Cost effective NAS drive

[paultownsend]

I’m looking for a recommendation for a cost effective (cheap) NAS drive. It will simply be used to keep my music library on for my Sonos. I will supply the SATA HD, not bothered about back up drive as I have a stand alone HD as back up. I don’t need any fancy web access. Just need it to spin up when I want to listen to an album.

I was thinking of the Synology DS119j 1 Bay Desktop NAS Enclosure. Any reviews? Would be good to get into something a little cheaper.

Cheers!

[rednotdead]

Synology or QNAP, both are as good as each other. Easy to use and setup with a nice user interface. My Synology has been rock solid for over 4 years and never missed a beat.

If you can stretch the budget get one with 2 drive spaces so you can setup RAID1. It's not backup but does give you a reasonable fallback if you have a single disk failure. I use several external drives to backup the synology and have a copy of the data in 2 cloud providers too.

Edited by rednotdead on Thursday 21st February 08:49

[richatnort]

I've had a 2 bay Synology for about 5 years now & i love it, it's a great piece of kit

[thebraketester]

Another vote for synology here. Only had our DS218 a week or so but has been great so far.

I didn’t know that you could play music off a NAS with a Sonos. I’ll set that up when o get home at the weekend.

Edited by thebraketester on Thursday 21st February 09:04

[maffski]

Some routers allow you to plug in a USB drive and share it as a NAS - not a good solution for normal use but might be fine for serving music.

[Crossbot]

I've had my DS215j for almost 4 years and i wouldn't hesitate to replace it with another Synology, I'd only get a 1 bay next time though, i never did get around to putting a second drive in, there's nothing on there that isn't replacable.

[bloomen]

maffski said:

Some routers allow you to plug in a USB drive and share it as a NAS - not a good solution for normal use but might be fine for serving music.

That may well be more than sufficient. Even if you have to buy a fancier router it's going to work out cheaper.

[paultownsend]

bloomen said:

That may well be more than sufficient. Even if you have to buy a fancier router it's going to work out cheaper.

Good idea! I have a Seagate USB drive I could try. Does the drive have to be formatted in a particular way?

[bloomen]

paultownsend said:

Good idea! I have a Seagate USB drive I could try. Does the drive have to be formatted in a particular way?

Best to check the individual manufacturer's specs.

[PorkRind]

Synology, my 4 bay drive unit and its drive in raid 5 has lasted me 7 years. SUre its a bit slow with only 1mb of ram and a weeny processory , but its interface is wonderful, its unix based so its highly usable via a cld / telnet. Its quiet, its well made and although it was fairly pricey i think the cost / longevity and usefulness of it far outweighs the cost.

I do hear good things about QNAP but theyre even more expensive again. I'd love a 2 drive Synology with 2 large ssds for streaming movies and music to my phone, wherever i may be..

[sparkyhx]

QNAP and Synology are the best full stop. But they don't come under the definition of Cheap. For me, value includes how reliable and stable it is and under that definition they are value.

QNAP I believe are slightly cheaper, but are less consumer friendly than Synology, but happy to be proven wrong.
I have a 1 bay and a 2 bay. The 1 bay runs the houses audio and video stuff for Sonos and other connected devices like the various TV's and the 2 bay runs CCTV. I have 3 cameras running 24x7 4k recording onto a 4tb disk the processor is running at over 80% capacity permanently, and its always 'on' and accessible it never needs a reboot or anything.

[paultownsend]

Cheers for the above. Think the 1 bay Synology will be adequate. May wait for theceadter sales.