How to choose a NAS

[craigjm]

I know when everyone talks about NAS on here people have their favourites with Synology and Qnap. I’m looking to invest but don’t know what features I am looking for. So here goes and hopefully someone can help

I need to create a shared drive with folder permissions for different people. The drive needs to be accessible from anywhere for anyone with permission and mapped to the PC or Mac to appear in their folder structure. I need to make some folders available to everyone and some just to some people. Most of the machines that need to remotely map the drive will be macs

In addition to this I will need a private area for myself that nobody can access and it needs to map as above. My machines are macs

I then need to be able to back up automatically onto another disc

I don’t need music server? Film server or anything like that.

Suggestions?

[bmwmike]

Pretty much any NAS will do what you want I think.

I went with qnap. I find the software pretty OK ish and cant compare to synology as ive no experience.

Take care with the drives you choose though, ref my other thread, as i'd avoid seagate ironwolf 8TB if you believe a NAS should be available but not heard.

[xeny]

Can you expand on "back up automatically on to another disk" - are we talking internal to the NAS or external, and if internal, do you mean a mirror, or a once a day copy kind of thing?

The requirements look pretty standard, how much performance do you need, are these office documents, or huge media "assets"?

[devnull]

I use my synology as somewhere to dump my old music collection, various bits of software and it can run virtual machines and containers for the odd bit of tinkering.

The symbology DSM software is excellent, and the migration from a 10 year old One to the new one was a breeze.

[craigjm]

xeny said:

Can you expand on "back up automatically on to another disk" - are we talking internal to the NAS or external, and if internal, do you mean a mirror, or a once a day copy kind of thing?

The requirements look pretty standard, how much performance do you need, are these office documents, or huge media "assets"?

Yes i mean internal to the NAS so once a day pretty standard stuff for disaster recovery. The documents on the drive will be MS Office documents not videos or anything like that.

The bit that concerns me is the access to the drive outside the home. I dont want anyone to have to go through an app i want it to be able to map like a native drive. I also need it to be able to control access to folders in that drive so have a directors folder for instance that the admin staff cant access. No problem with them seeing it is there but when they click on it it is "access denied"

[xeny]

The NAS has a built in VPN, so that should be possible. Check how much broadband upload bandwidth you have to see if this will be a tolerable experience though.

If you're after daily copies (rather than a real time mirror) consider using an external drive so you can take it off site.