Ask HN: Best NAS for home backup / media streaming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best NAS for home backup / media streaming?

2 pointsMobileVet7 comments

I have been kicking around a NAS purchase for a couple of years now... but I really don't want to add extra complexity to my life. It just needs to work. Ideally it would serve multipurpose and maybe that is my issue, expecting too much.

Ideally it would run: 1) Cloud backup (Backblaze B2) 2) Plex media server (w/ Hardware acceleration) 3) PiHole 4) Unifi Controller

I believe I have narrowed it down to the Synology DS720+ or the Qnap 253be. However, it seems like this tech is still a little fragile. For example, the Synology requires some tweaking for hardware encoding to work due to a bad driver.

I can deal with a longer setup as long as the result is as bullet proof as my Unifi AC Pro access point (which has literally run for years without an outage or glitch).

Appreciate any advice... including other options that include just avoid it all together.

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I’ve been a fan of Synology for years, and if you’re running Intel-x86 based hardware, you should be able to run almost all of the standard docker containers plus all the Synology apps that have been developed over the years, including Plex servers, cloud backups, etc....

However, even their biggest boxes don’t have a great deal of CPU power, because for serving storage you don’t need that much CPU. And you don’t want to overload them with apps and containers at the cost of hurting their primary purpose.

In your case, I might be inclined to do the storage part with a Synology NAS, and then add on a separate server component to handle the more CPU-intensive operations and have it access the Synology NAS over the network.

I do also like FreeNAS, and you can install it on hardware you build yourself, or you can buy one of the TrueNAS Mini configurations (see https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/). I’m definitely planning on going this route for my next home NAS.

I used to have a Synology NAS but eventually I got frustrated with the limitations of its obscure Linux distribution and upgraded to a NUC with a separate multi-bay USB 3.1 hard disk enclosure, which takes up about the same amount of space. I’m really happy with it. NAS appliances are great if they have built-in support for everything you want to do, but if you really want a multipurpose device, I suggest a small form factor computer.

Another advantage of this approach is that you’ll be forced to learn exactly how your redundant storage works. I was always worried that if the Synology device failed, I’d have to go out and buy the latest model and hope that it was able to read the hard disks from the failed device. Since all I did was click through the Synology GUI to set those disks up, I had no idea whether I’d be able to read them on another device.

That is a really good point. I think it runs standard RAID configurations, but I could be wrong. That said, it also supports encryption at rest so to your point, you probably couldn’t plug them in to another box. That kind of stinks.

As you said, I may be expecting too much. Maybe a dedicated custom box is better suited to the multipurpose application.

Synology are straight md raid... Any linux can mount them... Its not so bad..

That wasn’t obvious to me, as someone who had never built a Linux RAID from scratch at the time, reading the documentation on “Synology Hybrid RAID.” https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...

Have you considered FreeNAS? You can buy pre-built appliances or build your own. I did the latter and I do everything on your list apart from cloud backup to backblaze and I run Emby instead of plex (but plex is supported natively). You can definitely do cloud backup - I just don’t. I also use it as a time-machine server for my macs. I exclusively use UniFi network gear in my house and I find my NAS to be as bullet proof as that.

You could build a far more powerful NAS yourself than you can buy from Synology or the like but I appreciate that not everyone has the time or interest.

Heard about it a bit, but haven’t spent time looking at it. My buddy runs it but as you said, I don’t really have the time to put towards it. There was a day when that appealed to me... now I just want to turn it on and be done.

The point is still worth considering. I can stomach some NRE in setup as long as it is powerful, gets the job done and doesn’t require on going hassle

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