My Newbie Experience Getting Into NAS

[WarmWinterHat]

I decided to retire my 2TB Time Capsule a few weeks ago, seeing as it would no longer be operational with MacOS 27. Opted for a Ugreen DXP 2800 with two 4GB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs in RAID 1. I had a couple of 1TB M.2 SSDs spare, so they also went in the NAS for read/write caching. I also added the Ugreen US3000 UPS for safety.

So far all is working well. It's hosting my media, as well as Time Machine backup for my MacBook Pro. I'm also syncing my music library to it in real time.

You can change the OS on the UGREEN NAS(s), as well. They are supported by unRaid and TrueNAS, as well as most linux distros.

 

[tonmischa]

I have a question for all the home NAS users in here. I am still rocking my 5-bay Drobo DAS (yes, DAS) but will probably have to switch soon.
Drobo has the advantage that I can have several disk packs, like Pack A = 5 disks, Pack B = another 5 disks, and so on.
While the Drobo is powered off, I can switch all the disks, and when I turn the Drobo back on, it will recognize the new disk pack and its contents and present the data from the new pack without problems.

Is this "easy disk pack switching" possible with Synology and/or other "home" NAS systems?
Thanks!

 

[DENZIE]

I built a new truenas terramaster appliance for my parents to replace their aging time capsule. However I wish I’d looked at using a Mac mini to do the same thing - it can host time capsule for you and you get the benefit of another Mac plus it sips power. Attach a few drives for redundancy and that piece is handled as well.

 

[MacMorrison]

Yeah I wish they did as well.

I’m always sceptical of NAS brands because they all seem to be from more generic companies, and I worry about security…. especially when it comes to exposing devices to the internet.


I even feel that way about Synology. While I know they’re well regarded and widely used, they’re not a household name or privacy focused company like Apple or Google, so there’s an extra level of trust involved. For me, that means being cautious about enabling remote access features, locking things down as much as possible, and assuming responsibility for my own security rather than relying on the vendor by default.

At present I’m on raid DAS but very often just multiple Samsung T7 for backups in rotation

For the Samsung T7, you might want to look into their Activation Software to enable TRIM:

https://www.samsung.com/us/business/support/owners/product/t7-series-500gb/

I went down the iSCSI rabbit hole, inspired by this thread, a few days ago and I found that there isn't much current support for ISCSI initiators in macOS.

 

[RedWeasel]

ZFS is great, but honestly, bit-rot it protects from isn’t such a big deal if you do backups properly because you constantly have multiple copies to restore from if you DO encounter an issue in a file.

One point is that ZFS pool scrubbing allows you to detect an issue before it gets potentially propagated to all your backups as well (same applies to BTRFS).

 

[drrich2]

However I wish I’d looked at using a Mac mini to do the same thing - it can host time capsule for you and you get the benefit of another Mac plus it sips power. Attach a few drives for redundancy and that piece is handled as well.

Thanks for mentioning that. I don't have the specific link at hand just now, but I watched at least one YouTube video presentation discussing using a Mac Mini as a server. A user could set it up and attach some external drives, and use it to perform some functions a NAS might otherwise be used for. If anyone has their Mac (or PC) set up to do such a thing, please share what you use it for and how happy you are with it.

 

[throAU]

One point is that ZFS pool scrubbing allows you to detect an issue before it gets potentially propagated to all your backups as well (same applies to BTRFS).

Yeah, however if the ZFS box is not the source of your other backups, this doesn't do much.