NAS recommendation? (already disappointed by Synology)

[drsox]

Personally, I'd have set up a volume on the Synology and used it for time machine and not bothered with CCC. It's good for disk images, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything else.

I've had Synology NAS's for years, I still rate them for stability and performance at a good price.

Time Machine backups on NAS shares get corrupted and have to be rebuilt after a few weeks. Apple S/W doesn't seem to be able to deal with NAS shares - unless there's been a major overhaul of NAS and Apple S/W recently. Seems to happen on all vendor NAS units.

I've had the same experience as you but with ReadyNAS units over 6+ years. Stable and reliable with very good performance.

 

[bjmoose]

Maybe you had a bad Synology unit?

I've had the 1813+ running in RAID 6 for months, it's been great. Well, one of the drives died after the first day, but the rebuild of the array went fine, and since then it's been taking my TM backups and Macrium (Windows) backups just fine.

Yes I could have put the disks on an old box with Ubuntu, but the Synology has been wonderfully easy.

I also have an older 410 unit that's acting more like a traditional NAS, it's been working fine for years.

 

[twoehr]

Enough people use Synology that I would agree that CCC is more likely to be the issue, so if you think selecting a different platform and continuing to use CCC will solve your problem you may be disappointed.

I don't have the need for extremely large volumes, >3 TB, so I use a WD MyBook Live. I use TimeMachine for backups and have some shares for Media that I can afford to lose: music, movies, etc. I suspect this is good enough for you.

If I were spending over $500 or required more than 3TB I'd go the server route. (I always wanted one of those HP Home Servers when I was a Windows guy.) I don't see why to not use a Mac Mini with Lion Server. You may even find the additional features useful. Just make sure as you configure and expand disks data is always in two places, so you can lose 1 disk and not lose any data.

 

[Padaung]

I've run QNAP NAS's for 6 years and have found them to be excellent. Small, quiet, well built, heaps of functions. I prefer the QNAP's which are based on x86 processors rather than the ARM ones due to compatibility issues with various pieces of software I like to run.

Yup, agree. Totally recommend QNAP too. Just don't update the firmware as soon as a new one is released!

 

[mathemabeat]

I picked up a Thecus N5550 a couple months ago and have been really impressed.

Fast AFP read and write speeds from my 2012 iMac...just over 100megs/second across gigabit ethernet.


Rock solid reliable so far. Bought it without any drives in it and loaded it with 5 Hitachi 4TB drives. Configured in Raid 5 with just under 15TB available.