Comments on Profile Post by Merrick

I've been using the Synology DS415+ for the last eight years with MacBook Pro. No issues, other than replacing a couple of hard drives. I have about 3 TB of music stored on the NAS, and it syncs to the cloud with Synology C2. I haven't used Time Machine, so this doesn't specifically answer your question, but I've had no trouble interfacing with MacOS.

@MellowVelo I already use Backblaze for cloud backups, and it does backup both my hard drive and my external drive which has my music library. It looks like Synology and QNAP are the main players in this space, maybe I just choose the one that best fits my price.

The Synology stuff is easy to use and very reliable. Since you already have a solid backup plan, I’d recommend the single bay DS120j at $99.

Raid 1 with a 2-bay is really nice though. Makes replacing hard drives over time very easy since you just need to swap a new disk in and the raid rebuilds on it own. Makes upgrading capacity easier like this too.

@Vansen Single bay is all I would need? I figured two bay for redundancy.

@Vansen We posted at the same time. :) I think Raid 1, 2-bay is better for critical failures (redundancy) and long term maintenance (swapping out HDDs if they fail or I need more space).

Searching on Reddit I'm also seeing recommendations for Asustor and Terramaster, hmm.

My thoughts too and doubling the price for the functionality it offers is well worth it.

I highly recommend RAID 1 with two bays. It’s so simple to swap out hard drives when one fails.

I have an OWC 2-bay in a Raid 1 configuration. No complaints about the storage, but the USB hub function has never quite worked.

Synology here, too, I have a 4-bay model, don’t know which number off the top of my head. Quite a few years old, but still works like a charm and gets updates. I also use it for Time Machine with Macs, but the killer feature for me is Synology Photos, a very easy way to present photos to the family, including smartphone apps with automatic photo backup etc.

Synology here, ARM processor, 4 bays - 3 drives RAID 5 and a hot spare. Probably overkill but I have had hard drives fail before and it sucks. Recommend a UPS as well. QNAP is popular also, but seems to have a lot of security updates.

I've used Synology for the last 10-15 yrs - at home I have one in the house and one in the workshop that backs up changes to the one in the house every night house (I had a fire years ago and now the detached workshop is my "offsite" backup). Both are 4 bay with 3 drives using Synology's SHR raid. Been rock-solid

Now you guys have me waffling between 2 bay and 4 bay. It seems like Raid 1, 2 bay would still be the simplest method for a solid home backup, plus the cloud backup from Backblaze for offsite.

I went for a 2-bay, Synology DS224+. Now I need to price hunt on 10 tb drives.

USB on my 2015 Synology NAS is great. Can hit the max transfer rate of my spinning disk over USB. Auto-mounts every thing. Even recognizes APC and Vertiv UPS automatically.

I have a 2-bay unit at the office to serve music and am very happy with it. I currently have 14TB Seagate XOS drives in all my units and am very happy with them. I used to run WD red drives, but started to experience high temps and a couple premature failures so I slowly transitioned to the XOS (I replace one drive in the 4 bay units every ~1.5 years... so the oldest drive is never more than 5 yrs old)

The performance on the Synology wasn’t up to the need when I did this many years ago, so I ended up with a cheap tower stuffed with drives running TrueNAS. At some point I need to transition back to a 3.5-drive appliance - I’m not interested in managing my own systems anymore.

I’ve been considering the same thing @Qildail. My Synology is nine years old. Think I may stick with Synology for the simplicity. Considered Storaxa. But might just hang a two-bay NFS share off my Roon server since I have super light use requirements.