A good NAS?

I’ve found this is a ₹1k cheaper than wd red. Are they of inferior quality?


Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS Internal SATA Hard Drive (ST4000VN008) https://www.amazon.in/dp/B01LOOJBQY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_0XxjEb3PWD27A
Seagate is more failure prone compared to WD.
I also thought the same as you when I was shopping for NAS class hard drives as Ironwolf 10 TB cost almost the same as WD Red 8 TB.
Check the newegg/Amazon US reviews for the Ironwolf and you'll see the reviews where the Ironwolf drives failed at a much higher rate.

On another note don't buy hard drives from Amazon if they aren't on deal.
Buy locally as PC hardware is cheaper offline in most cases e.g. Vedant store is located in Kolkata where I got my 8 TB WD Reds and primeabgb has physical store in Mumbai. Where are you located BTW?

 
On another note don't buy hard drives from Amazon if they aren't on deal.
Buy locally as PC hardware is cheaper offline in most cases e.g. Vedant store is located in Kolkata where I got my 8 TB WD Reds and primeabgb has physical store in Mumbai. Where are you located BTW?

I’m located in noida.
 
The WD Red EFAX (as opposed to EFRX) supposedly are SMR drives . Just a heads-up to make sure that you don't end up with this specific model (not recommended for use in a NAS).

My experience with the Seagate Ironwolf drives has actually been better than the WD Reds (EFRX). Three Reds failed in about three years but the two Ironwolf's are still going strong for the same amount of time. No conclusions to be drawn, just saying.
 
Seems more like a system tuned for storing VM/container objects and images.
you can configure it for nfs or samba. block and object stores are more for cloud though. more complicated multi node deployments are more for enterprise high availability but a single node will be perfect for home type deployment. we at work are doing some cool things with Ceph but those are more for petabyte size customers. you can do some fun raids and things like erasure coding etc...
for example, if two friends have two nodes setup they can act as each others replicas and such.
 
On another note don't buy hard drives from Amazon if they aren't on deal.
Buy locally as PC hardware is cheaper offline in most cases e.g. Vedant store is located in Kolkata where I got my 8 TB WD Reds and primeabgb has physical store in Mumbai. Where are you located BTW?
Yes, its much cheaper offline generally
 
The WD Red EFAX (as opposed to EFRX) supposedly are SMR drives . Just a heads-up to make sure that you don't end up with this specific model (not recommended for use in a NAS).

My experience with the Seagate Ironwolf drives has actually been better than the WD Reds (EFRX). Three Reds failed in about three years but the two Ironwolf's are still going strong for the same amount of time. No conclusions to be drawn, just saying.
I had a 4 TB WD Red which failed and later I isolated the issue to the default el-cheapo power supply bundled in the iBall Nettop case.
I then moved to a CoolerMaster CM130 ITX case with a Corsair CX650M power supply and monitor the drives regularly with Hard Disk Sentinel.
I based my decision to go with WD Red on the Backblaze analysis on drive failures.
3 drive failures is a huge number to happen to one user. If it happened to me I would never touch WD again.:p
 
The DS218j would work in the long run as the playback component (e.g. Android TV box/smart TV) is decoupled from the main system and can be upgraded separately.
As for working for 5 years I would go with the Amazon reviews as I don't have a personal experience. Keep in mind though hard drives hate being switched on and off which is what happened to me in case of my 4 TB WD Red.

Tagging @vivek.krishnan as he's the resident guru when it comes to this stuff.

I found a 1 bay synology ds120j model. Has same 512mb ram, slightly slower processor but it’s half the price at around ₹8.5k.

If I’m not interested in RAID, can this stream 4K without transcoding?


 
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I found a 1 bay synology ds120j model. Has same 512mb ram, slightly slower processor but it’s half the price at around ₹8.5k.

If I’m not interested in RAID, can this stream 4K without transcoding?


The main purpose of a NAS would be to go for a bare minimum of 2 drives for redundancy in case of drive failure.
However if you are planning to reduce the budget this will work but ubuy is a SnS type provider and the final bill is massive with import tariffs and shipping.
Does your router have a USB 3.0 port? Then try experimenting with a USB 3.0 portable HDD you might have lying around and see if your TV can display the content from that using Kodi.
 
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Hi,

I want a personal cloud for storing and streaming media.

It should be able to stream 4k content.

I also plan to backup the data to the cloud using gsuite as backup.

Any suggestions? This is for personal use. Budget is around ₹15-20k

Do you have any concerns with power?

Do you want it to be expandable and/or customisable to a great extent?

Space or looks are not a concern?

Get a desktop, slap in a Pentium G4560 equivalent with 4gigs of RAM

Coming to 4K streaming, if you need to transcode it, the Pentium may not be upto the task, but you could optimise the media for streaming before hand.

I'm on mobile and will revert back with more suggestions tomorrow
 
Do you have any concerns with power?

Do you want it to be expandable and/or customisable to a great extent?

Space or looks are not a concern?

Get a desktop, slap in a Pentium G4560 equivalent with 4gigs of RAM

Coming to 4K streaming, if you need to transcode it, the Pentium may not be upto the task, but you could optimise the media for streaming before hand.

I'm on mobile and will revert back with more suggestions tomorrow

I don’t have concerns with power, don’t want expansion or customisable, looks are not concern.

I don’t particularly care about data loss.

The reason I need this nas is I want to be able to stream 4K stuff.

I think my 55” android 4K tv can play 4K without transcoding.
 
Is this nuc any good? Would this be better than synology ds218j?

Intel NUC NUC7PJYH Desktop Computer - Intel Pentium Silver J5005 1.50 GHz DDR4 SDRAM - Mini PC - Intel UHD Graphics 605 Graphics - Wireless LAN - Bluetooth - HDMI - 6 x Total USB Port(s)



Costs same at around 15k-16k.

I plan to add a 256gb SSD and 8gb ddr4 ram which will cost me around ₹4K totalling ₹20k.

I don’t care about data storage or loss. Just want a temporary local media dump to play/upload high end 4K media from/to google drive.
 
Is this nuc any good? Would this be better than synology ds218j?

Intel NUC NUC7PJYH Desktop Computer - Intel Pentium Silver J5005 1.50 GHz DDR4 SDRAM - Mini PC - Intel UHD Graphics 605 Graphics - Wireless LAN - Bluetooth - HDMI - 6 x Total USB Port(s)



Costs same at around 15k-16k.

I plan to add a 256gb SSD and 8gb ddr4 ram which will cost me around ₹4K totalling ₹20k.

I don’t care about data storage or loss. Just want a temporary local media dump to play/upload high end 4K media from/to google drive.
Actually this would a bit better but keep in mind Intel GPUs have a bit of a trouble with some video codecs e.g. HEVC if the BIOS is not up to date. AsRock is a major culprit in this case.

I would go for a Android TV box with a 4 TB portable HDD hooked up to it. You don't really need a NAS for your use case.
 
Actually this would a bit better but keep in mind Intel GPUs have a bit of a trouble with some video codecs e.g. HEVC if the BIOS is not up to date. AsRock is a major culprit in this case.

I would go for a Android TV box with a 4 TB portable HDD hooked up to it. You don't really need a NAS for your use case.

The android tv box won’t do much good as a torrent downloader or rclone gdrive transfer tool.

I guess I’ll probably end up with a synology ds218j.. -)
 
The android tv box won’t do much good as a torrent downloader or rclone gdrive transfer tool.

I guess I’ll probably end up with a synology ds218j.. -)
If you want a torrent downloader then a Raspberry Pi is awesome.

I have a RPi4 set up as an automated torrent downloader using diepti as the OS, jackett (to collate rss feeds from public trackers) ,flexget (to parse said rss feeds based on keywords and match the ones I want to download) and qbittorrent to download them to a attached SSD which is mostly a lot of p**n. :p

At the end of the day the full set is moved to the file server I have via a shellscript. But keep in mind for this approach you need to be conversant in UNIX shell scripting and a bit of python syntax.
 
I don’t have concerns with power, don’t want expansion or customisable, looks are not concern.

I don’t particularly care about data loss.

The reason I need this nas is I want to be able to stream 4K stuff.

I think my 55” android 4K tv can play 4K without transcoding.

You have 4 options - Attach a USB HDD to your router and share it, Setup a SBC (like RPi) with a USB HDD, Buy a NAS and install one or more HDDs or setup a desktop for the same.

I would suggest the router only if you want to spend nothing. The limitations are with the router itself so YMMV.

On a budget, I would suggest the RPi with the USB HDD - this should do a good job as long as you are not going to 1. watch 4K rips with high bitrates AND 2. Multiple clients at the same time. Ensure you get one of the newer RPi's with more RAM, setup the same.

If you want to watch high bit rate 4K rips you should go for either NAS or (ideally) I would suggest a desktop which has multiple SATA ports so that its more future proof.

This should be a Pentium class or above (with integrated graphics) which has the transcoding capabilities needed if you need to stream to devices which do not support 4K.

Install Windows or Linux or whatever is to your liking and share the same for a simple setup. For a more better way, for ex. If you want to do transcoding and want an easy way to manage the same, setup Plex. The free account should be more than enough for your needs, as long as the TV is acting as a Cast target.

TL;DR - depends on what you are - simple and tight budget use - router with USB HDD, simple and money to spend - NAS, complex on a budget - Raspberry Pi, complex with money and you want the best of everything - PC as NAS. If you find the write up complicated, please feel free to ask.
 
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