Synology NAS Thread

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Jase2985

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#300776 3-Oct-2022 20:24

Thought I would start a thread for Synology NAS owners, to share your hardware, share what you use the NAS for, what Packages you have installed, and any other tips and tricks you may have.

I recently brought a second hand RS1219+ off trademe. Its not quite 2 years old and came with 5x 8TB hard drives, full 16GB of ram and a 2x 10Gb SFP network card. It was being used in a small business who recently moved to cloud storage.

Ive mounted it in my rack at home and am in the process of moving all my media from my desktop PC, which was acting as my media vault onto it, along with moving some more of my hard drives into it. Eventually having 6x8TB and 2x10TB drives in it. I have leave one of the 8TB drives as a hot spare for the SHR volume.

Currently i have setup Active backup for business on it for my windows PC's, doing nightly backups, DS File on my android devices backing up the photos and videos. Ive also gone through and organised my TV series using Sonarr, and am in the process of moving all that over to the NAS.

In the future i plan on adding 4-6 cameras and using surveillance station to monitor and record them.

I am also working out the best way to present all the media on the NAS to the TVs/Media players throughout the house, i currently use Serviio, because its so lightweight and simple, but there is no native app for DSM7 so requires docker which i have no experience with, so will need to learn what this is all about. otherwise i might just try Emby, Plex, Video Station etc to see what best works for our house.

I also want to look into putting Home Assistant onto it to start getting into the home automation side of things around the house.

Would like to add a network switch to my rack so i can connect the NAS to the rest of the network via 10Gb network and also upgrade the connection back into the house to 10Gb to give better speeds.

Finally finding a cloud backup service that i can upload all the important files to that are stored on the NAS. Not to worried about the Media but photos and some other important files would be nice to have an extra copy off off site.

What do you have? what packages do you run? any tips and tricks for a newbie

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#2976956 3-Oct-2022 21:55

I love my Synology DS920+. I've had it for about 18 months. I've got 20TB in a SHR raid and I upgraded to 8Gb RAM. I also have a DS220j that backs up the 920. Eventually I will relocate the 220 to my parents place to be an offsite backup. Also I have an old USB hard drive connected too that backs up everything except Plex media. Both backups are using Hyper Backup, that seems to work really well.
My Plex server is the main use, running the package install (not docker). I have a several Apple TV's in the house and have set my folks up with one too and they use Plex regularly. Plex works well for me, except for a few frustrations when they add new "features" (Live TV, Discovery etc) that I wish I could disable server side. Every time there's something new I have to disable on all the client devices.
I run Homebridge (adds my Ring doorbell and TP Link smart plugs to HomeKit, and some other cameras), Pihole, and my Unifi controller in Docker.
I have an Eaton UPS that runs my whole small rack for about 40 minutes.

Cheers,
Joseph

Backblaze

Backblaze Unlimited Backup. World’s easiest cloud backup. Get peace of mind knowing your files are backed up securely in the cloud (affiliate link).

Shindig

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#2977035 4-Oct-2022 07:51

This will jinx me. Here goes!

I run a DS413j. Bought from PBTech ages ago. Loaded with 4x 4TB WD RED. It is brilliant! Is the web GUI slow, yes... but it works to serve files which suits my needs.

A USB drive hangs off it to backup photos, which are auto-sync from 2 android phones and one iPhone using 3rd party software.

A couple of cloud sync jobs to Onedrive4Business and google Drive run each evening to backup business files.

I like the idea of Synology Photos, as an alternative to Google Photos.

I have been looking at an upgrade, but currently this is doing the job. The 1522+ is the one I have my eye on, not bothered with PLEX\JFish. One day

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1522+

The little things make the biggest difference.

SirHumphreyAppleby

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#2977099 4-Oct-2022 09:00

Jase2985:

What do you have? what packages do you run? any tips and tricks for a newbie

I have two Synology units. One older 8-bay version with hotswap drawers and a cheaper 4-bay unit with fixed drives.

The 8-bay unit is now a single volume with SHR 2-drive redundancy. The 4-bay unit handles CCTV, backend storage for my IP TV setup and a mirrored drive for daily backups of data. The CCTV and TV drives are iSCSI targets, accessed from Windows and FreeBSD clients.

Both units run rclone, backing up to Google Drive every night.

No packages installed. Storage is storage, not a general purpose device.

afe66

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#2977385 4-Oct-2022 17:26

My 412+ decided to not boot when I tried to turn on on Sunday shaving shut it down last week for an expected Street power supply shut down. (? 9 yrs old)

In hindsight it required a couple of attempts to boot up last time I turned it on 6 months ago so the writing was on the wall. But it was running fine last week.

Ordered the 920 Sunday night and it's on its way currently with courier. Hopefully il stick one of the mirrored drives in and boot up.

Otherwise I have loved my 412+. Plex server, all family photos ripped cds.Syncing to Google drive and dropbox

A.

Shindig

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#2977389 4-Oct-2022 18:00

Where did you order the 920 from mate?

The little things make the biggest difference.

jm3

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#2977394 4-Oct-2022 19:24

I grabbed a 920+ from Ascent a few weeks ago. Took an 8gb module from a probook 450 g5 and installed in the 920 to bump memory to 12gb. Very happy great to have some space to sort out my old photos and videos.

Zigg

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#2977396 4-Oct-2022 19:40

Anyone else had this happen? https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/153041

I've been terrified to plug in an external or flash drive since it nuked one of my (luckily mirrored) 2TB portables.

nic.wise

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#2977411 4-Oct-2022 20:25

DS419j here. Had a 413j and a 411slim in the past. Lovely units.

3x8TB iron wolf and 1x4TB WD red until I replace it.

Almost no packages. I have a NUC which runs plex, home assistant etc. It does have my wife’s photo library on it tho. So there’s about 5TB of stuff I CANNOT lose.

Be interesting to see if I can saturate the gig Ethernet with the iron wolfs. Could only get 400-500Mbps with the old drives.

Nic Wise - fastchicken.co.nz

Shindig

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#2977568 5-Oct-2022 07:32

I was tempted to consolidate my docker environment onto the sinology NAS as well, but it works really well on the NUC

The little things make the biggest difference.

shk292

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#2977571 5-Oct-2022 08:12

I have a humble DS213j with two mirrored WD Red 3TB, all of which has provided faultless service for around ten years so far. Main use is a shared drive for documents, photos and movies. I use Freefilesync to move photos onto the NAS, and Synology CloudSync to back photos up to the MS cloud. For movies, these are handled by a Raspberry Pi doing torrents and acting as a Plex server.

One day I'll get around to upgrading everything...

Quinny

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#2977594 5-Oct-2022 08:56

Synology DS916+ with 4x10tb drives (WDs but don't think Reds as they were so expensive when set it up). Solid as, never putting a foot wrong, streams Plex zero issues local and remote.

mkissin

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#2977598 5-Oct-2022 09:15

I've got a DS918+, running solidly for years now. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB.

Had 4x 4TB WD Red drives in it, but one failed about a year ago and I replaced it with a 6TB.

I run all sorts of stuff on it, Mosquitto MQTT, Plex Server, InfluxDB, and Grafana. Mainly through Docker.

afe66

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#2977778 5-Oct-2022 14:54

Shindig:
Where did you order the 920 from mate?

Elive. Co. Nz

nic.wise

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#2977784 5-Oct-2022 15:08

Anyone ever gone from an arm to an x86 synology? Just wondering if it’s “drop drives in and turn it on” like it is with arm to arm

I don’t want to have to move 10TB+ around.

Nic Wise - fastchicken.co.nz

Jase2985

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#2977790 5-Oct-2022 15:56

nic.wise: Anyone ever gone from an arm to an x86 synology? Just wondering if it’s “drop drives in and turn it on” like it is with arm to arm

I don’t want to have to move 10TB+ around.

doesn't answer your question but i moved 8TB from my PC to my NAS via ethernet the other day and it took a little under 22 hours. I also had 2 PC's connected to it transferring data and both were sitting at 100MB/s (Mega Bytes) for 200MB/s total for a 5-6h.

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