NAS in 2025 mostly about Synology but open to others

[Obioban]

No, that is not what I said.
A locally attached Thunderbolt drive can deliver up to 40 Gbps. With Thunderbolt 5, even 80 Gbps.
Network-attached storage can deliver up to 1 Gbps or 2.5 Gbps. Best case, you can get a 10 Gbps network, but that's quite expensive.

In the affordable 1 and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet world, it doesn't matter whether you use spinning drives or SSD, especially if you use an SSD cache with your RAID storage.

10Gbps is pretty cheap these days, especially if you're just using a couple devices for high speed.

$130 switch that you just use for your fast devices, some USB to 10gbe ethernet devices (if your computer doesn't have it built in), good to go. Zero reason to have (pay for) your entire network on 10gbe-- just the devices that benefit from it-- which for most people is their NAS and a couple computers.

Not saying that local isn't faster, just that... fast ethernet is pretty cheap these days, if you're smart about how you deploy it.

Also, the benefits of SSDs over spinners really are...
latency
volume
power consumption

Absolute transfer speed is almost a perk, for NAS use

 

[Non-Euclidean]

For speed understood, but the silent operation would be a plus. Especially when very large storage pools aren't needed. In pricing out options, I notice some hard drive-based NAS options have SSD slots for read/write cache to speed them up, and if used, that closes the price gap for the NAS itself a bit. A couple of recognizable brand decent looking 4 terabyte SSDs (to start in RAID 1 or similar) would run between $450 - $500. Not as much storage as with HDDs, but if it would serve...

Its also more affordable if you are happy with SATA III speeds, grr but still not affordable as it should be thanks to AI.

 

[Alameda]

10Gbps is pretty cheap these days, especially if you're just using a couple devices for high speed.

$130 switch that you just use for your fast devices, some USB to 10gbe ethernet devices (if your computer doesn't have it built in), good to go. Zero reason to have (pay for) your entire network on 10gbe-- just the devices that benefit from it-- which for most people is their NAS and a couple computers.

Not saying that local isn't faster, just that... fast ethernet is pretty cheap these days, if you're smart about how you deploy it.

Also, the benefits of SSDs over spinners really are...
latency
volume
power consumption

Absolute transfer speed is almost a perk, for NAS use

Is this what you’ve done? Cause a high capacity SSD RAID gets very, very expensive and it’s less than 1/4 the speed of direct attached.

 

[venom600]

What do you use if for? I'm considering an SSD-based Terramaster F8, and one of the things I'd like it to do is back up my wife and our kid's iPhones, but it's my understanding there's not a clear path to simply do that the way one might back them up on a Mac. On the other hand, IIRC from reading, it's possible to back up photos pretty easily, but they need to be in an album on the iPhone, not just the Photos library. I supposed would could create an album, then go to Library, Select All, and drag 'all' into that album, then back it up. Naturally I'd like this to be automatic and hassle free, like using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my MacMini onto an external SSD.

Would appreciate hearing your experience, particularly if you've grappled with the usage case I'm facing.

I got it to hold my Plex library and Time Machine backups for my Macbook Pro so I don’t have to have it connected to anything but Wifi in the house. The Terramaster App allows you to backup all the photos and videos in the photos app. You just leave “Select Album” set to “Select All” under Album Backup. As far as I can tell you can set it to auto backup, but the app has to be running for that to work.

It does not allow you to create backups of your phone or text messages or anything else. Apple restricts backups of iOS devices (iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, etc… anything but MacOS). You either have to backup to your computer via Wifi or USB or backup to icloud. That’s it. That said, you could probably set a phone to backup over WiFi to your Mac and then sync the backups folder to your NAS using a variety of software solutions. I just pay the $5 a month for 200GB of iCloud backups of my iPhones and iPads.

And as for noise… I bought refurb NAS drives because my data isn’t super critical and they are far more affordable than the equivalent new drives, while retaining 5 year warranties. So far so good. They are LOUD though. Much louder than consumer drives. Loud enough that I can hear them clear across my apartment even though they are behind a wall in my den.

 

[Alameda]

I got it to hold my Plex library and Time Machine backups for my Macbook Pro so I don’t have to have it connected to anything but Wifi in the house. The Terramaster App allows you to backup all the photos and videos in the photos app. You just leave “Select Album” set to “Select All” under Album Backup. As far as I can tell you can set it to auto backup, but the app has to be running for that to work.

It does not allow you to create backups of your phone or text messages or anything else. Apple restricts backups of iOS devices (iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, etc… anything but MacOS). You either have to backup to your computer via Wifi or USB or backup to icloud. That’s it. That said, you could probably set a phone to backup over WiFi to your Mac and then sync the backups folder to your NAS using a variety of software solutions. I just pay the $5 a month for 200GB of iCloud backups of my iPhones and iPads.

And as for noise… I bought refurb NAS drives because my data isn’t super critical and they are far more affordable than the equivalent new drives, while retaining 5 year warranties. So far so good. They are LOUD though. Much louder than consumer drives. Loud enough that I can hear them clear across my apartment even though they are behind a wall in my den.

That’s odd. I have a four drive Synology attached to a single backup drive and I barely notice the noise. But mine sleep when not in use.

I’d like to buy a new Synology with an SSD cache and 2.5 or 10 gbs Ethernet, but that’s $500 or more. For the most part, my Synology just does backup and speed doesn’t matter, except when I’m browsing my photos. It’s pretty bad at that.

 

[drrich2]

Thanks all; I pulled the plug on a Terramaster F8 (not the Plus version), because NewEgg had it marked down at roughly $450. Ordered a couple of 4-TB Crucial Gen. 4 SSDs from Amazon, at a smidge over $500. I've heard SSD prices are likely to rise due to A.I.-related market impacts, and this is the key holiday shopping season of the year, so it seemed like the time to do it...if I were going to do it. The F4 was on sale around $320, but 4 drive bays and a 5 instead of 10 gig ethernet connection were at issue (plus one reviewer said the F8 includes some heat sinks with rubber bands to attach to your SSDs and the F4 doesn't, though he indicated such can be bought 3rd party pretty cheap). My main motive for jumping to the F8 was having those extra SSD slots to optionally fill over the years, should prices drop and need arise.

 

[Obioban]

Is this what you’ve done? Cause a high capacity SSD RAID gets very, very expensive and it’s less than 1/4 the speed of direct attached.

No-- I have no need for high speed in what I do. I have need for a LARGE amount of space, that can be slow and high latency.

My NAS is currently 8x 16tb drives in SHR2. Any high speed needs I just do on the local disk of the Mac I'm using.

Not sure what the relevancy of what I've done is...

 

[drrich2]

Do consumers still like Synology hardware/software? Do you like whatever system they now are on? Have you moved to something else like Ugreen (I see lots of ads) or ??? Or have you come up with some custom Apple Solution?

So, did you get a new NAS, and if so, what did you pick?

One potential point of discrimination when comparing brand lines is the ability to accommodate mixed drive sizes in a RAID array; so far, I'm personally only aware of Synology and Terramaster having this capability (with Terramaster they call it a TRAID).

In a nutshell, with a normal RAID array, the system treats all discs involved as thought they had the capacity of the smallest disc. So, if you have a 4-bay unit and put in 1 1-terabyte drive and 3 4-terabyte drives, the NAS will treat that like a group of 4 1-terabyte drives, at least unless and until you replace that small one with a larger one.

This bites if you want to start out with smaller discs (maybe money is tight and you'd like to start with a pair of 4-terabyte discs, but later add a pair or 12-TB discs down the road).

From what I've heard from others online, Terramaster and Synology each has its own proprietary workaround for that, so you get the benefit of adding some larger capacity drives into your RAID mix.

 

[Obioban]

So, did you get a new NAS, and if so, what did you pick?

One potential point of discrimination when comparing brand lines is the ability to accommodate mixed drive sizes in a RAID array; so far, I'm personally only aware of Synology and Terramaster having this capability (with Terramaster they call it a TRAID).

In a nutshell, with a normal RAID array, the system treats all discs involved as thought they had the capacity of the smallest disc. So, if you have a 4-bay unit and put in 1 1-terabyte drive and 3 4-terabyte drives, the NAS will treat that like a group of 4 1-terabyte drives, at least unless and until you replace that small one with a larger one.

This bites if you want to start out with smaller discs (maybe money is tight and you'd like to start with a pair of 4-terabyte discs, but later add a pair or 12-TB discs down the road).

From what I've heard from others online, Terramaster and Synology each has its own proprietary workaround for that, so you get the benefit of adding some larger capacity drives into your RAID mix.

Pretty sure UNRAID supports mixed drive sizes now.

I got my synology when Drobo went away, entirely for mixed drive size support via SHR (SHR2 in my case). Next time I need a new system, it wont' be a synology, but something more DIY/open source, that supports mixed drive sizes.

 

[venom600]

Pretty sure UNRAID supports mixed drive sizes now.

I got my synology when Drobo went away, entirely for mixed drive size support via SHR (SHR2 in my case). Next time I need a new system, it wont' be a synology, but something more DIY/open source, that supports mixed drive sizes.

Was just about to post this. I chose Terramaster specifically because you can run anything on it, including Unraid. I wasn't sure how i'd feel about TOS, but it's been pretty stable.

Synology was never even a consideration for me. Sure, the software is amazing, but they sell woefully underspecced hardware at premium prices. And now they are moving to reducing the feature set and forcing you to use their drives and SSDs, even on systems that already supported other drives. They've walked it back some, but the intention to move forward with that line of development is pretty clear.