Fast Multi user 4-bay NAS with 4K and remote access

I currently own a ReadyNAS NV+ (purchased back before Netgear bought them), and am thinking it’s time to upgrade. It currently has about 3 TB of storage over 3 disks. I use my NAS for movie and television show storage and playback (using PLEX on a Mac Mini, so the NAS does not have to run PLEX per se), and for networked storage for 5 family members who have their own shares.

Seems like the two companies I hear about most are Synology and Drobo. I really don’t know reliability or speed for any company other than ReadyNAS. I’m willing to consider any company so long as they have good reliability and support.

My requirements would be:
* at least 5 TB of storage
* 4 bays (I want enough bays to handle 1-2 disk failures)
* Fast transfer speed (aggregation support would be neat, but not required)
* ability to serve 4k video
* hot-swappable drives
* easy remote access

Synology’s site pointed me to the DS418play, but would like to spend less if that’s more NAS than I need.

 

I am afraid you have to look at NAS with dual LAN option just because of 4K media. It is still OK stream 4K videos over a gigabit network, but these files are getting more complex and heavier with new encodings formats and resolution improved. The cheapest you can go is DS418 which still does 4K and is more focused on new generation file formats. But what you really need is DS418play or DS918+ with dual LAN ports and much more powerful processors which can cope with all sorts of file type.

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What can I connect to a Synology?

Wireless Speaker Sonos

The great thing about Sonos is that you don’t need to pay for music subscription service. With the cheapest NAS at home like DS115j or any other, you can have your backups done for all of your devices and still use your network drive as a Sonos music library. Sonos will connect to your NAS via your network and let access your provided music library. If you have little more of IT knowledge, you can even set up your Alexa or Sonos with Alexa built in to play music on your voice commands (“Alexa! Ask DS Audio to Play Music!”).

Casting devices

Nowadays it is so cheap to upgrade your old TV and make it smart. All you need is Google Chrome or EZcast alternative plugged into your HDMI port at the back of your TV. Now you have great functionality added to your TV to send a video file directly from your NAS to a TV. No need for wires and chargers and other mess. You can use your phone as a remote to go to your movies or family videos and cast that content on your TV during family or friend gatherings.

 

Amazon Fire TV

You may not have a smartphone, or you just simply prefer to control your content with a remote in that case Amazon Fire TV will be a great addon to get to your TV. It also plugs into your HDMI port and will play content from your NAS to a TV. No wires no mess.

nVidia Shield TV

It gets even better! If you want some more entertainment and all previously mentioned functions – nVidia TV is a great thing to get. You can use it for playing games and watching movies from your NAS. The greatest thing is – shield TV does video transcoding. So even if you have a cheap NAS with a weak CPU, in a combination of shield TV you can now automatically on the fly change video file size and format for a destination device. It is a great way to reduce network load and let older devices to play video content which normally was not supported on the device.

Protect your data against power outage

Synology tested SMART-UPS list:
APC Smart-UPS SMT1000RM2UTW
APC Smart-UPS SMT750TW
APC Smart-UPS SUA1000TW
APC Smart-UPS SUA1500TW

 

Compatible cameras

C1
C1 Pro
C2
RLC-410
RLC-411
RLC-420
RLC-422
RLC-423