Update - Shopping Express Clearance has moved to more than 10 available items still at 739.50
This is the Synology DS920-+ 4 bay NAS.
This appears to be the lowest price in quite some time it
It's slightly cheaper at Shopping Express Clearance at 739.50 but there are currently 8 available
It's slightly cheaper at Shopping Express Clearance at 739.50 but there are currently 8 available
Where are you seeing this?
thanks, grabbing one.
any suggestions on NAS drives, nvme and ram for it?
WD Red or IronWolf Pro are the general consensus.
@MrFunSocks: I have this with 4X 8TB IronWolf Pro's and find it to be quite noisy given the IronWolf's run at 7200 RPM. In hindsight WD Red's (which run at 5400 RPM) would have been a better choice given I find it to be quite noisy.
I shucked 4 * 14TB WD external drives and they've been running great!
I'm torn between this and the QNAP TS-453D. Don't recall ever seeing the QNAP at a good discount though. Not sure if they are worth $200+ more than the synology.
In general I prefer Synology because of the applications (and mobile apps) that they provides
I know QNAP provides many similar applications too but Synology ones are better IMO
I'm the opposite. I find QNAP lets me experiment more and Synology feels more like a walled garden. A bit like Android vs Apple really.
Yea I do agree this is pretty subjective
my last owned QNAP was back in 2013 so things might have changed now
Don't think most household users will own both QNAP and Synology at the same time tho LOL
@littlesoldier: I own both qnap and synology. Prefer qnap software but the one feature I like from synology is the hybrid raid that allows mixing of drive sizes together, as the NAS expands with more drives.
QNAP has a HDMI port, which allows you to directly connect.
But both the latest QNAP and SYNOLOGY are great Plex servers and has good 1080P transcoding abilities as well ( I haven't tried 4K transcoding yet)
Also, the higher versions of QNAP allows for future LAN upgrades and even the installation of GPUs for transcoding
Yes HDMI is a consideration but not sure I'm keen to use the QNAP interface for PLEX client (for example). I'm currently using NVidia TV as PLEX Server & client.
Can someone explain this plex thing and transcoding ??? Been hearing for ages and still don't know what it is or how it works.
@ChipsChicky: Plex is a media server program for your media. You install it, set up your libraries by pointing it to your movie/tv/music folders. Then you install the plex app on your phone or game console or TV, and your plex server software that is installed on your NAS or PC streams thr videos to that device.
Transcoding is what the plex server has to do if the device you're watching on doesn't support the media type you're trying to watch, or if the connection to the server isn't good enough to stream it at full quality. The server transcodes it into a format/bitrate that the device can play.
I find that people try to use under-powered NAS' as computers, when they should only be used as NAS'. Where they try and do compute intensive operations like media servers and such, and it doesn't do either that well.
I've got this DS920+ running docker containers of NZBGet, Sonarr, Radarr, Headphones, Transmission+VPN, and running as a Plex server, and it doesn't skip a beat. I previously had them all running on a i5 NUC and just using a DS414j for storage, but this solution is much better and works much faster. You just need to know the limits of the NAS you're using.
@MrFunSocks: Yeah I started running a Valheim server on my DS920+ a couple of weeks ago, was a bit worried using it for both Plex & the server but it hasn't missed a beat. Surprised at how powerful it actually is. Such a good investment.
The QNAP TS-431KX might be a decent alternative
As a basic nas/appliance setup, either will do.
For iSCSI connections, have had issues with the Qnaps dropping the connection and requiring a reboot. The Synologys have been rock solid.
Also had similar issues with ISCSI dropping with qnap
I got a terramaster for $432 and put truenas on it. Had to add an 8gb stick of ram too.
Not doing anything too fancy. Just plex and some file back up.
I tried Terramaster as NVR storage for my cameras, with RAID 0 over two drives and the OS was garbage. I had to retire it, as it wasn't reliable. But I might try alternate OS solutions, didn't think about it. I need an offsite backup solution for core data and that unit might serve that purpose.
truenas has been pretty solid. Might be worth a try.
Look up QNAP ech0raix and QLocker hacks, as it may impact your decision.
QNAP = more features, Synology = easier to use with better community support.
Still waiting Synology to have a 2.5Gbps port NAS to upgrade my 218+
Is the drive array actually able to exceed 1Gbps?
I believe you can bond the two ports and also have them able to fall back to one. So in theory you have about 2Gbps anyway.
yeah unless you're using ssd arrays its likely not the bottleneck
Can i run plex/sonarr/radarr/sabnzbd on one of these while it's serving all my files?
Yes.
yes
Yes, with both Synology Apps (unofficial app store) or my prefferred, using Docker.
Yes, technically. But don't expect to do any of those well, specially PLEX, if you do any type of multi-stream usage or transcoding.
our wifi is fast enough that i think most files are direct-play. Wouldn't be anymore than 2 streams at time.
Re. PLEX - This is what has stopped me from buying a NAS, by contrast to setting up a new multi-purpose machine with a decent enough CPU (and GPU) to help with transcoding. There has been some decent refurb deals with intel CPUs that seem to fit the bill, and I think I'd be able to get away with what storage I could use in those machines (or even add a NAS for storage later). Will need to be solid in handling 4K both locally and also ideally across the internet to family members.
Happy to be shot down in the above thinking as need to replace a HTPC that recently died (goodbye HP N40L)
It does all of them brilliantly. I have mine running NZBGet, Sonarr, Radarr, Headphones, and Transmission+VPN all in docker, and running as a Plex server that's used often by 2 streams inside my house and 1-3 externally. Never skips a beat.
Thanks mate, might do some more reading then on the 920
Do you find that Plex grinds to a halt and buffers constantly if you put subtitles on? Externally, I can't watch anything with subtitles unless it's dropped to 480p. Internally with Ethernet to both the NAS and TV, it does the same thing. Not sure what's going on. I think it might be burning them in? The TVs are 4k so hopefully it's not doing some stupid transcoding
@DreadPirateRoberts: If your client cannot handle subtitles natively, Plex will be transcoding it. Use a good native client and you will no need to transcode. XPlay on my shield works well for this scenario.
@DreadPirateRoberts: Nope, absolutely no problems at all on mine, downloaded subtitles for a show just last night and it was fine at 1080p. All connected via gigabit ethernet.
I do believe it has to transcode to show the subtitles, essentially burning them in.
hi, did you keep your ds920+ with the initial 8GB ram ?
does it need more ram ?
@andrew229: I'm just using the default RAM and it hasn't skipped a beat running ~5 docker containers and plex server.
last I checked sonarr and radarr weren't supported on DSM 7 yet so look into that first, you might want to use DSM 6 for now if that is your use case. Or you could look into using docker to run them instead of the apps
edit: NVM looks like they are supported now
Absolutely, and you can do it using Docker which makes it even better.
Can anyone help me choosing between this with a Raspberry Pi 4b NAS? Since Raspberry pi is much cheaper, how much performance do I need to sacrifice?
Thanks
Depends what you need
If you just want a simple NAS that can store and access files (and hook up with network drive) etc.
Then Raspberry Pi should do the job nicely
What NAS like synology or Qnap is to provide a "it works out of the box" without much settings or installations needed
applications that can be installed within their UI also empower the usage of the NAS
Open media vault well with Rp4
I have my RPI4 as a IP USB server.
How tech savvy are you? What are your redundancy requirements? How much effort do you want to put into building and maintaining the solution you build?
Also checkout NextCloudPi… that is pretty easy, but I can't comment on its long term suitability. You can't do RAID with a Pi over USB.
I'm an IT student, and I took OS course before. So setting up and maintaining the system shouldn't be too hard.
Currently, I only have several movies to stream. I think 2 drives are sufficient for my use cases (Also because of budget). Since raid 1 only mirrors those 2 drives, I prefer Rsync doing the same job.
I don't need cloud services like nextcloud, at least for now.
I'm mostly concerned about the performance differences.
My 2 Cents- Might not be the most efficient way to do things,
I currently have a 10 TB Hard disk attached to my Raspberry Pi, and I run below on Docker Images:
Works well enough for my use-case : No hardware transcoding on the Pi so I sometime run into stuttering if transcoding is required.
But I mostly use my Android TV to watch plex,, so most of the time no transcoding is required and direct play is fine.
A pi ( since its cheap enough ) might be a good idea to start with to see if you need a dedicated NAS.
DISCLAIMER: I dont use this setup for any sort of backup. If I lose the data on the disk. I dont care.
I just found some hard drive enclosures that power off the drives if they were not used for a while. I'm going for the raspberry pi NAS solution.
Thanks
Can anyone suggest a good deal for a hard disk and ram upgrade.
Thanks
Unfortunately HDD prices are insane at the moment. Back in like March I bought a 20TB WD external drive (2x10TB WD Reds) for ~$500 - that same one from the same supplier (amazon) is now $1100. I just bought another 10TB one and shucked it and it cost me almost $400!
I quite liked Synology NAS's until I owned one that was faulty by design (1815+ with the voltage issue), they kept repairing it with temporary fixes until it was out of warranty then told me I had to buy another one.
I feel like if your product is faulty by design it should be replaced by one that is not guaranteed to fail again in the exact same way.
PiratePete I had a similar situation with the Dell XPS m1330, the nVidia chip they used was known to overheat, they just kept replacing it with the same motherboard with the same nVidia chip. When I was out of warranty Dell graciously informed me they were doing it gratis and I’d have to buy a new motherboard, I could even get one with the slower intel graphics that didn’t overheat which they could have done all long. This debacle went on from 2008 to 2010, I think consumer laws now state that gear such as the laptop and NAS should last way more than 2 years.
I had this same issue with my m1330 was an awesome little laptop apart from that issue tho.
What are people using these for?
A NAS.
It's like a self hosted OneDrive or Google Cloud Storage.
If you have a tonne of movies on your hard-drive, you can put them into a NAS and install something like Plex and have your own Netflix like server with your movies that you can access from pretty much where ever.
raid redundancy, on site backup, media servers (e.g. Plex)
on site backup, Media Server. Docker with PiHole,Unbound, Home Assistant etc.
I don't have this but I have HP microserver with XPENOLOGY installed (Synology's OS). Using it as Surveillance station for my wifi cameras (24/7 recording), Plex, Cloud backup, Moments (Google Photo Alternative), Home assistant, Torrents and VM's.
How easy/hard was this to setup? I currently have one with OMV installed with mirror drives but I don't have time to relearn everything when something breaks down.
It's not that complex, just search your hardware from https://xpenology.com/forum/ and just follow the procedure. You have to create a USB boot loader to load the OS, I have it permanently installed inside the usb slot of my server. The only drawback is you cannot use the update functionality of DSM.
Purchased the CA one before seeing the SX link. $8 more but still a good price. Cheers OP
My advice to anyone considering one of these - if you think there's even a reasonable chance you may want more than four disks, take the wallet pain upfront and buy a larger model (DS1621+ or DS1821+) from the start. Beats buying one, then maxing it out a year later and having to buy another one - I speak from experience :(
I went two bay -> four bay -> six bay and now my six bay is full and I'm looking at an eight bay model. I sold the two and four bay ones but I'll probably hold onto the six bay and run a DS1618+ and DS1821+ together.
There is also the option (which would work out more expensive) to use an expansion unit (https://www.synology.com/en-au/products/DX517) that can add 5 drive bays.
Seems to retail for around $700+, so it all depends on where/when you want to stage your pain/value.
Hope this helps.
The expansion units are a viable option too, but not perfect, and have their own issues.
The main ones being: it is very very bad practice to expand the same volume across two units, so you're essentially forced to have two volumes. And the other is that it is quite expensive for what it is (which you note) - a DX517 and a DS920+ for example would cost about the same if not slightly more than just buying a DS1821+ upfront - granted you have 9 bays instead of eight, but other limitations come into play (primarily the fact you will need to span it across two volumes.) The two volume limitation becomes especially apparent if you use SHR2 instead of SHR1. In a single 8-bay unit you'd have two parity drives out of the eight bays, in a 4 bay+5 bay unit, with two volumes you'd be using four drives on parity, so you would actually have less effective capacity than if you had a single volume on an 8 bay unit.
Why not just change your hard drives for larger capacity hard drives instead?
I gain a lot more space adding an 8 bay unit than replacing my HDDs in the existing unit, which would only be a short term fix as I already have pretty high capacity drives in there.
Definitely worth considering. I'm kind of wishing I did this now when I bought the DS920+ a few months back - I've already got 4x10TB drives in it and only have about 8TB free. My plan was to buy the expansion bay next, but maybe it would be better off just buying the latest 8 bay at the time and selling this one.
DS3617xs on hand, hassle-free.
I’m assuming these don’t come with hard drives. Is there a recommended brand/model of hard drive to use with these?
They don't. WD Reds are the ones to go for. Unfortunately their prices are insane at the moment. The best way to get them is usually through the WD Elements and WD My Book external drives and rip them open to get the drives out. I got a 20TB My Book for ~$550 in november, but they're now about $1100.
Umart and MSY both have 8TB Reds for $339, pretty sure that's cheaper than I paid 12 months ago when I got my NAS
The best way to get WD Reds has been via shucking WD Elements and WD My Books. I got 10TB drives at the equivalent of $275 each whereas they're $435 each on MSY right now. Bloody chia mining.
Definitely should go for NAS hard drives, ironwolf , WD red or etc. normal drives don’t work last long.
have anyone seen deals on harddrive for this NAS?
Anything above 4TB drives is ridiculously expensive at the moment.
Chia mining has killed super good deals. Still the best bet is shucking desktop usb drives
So when does one use the NVMe M2 slots?
If I was to max this out for SMB backup is 4x16gb ironwolf (or 4x 14gb WD red) raid 1 the way to go?
The NVMe is only used for caching iirc. Most reviews and reports say it's not worth it.
apparently the R/W cache isnt super reliable on these models, a handful of reports of volume crashes. i have an NVMe drive as a read only cache, it did make some of the things im running (docker, plex) a freckle snappier
I don't have eBay plus :(
get a trial or a monthly membership
TECH10OFF does not work! I have eBay Plus as well. Did anyone have this issue?
Update: Works now! :)
i run a 918+ ; i dont have a huge need for space, it was a 718+ (2 bay) or that. i future proofed and got a slightly bigger one.
for those curious what you can run on them, heres an example-
If you want to run VMs you need to install extra ram, and need to make sure to use a certain format for your hdds upon setting up the volume.
For replacement of Google Photos and storing files … which one has better software Qnap or Synology ?
Just a warning on Shingled disk performance.
SMR is crap. You want CMR drives.
I've used WD RED EFAX drives for 7 years. Always on. 5x 3Tb in Raid 5. Mobo/Cpu setup, not a premade NAS.
I only lost 1 drive, in all that time.
![[eBay Plus] Synology DiskStation DS920+ $747.15 Delivered @ Computer Alliance eBay](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/17/643517.jpg?h=93e0c762)
Nice, been looking at these for a while. Great price!