Best NAS

[Gaitkeeper 2]

I've been using a Qnap TS453a for a couple of years now and it works very well, but I'm wondering if I were to create a server for someone else is it the best option to go with for running an Emby server? Is there a consensus on what the most user friendly, low maintenance NAS is for this purpose? Thanks!

[Luke 42080]

Hi, Synology and QNAP are both great choices. Asustor as well. @@FrostByte will have good things to say about his Synology I'm sure.

[cptlores 40]

My money (literally) would be on a Synology NAS. Has lots of functionality but still easy to configure and maintain. Just be aware that they don't have enough processing power to do video transcoding.

[FrostByte 5392]

I've had no problems running Emby on my Synology.  DSM is a great OS for me and I had zero experience with NAS and unix prior.  Switching from Windows to Synolgy was very easy. 

 

Like cptlores mentioned if your friend does a lot of transcoding I would just go with the fastest processor they can afford between Qnap or Synolgy.  I haven't sat down and compared who has the fastest processors lately

 

One of the good things about Synology is that we have (or had) a Synology rep here who has helped out a lot.  I haven't seen him in awhile though and I read he might be on vacation or something.

 

I know of users of both, but I don't recall any one person who has used both and can compare.

[Spaceboy 2573]

Happy synology user here too.

[PenkethBoy 2068]

Happy Qnap user here

 

QNAP have generally many more hardware choices than synology - possibly too many - but have lots of Intel and AMD options including Ryzen, i7,i5,i3 etc - avoid anything that uses ARM processors

 

the OS have similar options - having used both - plus and minus points to both - but both easy to use

 

If it was my money - get the best hardware you can afford - especially if you want to do any transcoding as you will need a decent cpu with HW Acceleration to achieve acceptable results

 

Remember most NAS are designed for low power use - being a media server (with possible HW Accel Transcoding) is not high on the design criteria

 

Both companies over state what these boxes can do - especially at the consumer end of the range

[vdatanet 1617]

The WD My Cloud Pro series works very well as long as it is not necessary to transcode 4K video. I had a PR2100 and I was very happy with it, but finally I replaced it with a more powerful computer.

[pgriffith 88]

I believe the best NAS to be a Windows box.. hear me out.

 

My "NAS" is an ITX based machine in a 4 bay hot swap case running Windows 10. I find the flexibility of a Windows box more convenient. I have a Hyper-V VM running on it for download purposes and that is VPN'd. I considered a Synology or similar, I just find Windows to be way more multipurpose and way more flexible. I don't have a dedicated GPU, just on-board Intel, but that's enough for my needs (I could though). Being a custom box means you can have way more horsepower under the hood as well, mine is just an i5 with 16GB RAM. I have an SSD for OS/Emby and 4 x 8TB drives in RAID 5 for storage. It's headless and I use MS RDP to access it.

 

I run Emby, Sonarr, Radarr, Headphones and a Teamspeak server on the base OS, and in the VM I have have SABNZBD and Qbittorrent.

 

From time to time I fire up Minecraft and 7 Days to Die servers on the base OS.

 

Just food for thought... NAS users, don't hate on me. 

[CBers 7451]

Like @@pgriffith, I run Windows (10) with DriveBender pooling software running on it.

 

I have 2 pools on my Window server, one with 20Tb (media) and the other 10Tb (BlueIris CCTV).

 

The server is only an i5 (will upgrade to an i7 at some point), but no remote users, so nothing transcodes, apart from the occasional audio remux and it never struggles.

 

A NAS can be any type of storage available on a network.