Reddit mentions of Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation, DS216J (Diskless)

If you want an actual camera system i'd recommend one of two options.

Run CAT5e for your camera wires. Once you've chosen the spots it's time to choose the cameras.

With CAT5e you have two options. You can use baluns (like these) and hook them up to analog cameras, or just terminate them with RJ45 connectors/keystones and you can use IP cameras.

Both options will work, but i'm a bigger fan of Network devices so I would choose to go IP. You don't need crazy expensive gear anymore with IP, but it is going to cost more than analog.

For NVR I would go with a Synology product, these are great prices and have a wonderful interface that anyone can understand. They carry many models so you can find something that suits your needs.

For Camera's i'd recommend Hikvision, something like these work great.


At the end of the day there are so many options, combinations and possibilities that it comes down to your research to figure something out that works best for you.

I had a similar thread a few weeks ago with some tweaks/settings that I've stumbled across.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/5hhk8o/windows_10_settings_for_home_server/

As for your specific question about redundancy, modern versions of Windows do have some options built in, search for "Windows Storage Spaces" for more info on that- it comes with mixed reviews.

I personally use some awesome software from a company called StableBit to accomplish this. It's called StableBit DrivePool https://stablebit.com/DrivePool

I also like their StableBit Scanner product, basically a disk health surveillance tool that will send me emails if there are issues with any of my disks. I think it was about $50 for DrivePool+Scanner.

EDIT: seeing what you'd be using the server for- I don't think a server is the right choice for you. A NAS (network attached storage) would be best for your situation. It's going to use significantly less power, cost less, meet your storage needs, excellent reliability, low maintenance, and high redundancy.

For example:

-This Synology NAS: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01BNPT1EG/
-Two 4tb Western Digital Red drives: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00EHBERSE/

Thats $170 for the NAS and 2x$146 for the drives = $432

You will set the drives to mirror eachother for redundancy leaving you with 4tb of storage for your wife's photos. And if you don't have an off- site backup solution already there are plenty of Synology plugins to help you with that as well.

Get a NAS. You can access you files from any computer on your network.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-3-5-Inches-1xGigabit-DS216J/dp/B01BNPT1EG/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1505507181&sr=8-5&keywords=nas

or a NAS?

Get a used Dell R710 or a Supermicro. You can find some very nice hardware on eBay for cheap. Install XPEnology RockStor, FreeNAS, or something like that on them.

Otherwise, $200 is not going to get you much, if anything at all really.

Otherwise, I'd recommend something like these:

QNAP TS-251

Synology DiskStation DS216j

Losing an external shouldn't be a heartbreak. Remember, it's not a backup if it's the only copy.

USB 3.0 is great and fast. If your data is important enough that you want it to survive a one disc failure, look at a cloud solution, or a NAS. Something like this is pretty affordable. You buy it as well as two standard SATA drives, and put them in, and it keeps them mirrored. If one drive dies, it tells you, you swap it, and it rebuilds the mirror. This way two drives need to die before you get a replacement to lose your stuff. Well...or it could get destroyed in a fire or something. That's when cloud wins. But not everyone is up for paying a subscription.

How about;
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01BNPT1EG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496069850&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=synology&dpPl=1&dpID=31d8-qntl9L&ref=plSrch

I'm looking to buy a NAS, and looking at a synology DS216j. For PC Parts I use PC park picker to find the best deal, but they don't have NAS encolures listed there. Does anyone know of a site which lists these types of deals?

What I'm currently looking at Synology NAS DiskStation (DS216j) https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01BNPT1EG/

I've not worked for a truly small company, smallest is where I am right now with probably around 100 users on site and 50 or so more offsite, so my answers are more geared toward an actual enterprise setting, but I'd say that it really depends on need as for when the system should be reimaged. Can they make it without that computer until those parts come in or is it a huge burden where people will be taking 2 or 3 times longer to get things done?

Windows should do fine with the built-in things. If you're feeling motivated you could try linux as it usually has better functionality and is free, but you'll have a learning curve and they'll probably be fucked if you leave without teaching someone there how to do it. If they want to throw money at an easy solution, a NAS is only a couple hundred dollars. https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DS216J-NAS-DiskStation-DS216j/dp/B01BNPT1EG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1500340380&sr=8-3&keywords=NAS

I'd recommend one with at least 2 drives so you can set them up in RAID for data redundancy in case 1 drive fails. And alot of them allow for accessing files over the internet if they need something while away from the shop.

Depending on how secure you want the admin accounts to be, you can disable them so nosy people who shouldersurf still can't get into it and fuck things up. Then pop in a Hirens BootCD and enable the account when you need it. In fact, I'd recommend Hirens for anyone working in IT because it's just super fucking useful.

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

That's exactly what I'm planning to do. Thinking of getting Synology DS216J NAS DiskStation enclosing two 4TB WD Reds.

Have to mention that the RAID1 array was made like 4 years ago and had no hiccups with it what so ever, you guys have augmented my concerns of both drives failing anytime now given they have made it this far.

I wish I could say that the solution you seek is easy. I wish I could say that you have everything you need. Sadly, I do not believe you have a good platform from which to launch into all of the above points.

While your Seagate Storage Server does have quite a few capabilities of its own, it will be limited to the version of Windows that it was custom built to run. I have used other Windows Storage Server devices during my IT career ("dime a dozen Windows IT guy here") and I can pretty much tell you that Storage Servers have all been tailored to be fancy file servers that exist within a Windows Active Directory environment. Can they be tailored to do other things? Sure. But it's going to take quite a bit more than just some tinkering to get it right. Even then, the ease of use that you've identified in your goals will likely be sacrificed to a great extent.

All that being said, not all hope is lost. Your Storage Server can still be used as storage. But what you need now is to augment your daughter's "lab" with a laptop or desktop computer that can do all or as many of the other things as possible. As you've probably learned with the RPi, linux has many things to offer your little one. You have the storage. You just need something with a bit more flexibility to add the missing pieces.

Alternatively, if you were looking for a system that had most of the bells and whistles out of the box but could be tailored to your liking, a base level Synology NAS might fit your needs. A Synology NAS can actually act as a Wiki, A Blog, A file server for your daughter's art, a code repository (if programming is her thing), a media center with mobile app functionality (maybe for your husband?), and much, much more. A Synology DS 216 with at least one hard drive (depending on your budget) may be all you need and could really tick off all of those boxes.

These are just a couple of options and I'm certain others will have different suggestions. But I do believe you'll need to augment your current hardware to achieve your stated goals. Good luck! Your daughter is lucky to have a mom as caring and as interested in her growth as you.

If its for important stuff family related 1 copy on the 1tb drive (ext) off site and on a nas like https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01BNPT1EG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491200099&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=synology
Then run rclone on it automatically and sendit to acd

Yep, ok then you'll be just fine with a NAS. I'd highly recommend Synology as they're super easy to setup permissions for sharing files over a network.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BNPT1EG/

Keep in mind you still need to buy the hard drives to store all of your data, but if you setup the share correctly you should see the share on all of your computers over the network. It's as simple as dragging and dropping on your main computer. Then you just point Kodi to the network share and it will see the files.

That would be ideal if I could run Plex on the NAS but my needs are pretty simple so I can't justify buying an overly expensive NAS.

If I was to get a NAS like the Synology one in the link below, which is more of a lower end NAS would I be able to install Plex on it without any need for transcoding since I will only ever be streaming locally to my Android TV device?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01BNPT1EG/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1468320659&sr=8-3&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=synology+nas+2+bay&dpPl=1&dpID=31d8-qntl9L&ref=plSrch

If I wouldn't be able to do that I'd probably go with something cheaper like a WD my cloud + ES File Explorer & MX Player/VLC.

i ended up buying this stuff:

NAS:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BNPT1EG/ref=psdc_13436301_t1_B014YN6IK4


harddisk 2x 4 TB:

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WD4002FFWX-128MB-Cache/dp/B01CK5UBHE/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1505392774&sr=1-2&keywords=WD+Red+Pro+WD4002FFWX


This should be enough for quite some time for me - there arent so many 4k movies out there yet ;).

i hear that i will not be able to use Plex, to connect to my NAS and flawless play 4K movies (40-50Gigs), because plex will always try to transcode the 4k movies, for that they have to be stored locally.

but i should stick to using Kodi and just play the files on the NAS directly from there.

• advice on how to setup the nas / settings in plex / kodi or shield in general, is much appreciated.

> I can't download music outside iTunes.

Sure you can. You can download music with 3rd-party apps over WiFi pretty easily.

If you don't want to fill up the iPad you can save music to cloud services or to a local wireless storage device (like the Western Digital MyCloud), or to a home network-attached storage (NAS) unit like the $250 dual-drive QNAP TS-251 2-Bay Personal Cloud NAS (which you need to add drives to) or the $170 (also empty of drives) Synology DiskStation DS216j.

That budget makes this hard.

You have 2 options, DAS or NAS. A DAS would attach via usb, or a simmilar interface, while a NAS connects over internet.

For the DAS option, Id probably get something like the segate archive drives https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-STEB8000100/dp/B01HAPGEIE/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1480446876&sr=1-1&keywords=8tb+external+hard+drive

These are really cheap because they use SMR on the hdd. SMR makes it so that writes can be very slow, but reads are fine. I probably buy a second one or use a clould service like amazon's unlimited acd to back it up.

For NAS, Id probably get this https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DS216j-NAS-DiskStation/dp/B01BNPT1EG/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1480446978&sr=1-2&keywords=synology+nas

And 2x 4tb hdd's to go with it. Any hdd will work, but there are nas optimized drives like wd reds, that are lower power, have longer warranties, and have firmware that is designed to handle errors better.

Here is a drive id pick https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1480447066&sr=1-1&keywords=wd+red

Nah, I'm using an off-the-shelf solution, a rather low tier one at that, the Synology DS216J.

I was going to build a mini-ITX system around the Pentium G4560 or repurpose a used Dell OptiPlex or PowerEdge tower (T-series) since those are plentiful off of eBay and CL but I was wary of the size and power consumption. If size and power consumption aren't issues any of those would do wonders for a NAS and or home server.


I did just buy a used Intel NUC, one of the weaker dual-core Celeron ones but that has regular laptop RAM not ECC. It's just for cloud storage, it won't be syncing/backing up anything nor will there be any redundancy for it, I might just plug in some external hard drives and share them via SMB and have it function as a non-RAID NAS of sorts. A low power (7.5W TDP), small headless baby home server of sorts, but probably not enough for streaming/PLEX/transcoding type stuff.

Not particularly. You're looking at building a cheap NAS, which generally isn't that cheap.

Especially when you're dealing with that many drives of smaller size. If you really want to do something like this, you'll be much better off consolidating to something like a 4tb drive. You could still keep the 500gigs around though, never know when you'll need them. You may be able to save some friends ass when their drive goes out.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Network-Attached-Storage-DS216play/dp/B015JQAWW0

or even this - https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DS216J-NAS-DiskStation-DS216j/dp/B01BNPT1EG

If you won't mind me asking, what's wrong with this? It's $150 less than the one you linked to... in my mind it shouldn't take a very powerful system to provide dumb RAID1 and some configuration options. I'll be limited by the gbe connection so performance shouldn't be critical.



When I build a NAS for myself it'll definitely build something higher end and will likely get something with 10gbe in mind, ssd caching and RAID10, etc.... I just don't see a good reason for that in this case.

To clarify, I think you mean RAID-1, not 0.

I'd look at Synology. I love my DS216Play. The DS216j is pretty cheap too.

For the setup I am about to outline, my client has the following devices:

• DS216J
  
• 3TB HGST HDD
  
• TrendNET TV-IP321PI (720P Cameras)
  
  I have allocated 500GB per camera (five in total), which takes up 2.5TB. Three are set to record at 1280x960 and the others are in a smaller area, so they're set to record 640x480. I can usually get 3-4 weeks by setting each camera to record for 500GB each, which is plenty of time. I could easily add another 3TB or bigger HDD to get a total of two months record time as well.
  
  Another one of my clients has 4MP, 1080p Cameras with basically the same setup (different cameras, same NAS) and he gets 3 weeks of record time.

For ReadyNAS, the entry-level RN212 will fit most people just fine. If you want something cheaper, Synology makes the Diskstation DS216J, which has basically the same features minus the protection against data corruption (which may or may not be worth it for your uses).

Network attached (some say addressed) storage. They work great, and there is free software out there like FreeNAS and NAS4Free, just add a buch of matching(ish) hard drives and install your NAS OS