Dear Tek Community,
I've been looking into getting a NAS for home use. I'm well educated when it comes to PC's themselves but have a lot to learn on the matter of networking and servers. I'm willing to though!
So the thing is. I have a decent collection of media like Movies and Music. Right now its stored across devices and external HDD's etc. My objective here is to get it all centralized on a NAS. I'm not yet venturing into all of the personal cloud stuff though that would have added value for me as I do use dropbox a lot for smaller files.
Basically my collection houses about 2tb of 1080p movies each about 10gb. Alongside that is something like 100gb of music albums.
As a cheap solution for storing this on a single NAS my eye fell on the Synology Diskstation DS214se (https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS214se)
According to reviewers its very capable for the price and will work fine for home use.
I'd like your opinion on the matter and maybe advice or tips on the matter. I'm planning to go with two 3tb green drives in RAID 1. I might add an off site copy of those drives later on at my parents house.
I know green drives are less reliable than red's but I dont plan on reading and writing to it 24/7. The 50 dollar different between those types justifies it for me.
Don't put greens in a NAS. Trust me, the reds are worth the extra cost. I used to have greens in my file server and they all died after about 18 months. Plus they will drop out of RAID and cause problems as they're not designed for use in RAID or being powered up 24/7.
Other than that it looks like a good option for what you want to do.
Is it really that bad. I have only once had a Hard drive fail on me but it was a second hand Samsung 2tb drive. And I don't think the drive will have to do much read or writes. Only at the start or when I'm using one of those movies.
But you might be right and I have been looking into Red's but to me they seem to be more for professional full time heavy load usage.
For one to two people it will be fine but it won't be able to transcode media but if you are using xbmc To watch the media you will be fine.
Reds are made specifically for NAS devices like what you're looking at, they're a hybrid of enterprise disks and low power consumer disks (like greens). They're built to be in an always on environment, which greens are not, and also to work properly in a RAID configuration. Disks which aren't made for RAID can drop out of RAID and cause problems.
It's not so much about the load but that they will be turned on 24/7, most desktop drives are only made to run for 8 hours a day or something like that. Greens used to have a real problem when used in NAS devices, They made the reds to address that problem but I'm not sure if they've improved the greens since then.
I was running eight greens and they all died within a few months of each other. After that i replaced then all with reds and haven't had any problems.
Dude you convinced me. I guess I will just be saving up a little longer and get me some reds. If there is the chance that I have to replace the greens in a year or two it would make them more expensive compared to the Reds. Its just strange how many pre-built NAS's come with greens though. That kinda put me on the wrong path I guess.
Anyway thanks for the advice.
I won't be using it as a transcoder. I have a perfectly capable HTPC at home and if I can just use it as a network HDD I'd be delighted. I just need a lot of storage for my growing collection and need a place that I can acces from a couple different computers. Oh and I heard the OS of this particular NAS does remote cloud stuff as well (it can function much like dropbox, so when I'm at school I could still acces it via the net.)
For me as a filmmaker and photographer this is awesome. Imagine me working on a project while also backing up everything to the NAS at home.
BTW: Do you think it could handle downloading torrents to the HDD's while also watching movies?
It has cloud station which is ok, not as good as own cloud. You should be able to torrent and stream from it but other stuff on the network.