Which Synology NAS Should I Buy?

Which Synology NAS Should I Buy?

Before you buy you need to decide what drive failure protection you need and what functionality you want it to have.

You have options starting with no drive redundancy which includes 1 bay NAS models or NAS with several bays merging together all available disk space. Or you can have single or multiple drive failure tolerance. This means that one or more drives can fail, but you loose no data and you can still access it as if nothing happened. This will require 2 or more bays on your NAS.

Another thing you need to decide is the speed. Are you happy with standard 1Gbit speeds that everyone has at home, or maybe you need something faster. You can have a single LAN port for basic data access over the network. You can have multiple LAN ports that allow more people to access data without sharing a single LAN connection. Having a dedicated line to access speeds things up. Or if you need faster speeds per user, you may consider getting a NAS with 2.5/5/10GbE connection.

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NAS compared on hardware level

If you are planning to achieve really fast data transfer speeds for things like video editing or fast backups then you will need to look at CPU and LAN connectivity. Faster CPU will also mean faster data transfer speeds. If you are looking for video editing storage solution then you will need around 300MB/s bandwidth for each 4K editor. This would mean a NAS with 10GbE connection (or PCIe 10G card slot). If you have a WiFi6 at home you may also consider dual 1GbE LAN or even 2.5GbE connectivity from your NAS.

Having a faster CPU will be crucial for running your virtual machines and docker images.  Faster CPU would also help with third party apps that require things like video transcoding.

Every year apps and operating systems are growing in size. Having an option to increase a memory size could buy you some more time. Otherwise you may not be allowed at some point to install latest OS or apps simply because you have not enough RAM memory.

Having SSD cache allow all uploaded data first to land on fast SSD instead of slower HDD volume. This speeds the file upload. Also read cache will speed file downloads that are frequently accessed. This would mean faster data download in multi user environments, Virtual machines, web servers and do on.

Having a spare PCIe slot allows you to upgrade your NAS with a faster network cards and cache cards.

Compared on storage space and redundancy levels

When choosing a NAS you may need to run few data growth rate predictions. You may start with just a couple of drives in a NAS leaving few bays empty. Many people do leave empty bays because they know they will need them in a year or two. You can also plug in expansion boxes and and few additional drives this way. Synology offers 5 bay and 12 bay expansion boxes. Sometimes it is cheaper to get an expansion instead of replacing existing drives with bigger size drives.

Business environments where downtime could cost money do demand NAS with hot swap option. This means that if a drive fails, you can replace a drive without switching off a NAS. People would would not even notice that hard drive has failed and been replaced with a new one. Also people who buy a NAS with spare bays do prefer models with SHR or drive mixing option. This means that they can add two bigger drives to their existing setup and gain more space. Other brands require changing all drives to a bigger size to gain more storage space.

The last step people are choosing is drive redundancy level. Should they allow 1 drive failure or more. Businesses with sensitive data on their NAS do often choose 2 drive failure protection also called SHR2/RAID6. But the most popular option is drive mirroring where one drive synchronised with another in the NAS. Also called RAID1/RAID10.

Multimedia performance

Majority of people buy a NAS for their multimedia needs. It can be their movies and family videos. Having a graphics chip built in allows people to also access video remotely or on devices that do not support certain video formats. If you have an HD TV it could not play your videos from new 4K phones. This built in chip will convert videos on the fly. Also when accessing remotely your videos might bee to big for the internet upload speeds. Synology will convert these videos into a smaller version so that it can be streamed over the internet. But if you have a 4K TV and 4K videos then there is no bottleneck in your local network. You can then use any NAS to stream videos in original format locally.

Software and functionality

There are people who want much more then simple network attached file storage and backups.

Having BTRFS enable self healing if there have been power cuts and other unfinished file copy operations. This file system also enables snapshot functionality which is similar to Windows System restore. You can restore previous version of files and folders on your NAS if someone accidentally altered file contents or deleted files entirely.

So many people use VMs to install Windows or Smart home environment. You do not need to buy a separate PC to do this. Having a virtual machine on a NAS is far les power consuming and generates less noise. Also you do not need to get special software for this. All this is built inside the NAS OS. Docker especially is becoming very popular. You can install popular systems with a click of the button.

Apps like Active backup will allow you to run full system backups of your Windows PC and servers. Al this free of charge. You cna also back up your Google suite and Office 365.

Businesses that require 0% downtime do often set up high availability. This mean that two NAS system are linked together with something caller heart beat cable. If one NAS fails (internal component failure etc) the other NAS will take over and continue serving clients. They might not even notice that the main NAS is on fire.

There are many business that pay for yearly server licences to be able to run Active directory. Synology offers this for free.

You can also have your own mail server. Nowadays people do not want to trust or accept cloud provider privacy policies. It is safer to keep things in house.

I have mentioned 4K editing here since it is software related. But it is crucial to have 10GbE connectivity to be able to edit off the NAS. You can also use ISCSI option to trick your editing software that this is an internal disk instead of network disk. Having a transcoding chip or a powerful CPU will also allow you to share finished projects with your clients easier.

And lastly there is PetaSpace functionality for XS series models that allow merging multiple volumes together and give access from one volume to another without physically having these two locations linked.

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