Hello there.
I'm so glad I found this forum and it is great to be here! So over the past few days I was lurking around and finally decided to register. Hopefully I can get some help here.
I have a few issues with my storage device at home. Also with a new SMART-TV coming up, I was thinking about getting a NAS device.
That's why this week I did a lot research online and checked out a few, well known trusted shopping sites as well as websites for classified adds. But there are so many NAS server available for sale, I can't really decide which one to pick.
What I want to do is, I want to use it as a solution to store my pics and vids as well as movies and series. It would be great if I can also stream it directly onto my SMART TV.
After got some more information, I found a couple of NAS devices from Synology on the for sales website [url]http://www.used.forsale/australia/nas-server-synology[/url]. Anybody here knows that brand or, even better, owns it?
I'm fairly new to that topic, so any feedback is greatly appreciated as well as further recommendations.
Mat.
Almost anything made by QNAP or Synology will do those things without any problems. Both are very respectable SOHO NAS vendors. The only thing is low-end versions will not be able to transcode video's with decent speed so if you are going to get low-end NAS make sure your Smart TV supports desired audio/video formats so you don't need to transcode them.
I also recommend QNAP or Synology, you might also want to consider a custom build if you have the know how.
I have a DS416j, the reasonable entry-level 4 bay one.
It is fine. It will struggle to transcode video above 720p though, and H.265 is impossible. But if you have a spare laptop or you want to leave your desktop running, it can do that. Be aware that for smart TVs, you will almost certainly be transcoding. Also, its thumbnail generation is horrendously slow.
Synology NASes are accessed two ways: first, through your browser (imagine your router's admin page, but accessed through a simulated desktop so you can run little apps and browse files as well) and second, through SMB or whatever network sharing protocol your OS uses (which makes it show up as a network drive accessible just like a local drive).
Setup is guided and pretty simple, it will figure out RAID and all that for you. Obviously it will be in some sort of RAID-5-ish configuration. It also has a backup system (Hyper Backup) that will do incremental backups to basically anything - I have it sending 9 months worth of daily incremental backups to ACD unlimited.
I have had a few little problems so far but no data loss. Just be aware that for the j-series, the RAM cannot be upgraded (unlike higher-end models) and it will struggle to run any additional apps. I had it running a variety of things and ended up moving all of it to my home server and just using the NAS for storage only, works a lot better. (As a storage-only device, it will easily saturate a gigabit ethernet connection.)
So yeah just get one of those.
Apparently Synology has "play" editions of their NASes which are capable of UHD transcoding
[URL="https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS216play"]2 bay[/URL]
[URL="https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS416play"]4 bay[/URL]
But they are a lot more expensive than the basic NAS.
Thank you guys the these helpful answers. So I'll check out some more Synology models.
maybe its because its quite old now but my synology nas has/had terrible transfer rates, iirc it wasnt enough to stream a bluray over CIFS, i think id buy a i5 and motherboard from ebay and a nice case, probably no more expensive because nas boxes are usually pretty expensive
synology do have really good support though
[QUOTE=waylander;52307709]maybe its because its quite old now but my synology nas has/had terrible transfer rates, iirc it wasnt enough to stream a bluray over CIFS, i think id buy a i5 and motherboard from ebay and a nice case, probably no more expensive because nas boxes are usually pretty expensive
synology do have really good support though[/QUOTE]
I don't think I've ever had a problem streaming large files (20gb+) from my QNAP TS-212. Even jumping from beginning to the middle of the 27gb video is instantaneous.
Oh, dude, Synology all the way! Web interface, full admin there, surveillance station, torrents, blah, blah. Never dealt with direct to smart TV streaming or transcoding, though. I'm pretty sure I had seen something in Diskstations about transcoding, and this was actually one of the Diskstation models. I always had a client box hooked up to my TVs, so never really used such feature :/
SMB is always a good fallback.
QNAP devices are shit hot. We use them in industry settings, for backups. Never really used the media features...
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