Hmmm keen to see the replies.

Not too many 5 bay NAS' out there but the one that comes to mind si the Synology DS1520+

Can definitely recommend Synology. 

A friend recently had his Drobo die as well and, after some encouragement, finally replaced it with a Synology and hasn't looked back.

I have 3 of the four bay units, one at my brothers as an off-site backup using their Cloud Sync software and the whole solution works really well.

Wow, I didn't know Drobo still existed. I had one in about 2012 or so. Dumped it cos it was slow AF and unreliable. Synology since - DS411slim, then a DS413j and now a DS418j I think. All 4 bay.... Might want to go up from the J's if you want a bit more thruput.

Synology's are great for prebuilts or if you can be arsed you could build your own NAS for the same price as a prebuilt which will have way more grunt using truenas as the OS

@dt I definitely can't be arsed. 😀

SO no one has mentioned QNAP, what is wrong with them?

kiwifidget:

 

SO no one has mentioned QNAP, what is wrong with them? 

They have had quite a lot of bad publicity recently regarding the deadbolt ransomware exploit - https://threatpost.com/deadbolt-ransomware-qnap-again/179057/ 

@allan thx, thats good to know.

kiwifidget:

 

SO no one has mentioned QNAP, what is wrong with them?

 

In general, if there is a NAS with a security issue, normally has QNAP in the title...

I'm leaning towards the DS1621+.

Any known issues???

Don't really know what I'm talking about, but I imagine with the Ryzen, not so good for transcoding if you're into Plex or Emby media serving type things.

What I used the Drobo for:

File serving - for Office docs, general data, and media files for Kodi on Nvidia Shield.

Backup destination for Veeam clients on Windows pcs.

Public share for photo sharing with family.

All data on the Drobo was replicated using Filesync to a Win10PC running Drivepool.

kiwifidget:

 

SO no one has mentioned QNAP, what is wrong with them?

 

I have had (well still have) two QNAPs and have been happy with both so far.

First one (TS-453 Pro) is over 7 years old.  Did hit one problem at just over the 7 year mark due to the Celeron CPU degrading.  It is an industry wide problem affecting a particular Celeron chip from that era.  It was widely used as an embedded CPU and it is not just NAS's (including some Synology models) that are affected. Problem usually starts occurring around the 5 year mark.  Was (likely temporarily) fixed simply by soldering a 100 ohm resistor across two pins (one being an earth pin) to lower the voltage on one of the CPU pins.  Very straightforward once you know what to do (info widely available on the net).  I don't recall the full details (& it was only 2 months ago!) but the data on the disks was never at risk as the part of the CPU affected handles communications.  But the CPU will continue to degrade and given that the NAS was already over 7 years old it was no longer suitable as a primary NAS.

New primary NAS is a QNAP TS-653D (with a new set of larger disks as three of the 10GB ones in the old NAS are also over 7 years old).  Now using the old NAS as backup to the new one.  Intention is to only turn it on say once a week or so, run the back up then switch it off.  Advice is that that will much reduce the ongoing degradation of the CPU and should be possible to get several more years out of it.  Alas, that is one of those 'get around to it' tasks so currently the old NAS is still on 24/7 (it is in a somewhat out of the way location - and another user has yet to move all data onto the new NAS).

But yes, a timely reminder to me to take the old one off line other than during backups.

Went with QNAP again as the problem experienced was not QNAP specific, we are familiar with the QNAP os and software, and otherwise have been happy with how the old NAS had performed.