Hey guys I 'm looking to buys a NAS Unfortunately I do not know much about them I think I wa...

[G+_Justin Egan]

Hey guys. I'm looking to buys a NAS. Unfortunately I do not know much about them. I think I want to go with Synology because of Padres recommendation. I'm just not sure which one. All I want it to do is me a media center for movies and computer backups. Any advice? Thanks in advance.

[G+_Jason Brown]

What do you want to do with it? If you just want a backup or media drive, Synology might be overkill imo

[G+_Jason Brown]

I like my Buffalo linkstation. Terastations are pretty popular as well

[G+_Justin Egan]

Jason Brown mostly a streaming media center. And back ups. I'll look at the link station. Are the easy to set up?

[G+_Black Merc]

No offense to Jason Brown?... Overkill or not if you cn afford it, get Synology. Worst cast you will end up like padre' loading vm's on it.

[G+_Justin Egan]

Is there anything specific I should look at when choosing a model?

[G+_Sam Bradley]

Capacity!!! I bought my Synology DS916+ last year, filled with 4 each 3Tb drives, and immediately filled it with movies and the data files that I had collected over the past decade. I'm now needing to expand it with a Synology DX513. I just didn't pay enough attention to how much stuff I had accumulated prior to my purchase. So my recommendation is to over size your disk drives. And I love the Synology administrator interface.

[G+_Jason Brown]

Black Merc? No offense taken at all. It's just all about the use case for me. Mine's just a simple mirrored raid, that provides backup and media services. I absolutely want more. But the price is right and ultimately I'd just be playing with features and never truly using them. Now if it's for something mission critical, then yeah, I totally agree you should go Synology.

 

Justin Egan???? it's super easy, just pretty featureless if you get the linkstation. Not sure about the terastations though.

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Justin Egan? What are your requirements ? What's you budget ? What's you're expected space growth ? Any particular features are you looking for?

[G+_Ben Reese]

Here's the list I came up with a couple days ago.

 

1) Budget. Consider how much you can afford.

2) Storage. Decide how much you need.

3) Number of drives. Think about how many drives you want and how much redundancy you need.

4) Features. Probably all NASs will do backup and serve media, but some are easier to use or have more applications.

 

Example Synology build (prices from Amazon)...

$285 - DS416j

$340 - 4 x 2TB WD Red

$625 - Total

 

For comparison...

$654 - 8 TB Buffalo TeraStation

$699 - 8 TB WD My Cloud

[G+_Ed H]

Thanks for this post. I will consider this as well.