Safe 8-bay NAS solution with 10GbE

I also have to say at the start here that I use to use FreeNAS for many years and build my own setups for that over the years. Kind of getting sick and tired of constantly fooling around with that as I don’t have as much free time anymore and would like to find an all in one setup. Sad as I’ve purchased several Supermicro motherboards over the years trying to manage different setups and dealing with managing noise and heating issues with a small footprint at the time. QNAP or Synology seems like two main choices and I’d like to look at having room to grow so to say. From my understanding now, that the QNAP and also Synology software has many different options and way better than yrs ago for management and data recovery (depending on RAID options). One main reason I even got into the whole FreeNAS / ZFS stuff was if there were a failure, hardware can be swapped out with almost anything just to get the data off. Also, I seemed to have read into it more then I should have and thought that the normal RAID(0-5, etc) had a large chance of having “bit rot” issues and not noticing that some data was slowly degrading even though the physical HDs were fine. That seems to be a thing of the past (from my knowledge). The other main thing I was trying to do with FreeNAS was having some sort of Tape Backup system available but never even got around to that…. Anyways, sorry for rambling on and on.

Right now I’m looking at having an 8 bay system. Right now I’ve got 6 x 8TB WD RED’s.

The following are must have:

– 8 bays
– 10Gbe built-in or can be added in later
– interfaced with a UPS or able to manage / interact with one
– expandable RAM options
– ECC RAM (no idea if this is even a possibility)
– non-rackmount unit
– setting up different user access, mostly will be in a Windows environment (5 users max)

Bonus features if possible:

– all possible bays (8), be able to be in RAID-5 and still keep up with 10Gbe reading / writing. No idea what a normal read or write speed would be
– ability to have some sort of interface / connection to tape backup system (either externally via USB connection) or something like that?
– able to monitor the unit outside of my LAN when away from home or the such
– add-on of an SSD or two

From your experience, do you find any big issues with the QNAP or Synology software? Do you prefer one over the other?

My other concern is hearing lots of issues with the Atom based chipsets on certain motherboards, can’t remember the exact Chipset and this might have been a year or so ago. Something about the Atom C series have some just stopped working and then had to have a massive recall to fix stuff.

Hope this isn’t too generic of a question and sorry for blabbing on and on about this.

Sounds like new DS1819+ tick all your boxes. If you want a cheaper option but without ECC RAM then you can look at DS1817+.

You will have 8 bays with a potential to upgrade up to 18 bays for more drives or SSD caching. You can install 10GbE card and connect NAS to the smart UPS which will automatically shut NAS safely down when the power drops below a certain amount. Synology 8 bay comes with non ECC RAM but it supports ECC RM upgrade.

Accessing files and sharing them with your friends over the internet cannot be easier. You can share a file or a folder and later easily manage the content you have shared.

The RAID5 protection or even RAID6 will still allow you to benefit from 10GbE bandwidth. You can even add external tape drive to do a safe backup of your data.

Atom CPU has never been a real issue. Synology very quickly released a patch for the bug and start offering extended two years warranty for atom based NAS system to reassure that there is no issues at all.

The 8bay solution will be a very good NAS choice if you are planning to upgrade to 10GbE network. More drives will mean more speed.

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