Synology vs Qnap vs Diy?

[dragon2611 27]

I need to rebuild my storage backend I use for Emby (and other things) as it's currently a USB3 multi-drive caddy connected to a J1900 Itx board (The machine it's connected to is also my Emby server).  In theory USB3 should have a decent amount of bandwidth, in practice for whatever reason the caddy isn't much faster than USB2 and cannot handle random/Multidisk IO at all well.  (It tends to become very unresponsive, sometimes causing the Disk response time to be above 10s, someone suggested that a lot of the manufactures don't put a beefy enough controller/cpu in the caddies no idea if that's true).

 

The board only has 2 Sata's and no PCI-E slot (it was out of an acer xc603 I had laying about) so I need to replace it to connect the disks locally.

 

 

1) Buy a 4 bay hotswap ITX case such as this one ( http://www.xcase.co.uk/mini-itx-pc-cases/x-case-itx-nas-04-4-hotswap-caddy-chassis-usb-3-ideal-nas-or-home-server-49-99-x-case.html ) Then either buy a new motherboard/ram/cpu or use the E350 board i have spare (Slow cpu, worse than the J1900 but low power and the board has 5x sata ports)

 

2) Grab a HP Gen8 Microserver (I have a Gen7 one spare, but it's the original N36L so Id rather replace it with a Gen8 which is much faster) - there is currently a cashback offer on these that should effectively make it £120 - Ships with a G1610 cpu, although people have manage to swap it with a low power Xeon E3.

 

3) Grab a NAS unit and use that for the storage back-end, Probably a QNAP TS-431 or a Synology 414j , There are many NAS vendors but these 2 seem to be among the best for features and stablity even if they are a bit more expensive than the competition.

 

 

I can't decide which one go for, on one hand going for the Microserver/Custom box means I should be able to simply Swap the data disks straight out, using a NAS would be a bit more complicated initially as I'd need to copy the data off (The important stuff is backed up of course) before reformatting the disks to whatever F/S the NAS uses (usually ext3/ext4 on Linux software raid) but then once it's running the appeal is it should be relatively low maintenance.

Edited April 3, 2015 by dragon2611

[simono5 21]

As I was reading your post I was thinking a Gen8.  Serverplus have one with £60 cash back which would make it less that £100.  I have the older HP Microserver 54l and its been brilliant.  I run Xpenology on it so get that Synology experience.  I've just got Embey server up and running on it via a manual install of all the pre-reqs.

 

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/hp_tower_servers/712317-421

[dragon2611 27]

The thing that puts me off Xpenology is that an update could kill it.

 

Also the Boot order on the Gen8 is a pain you can't boot it off the ODD port and run the HDD's as JBOD apparently which is annoying if you want to have an SSD boot drive and use all 4 bays, that said I guess I could get a PCI-E controller but I'd want one that acts as a dumb HBA rather than doing H/W raid.  (I don't want to be in a situation where the controller dies and the data is some proprietary format that only works with that raid controller family)

[KRA 39]

I've been running first openindiana then freenas for last 2,5 years. ZFS is really great but it demands server grade hardware, especially ecc ram is highly recommended and you need a lot of it. Openindiana was great, but I wanted something more userfriendly so I migrated to freenas, that was something I regret. Not only did it update my ZFS pool so no other system would read it, I also had stability issues, add that to a support forum/irc chat that has some people who laugh at you, point a finger and ignore you if you say you use your nas to more than just serve files. (ex. running stuff like emby). So when a disk died without warning last week I figured I'd just buy a NAS, they have become so powerfull now they are basically a small computer with the bonus of a nice userinterface and practical hardware.

 

I went for the qnap TS-453 pro 8GB. And it's close to replacing my Esxi server completely. I even migrated a couple of virtual machines over to it, super easy.

 

On a bad note though I installed emby on it in a virtual machine (since there currently is no native support, though docker support is on its way). Emby was running fine, except for one thing, it was not able to handle transcoding very good. Now the box itself has HW assisted transcoding that is very fast, but emby does not support it The day emby support quicksync my NAS is actually more capable to transcode than my server.

 

Qnap has a fair amount of addons/apps you can install, but some of them are a little old (I need bleeding edge, no patience), the support forum has some updated unofficial apps also, but some are missing. I assume this will be solved as soon as Docker support is added. I guess Synology has an advantage over qnap when it comes to software, but I wanted faster cpu and the hardware capabilites qnap can offer, such as HDMI and ability to run Kodi on my TV. I think Asustor is only option that also has that.

 

Bottom line, running your own system is great and gives you more freedom, but I just couldn't bother with the hassle anymore. Now I can "have fun" with my server while the qnap nas is handling the important 24/7 stuff. A little more than a week in I love it, but who knows 6 months from now.

 

just my .02

[dragon2611 27]

I plan to have at least one X86 machine running either way so it just depends if that machine is providing storage or if it's connecting to a storage backend over gigabit ethernet.

 

My machine running Emby is in colocker at the moment so power draw is one of the concerns otherwise I'd just put something stupidly powerful in there.

[jamvids 37]

Whatever you do, don't buy an Icybox, I had a 4 Bay usb3 one and it was nothing but trouble, in the end I lost 800 films due to a drive becoming corrupt. Personally I would put my money (if I had any) into a large enough case to house my hdd's with pleanty of cooling, which I have kind of done with my server pc as it is. It works far better now and the power supply can handle 4 drives spinning up at once

[dragon2611 27]

Whatever you do, don't buy an Icybox, I had a 4 Bay usb3 one and it was nothing but trouble, in the end I lost 800 films due to a drive becoming corrupt. Personally I would put my money (if I had any) into a large enough case to house my hdd's with pleanty of cooling, which I have kind of done with my server pc as it is. It works far better now and the power supply can handle 4 drives spinning up at once

 

I did... and it's terrible as you say, hence why i'm trying to replace it.

 

I'm really liking the look of an asrock-c2750d probably cased in a silverstone ST-DS380B and 16GB ram (2x8GB) to start with.

 

It's more expensive than I originally wanted but then again trying to be cheap is pretty much why I have the piece of junk I'm running now.

[jamvids 37]

Yeah, like I say, I just built it all into my pc case, bought a 10m long hdmi cable and stuck it in the loft. Planning a giant case with a load of hdd bays in it and a motherboard with pleanty of sata headers on it, and would love to run a mirrored, striped and huge raid structure with 8 3tb hdd's (the dream) For front end I am waiting in contemplation of Android TV. I hope video backdrops will be in the future of that though.

[dragon2611 27]

If you're running a windows OS on the server It's worth looking at Stablebit drivepool, Been running the Trial and if I decide to stay with a DIY server then I'll probably buy it.

 

On the Linux side Greyhole is pretty nifty although it's not as slick as Stablebit's software (Greyhole has to copy the data from a landing zone and then symlink the files to the share, where as stablebits does it at a Kernel/FS level)

 

The thing I like about these drive pooling apps is you can decide on a per folder basis if you want the data replicated and how many copies to keep.  Handy if you want to save space by not keeping redundant copies of stuff you can easily get again or aren't that bothered about but at the same time keep several copies of really critical data.

Edited April 4, 2015 by dragon2611

[TolkienBard 54]

I wasn't all that long ago I was asking myself this same question. Eventually, it cam down to DIY or Synology for me, as I felt that Synology gave better bang for the buck than QNap, especially once I looked at the ready integration of apps on Synology that included Plex and XBMC.

 

I eventually wound up going with DIY, for two reasons. First, the price was lower, though more work was going to be involved. Second, despite being less expensive, the DIY route was going to result in a more powerful server. For most users, a Synology probably is still more than enough. I knew the sort of usage my household was going to put the server through though. I wanted to make sure I could have 3-4 1080p streams all going at once with no issues, even if transcoding became involved. The Synology's processor isn't ready to handle that. So, I went DIY, saved myself some scratch, and also got improved performance. 

 

The one other thing I can say about going DIY, it makes it infinitely easier to upgrade and maintain over time as needs change. By not being locked into any sort of proprietary add-on solutions, the ability to expand, contract, or to increase performance is only limited by the pocketbook and how much time one is willing to dedicate tot he work. Also, there are far more utilities out there for PCs to create solutions for any problems that might arise in the future.