ uses 27tdp what is not that much.

8

I saw indeed with Qnap they give you access to 4 free licenses for cameras.

I can always put an extra switch between to segregate the lines.

Since I am using the Kabelvodafone (cable modem) of Vodafone here at the moment and not an Router. I would also need to buy a extra router for example an OpenVPN router with 4 ports for example to secure it.

It also needs to be easy for my friends and family. With an NAS it is way easier the. DIY.