Reddit mentions of Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS218j (Diskless)

One alternative to even a free option like Zoho is to get yourself a small Synology NAS. You can install a CRM on there that employees can access, just like any other CRM website. It's not completely free, but it's a one time cost versus a monthly subscription. Plus, you have a very useful NAS for sharing files, backups, and there are other apps available as well (like a human resources app). You can get a 2 bay NAS for about $167 and add 2 small harddrives if you don't need much storage. Or if you really want to be frugal, get the 1 bay version for $114.

Absolutely this.

If it's for business and your $$$ depends on it then the general rule is "3-2-1": 3 total copies of your data, 2 of which are local but on different mediums (read: devices), and at least 1 copy off-site. Get a NAS or an external hard drive.

Synology makes decent stuff and you can find something in your price range. This is a good start: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=nas&qid=1570326553&sr=8-3

With a limit of $150 OP isn't getting anything "professional" grade, but a basic Synology box should be fine.

You don't have to do top tier everything for a homelab.

Most people will never need managed switches, much less Cisco branded stuff. TP-Link makes competent and reasonably priced dumb switches.

For the router, I used to run pfSense on a custom PC build (~$300 about 6 years ago) but I'm already familiar with enterprise router settings and found all the features I could want in a consumer grade Asus router. At the end of the day, port forwarding, WiFi and OpenVPN are everything I'd ever want it to do. I can offload any heavy lifting or advanced features to my server.

If you're not looking to be super fancy, here's a simple homelab setup:

• Asus AC86U Router: $170.14
  
• 24 port TP-Link Switch: $89.99
  
• 8 port TP-Link Switch: $19.99
  
• 2 Bay Synology Diskstation: $166.87
  
• Dell PowerEdge R710 Server: $209.95
  
  You can swap up or down based on needs but the router does all the basic stuff most people will need it to do. The 24 port switch should be more than enough as the primary switch for most people. The 8 port switch is great for secondary locations. The diskstation can handle your backups and cloud storage and is a nice balance of convenience and price. The R710 server can handle Plex, NAS duties and probably some light duty VMs.
  
  The big add-on expense will be the hard drives, of course. You could probably get by shucking the 10TB easystore drives to save a bit.
  
  I use a custom built server (Xeon E3-1231 v3 @ 3.4GHz, 16 GB RAM, built around 2012 and upgraded the CPU a few years ago) and have never owned a R710 myself, so I can't say much on the actual limits of what you can do with it. That said, I'm suddenly really tempted to grab a R710 to use as network storage because I've reached the limit of my current server. The biggest weakness I see in the R710 is the CPU isn't too beefy but its still decent given the sheer number of (8)cores/(16)threads. Plex and less demanding game servers are probably the limit of what it can handle but it should easily handle a number of less demanding VMs.
  
  Anyways, as a starter setup, this should more than satisfy most people.

Hello! A small NAS should be a good solution for your company. If you want to increase the level of security you could always buy another NAS which replicates the first one. Another option would be a daily backup which you carry home with you after a work day. If your server gets destroyed the data is still save.


I don't know what exactly you mean with your question but some companies allow thier users to use addons or other services to download stuff directly on you NAS-Server (e.g. Synology, QNAP). For your local network the speeds should be sufficent but they won't be really good. Consumer NAS servers usually have a gigabit connection and can therefore transfere at a speed of ~100 MBps. For normal office work the speed should be enough and you won't notice any slowdowns.

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If you haven't bought a device yet you should consider buying an used industiral server with a good RAID controller and sufficent RAM. You can find these all over eBay and other platforms.

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Synology and QNAP are known for reasonable prices, easy installation and good speeds.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=nas+server+2+bay&qid=1563207524&s=gateway&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&sr=8-4

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https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Bay-DiskStation-DS218-Diskless/dp/B075N1BYWX/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=nas+server+2+bay&qid=1563207533&s=gateway&sr=8-3

ExFAT is fine for file sharing in between systems, but I would not work off of it, you might lose data.

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A better alternative imo would be a NAS via Gigabit. A dual drive RAID 1 NAS would be nice and you can plug it into your router and mount it either in Windows or macOS. I've used this "workaround" for ages and always avoid sharing drives in between systems.

Yes you can read NTFS in macOS and get drivers to write on it, but I don't trust them.

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If you need REALLY fast storage, maybe a 10GbE NAS would be better, which will cost you a bit more since you have to get a bigger NAS and PCIe cards for both the NAS and the Hackintosh

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To save costs, you can try to see if your wireless router has a USB 3.0 port because modern routers have the ability to share external hard drives on the network. All you have to do is plug your choice of external USB 3.0 drive to it and format it and share it from the routers menu.

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Just make sure your Hackintosh is wired via Gigabit and you should be saturating the network at around ~100-120MB/sec (depending how fast the CPUs on the router is)

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You can the network drive automount with a drive letter in Windows in This PC and also have it auto mount on macOS via a Apple script or something like Mountain.

I use a NAS that has a private "cloud" program. It's like my own personal dropbox. The NAS is a RAID array so if a harddrive fails, I have a mirror, and it can also back up the entire thing to Amazon S3 which is dirt cheap "cloud" storage. I highly reccomend a NAS setup... This one is great on a budget. (Keep in mind you'll have to get two drives to go in this thing too).

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1524775406&sr=1-3&keywords=synology+2+bay+nas+diskstation

It doubles as a DNS server, FTP server, Web server, Virtual Machine host, Surveillance Camera station and will even host a podcast RSS feed for you!

I feel like this price is a bit too much, its 169 brand new on amazon without the drives. I promise I am not trying to shit in your cereal - most people interested in NAS technologies would be buying 4tb drives minimum. Maybe you can get rid of the 1tb drive pair, but I know that I would prefer just the chassis.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ

For that amount you're going to be looking at a NAS like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=psdc_13436301_t1_B075N1BYWX#nav-top

As long as you're not doing heavy transcoding you should be fine.

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If you're looking for a PC that you can build yourself head over to r/buildapc for component lists.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ

That's what I have. I don't know if there's an updated model (or if this is the updated model). It has its own web portal where you can add plugins/apps and transfer files etc.

It's a bit pricey though, and if I was as technically savvy then as I am now, I would have just built a PC like the others are suggesting.

But if you want hassle-free, this is as easy as it gets.

And a note, upgrading is a bitch (this is for all NAS's though). I went with one disk first and tried to add a second, but you need format the whole thing together as one LVM...

I have a Home Lab situation with 2 server with above 20TB storage in one of them. I can install VMs & Dockers & on the Server's OS.

I have a nextcloud docker <-best software for self hosted cloud where I can expand my cloud as I desire not as much as my wallet has.
This is off course is a small portion of what my home lab does. I also stream movies to my family and friends from Plex, also have a music streaming service I use for listening to music on the go from my home library.

in your case if you have no idea about any of this you can get a home NAS witha a single drive or 2 for redundancy. https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1550568800&sr=8-3&keywords=nas
the onboard software will help you configure your own cloud and more.

Dropping idle power usage is tough, and dropping max-speed power usage isn't really beneficial since it won't save much money (unless you plan on having your CPU crunching for long periods of time).

Honestly, your best bet is to get a system meant for lower power usage. You can sometimes shave off a few watts from idle on a "big" computer, but you risk stability issues, and an unstable NAS is a pointless NAS.

My recommendation is to look into Synology units. I have an old DS216j that uses something like 15-25 watts on load, far less on idle. Most of the power usage is by the disks, which are set to hibernate when not being used.

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ

Here's an example of a unit that might be good. These aren't good as media streaming servers, but if you're looking for a place to dump some drives and storage that can manage itself well and do stuff like automatic backups, then they're awesome. They make more powerful units, too, but those of course use more power on idle (especially if they're x86 units with i3s and stuff).

Is $119 a good deal to get a synology 2 bay DS218j NAS? I've been wanting to get a dedicated plex server for movies and tv running and this seems like a decent pricepoint. Anyone have one of these?

> Is RAID the same as Bay (e.g. 2-Bay NAS)?

No raid is different, here's a vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7Bfw9lFfs

Would not recommend, that specific product got a 3.5 rating on Amazon. I generally don't trust anything under a 4 rating.

I would recommend something like:
https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ

filled with: https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE

** make sure you pick the correct size hard drive.

I gotta respond to a fellow Owl! I also did similar topic replies earlier today. If the 350GB HDD is running your OS then your first step would to be to get a cheap 250gb SSD and transfer your OS onto there. How many extra HDDs bays do you have within your computer? Next step would be to get a 8TB or 10TB shuckable HDD on sale, Easystore and Elements drives are good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/dmisv3/anyone_familiar_with_backblaze_storage_pods/f55nxpp/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/dmvcqc/bestbuy_easystores_8tb_130_10tb_160/
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-500GB-Internal-MZ-76E500B-AM/dp/B07864WMK8/

But to expand upon that it really depends on how much money you want to spend and the quality of a setup you can get by with for now. As history has shown, every dollar you spend now gets you less than what you can get next year. Putting that aside though, you do need a base level set up and upgrade from there. The cheapest is just to reuse your computer as a "NAS". You could purchase Drivepool (Windows) if you want to pool/combine all of the drives onto one drive letter/mount point or use free MergerFS (Linux) standalone or within OMV4 OS (also free).

There is a real void in the market for cheap low end stuff that you can expand cheaply. You can use USB external storage, but USB is finicky so don't trust any raid setups via USB, but Snapraid might be ok'ish... You want a network attachment with one of the following.
https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc2
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076G6YKWZ/
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/nas-killer-4-0-build-guide-fast-quiet-power-efficient-and-flexible-starting-at-125/667/12

Since you already have a computer up and running then you can skip the odroid, but it's still good for standalone NAS backups of your OS or VMs. The Synology is new AND it is network attached, not USB attached; however it is only 2 bay (4 bay is too pricey), it has minimal processing power and upgradeability with no storage expandability. Depending on your location and shipping then ebay would have the highest value per dollar spent if you make the right purchase and the used device doesn't crap out shortly after... I made a ton of posts on all this, so if you want start reading up. Just click on the link then read and keep following the links and reading, have fun.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/d56cfr/best_upgrade_from_a_single_drive/f0nxotm/

Would this one suffice?

Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS218j (Diskless) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_lGe4DbR0HSMKX

Synology NAS

Buy this and two hard drives, and for all intents and purposes your data will be immune to hard drive failure.

Or just get a cheap USB hard drive to back them up.

It's 2018, "the hard drive might crash" is no longer an excuse not to store things digitally. NAS devices, USB storage, and online backups have rendered that concept obsolete.

Beep. Boop. I'm a bot.

It seems the URL that you shared contains trackers.

Try this cleaned URL instead: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_4

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1. Won't answer since others have already answered.
   
2. Take a course on Ubuntu (my own course sadly is not ready). I am not too certain of one for 18.04. There is a quite a difference between 16.04 (April 2016) and 18.04 (April 2018)'s release in look and feel. (This is expected to be a one time change.)
   
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   If you want privacy you need to host things yourself. An easy starter would be to setup Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ on all your computers and sync common work and personal folders. I do this for my business's work and documents. It can scale to large videos and projects very well so you can use it to setup a remote backup server with a friendly gui.
   
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   When you are ready to get more advanced you can buy a little NAS (a tutorial linked below) and setup both syncthing and Nextcloud https://nextcloud.com/ on it. Nextcloud is a google drive/docs replacement.
   
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   https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ
   
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   It's a little advanced so if you can just run syncthing on your computers would be a good start.
   
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   There are quite a few free tutorials for the open source equivalent applications. See below for my picks for the equivalent on Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
   
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   https://wyatttechcourses.com/pages/free_tutorials
   
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3. I do not see why not. If you buy enterprise (and Intel) it will work flawlessly because Linux dominates the enterprise, server, and scientific computing (and hollywood rendering). Linux does have trouble getting support for consumer devices (esp cheap ones) and bluetooth is a mixed bag. Software for your field is the real issue as I make course videos and the open source stuff just isn't ready. (OBS is an exception and now dominates the industry for streaming.)
   
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   If you buy a laptop I highly recommend System76. Laptops have a lot of custom work in them that makes it difficult for the community to get working 100% on Linux. System76 does a lot of little things like contributing to patches, flashing Linux friendly custom firmware to get things working 100%, and they offer lifetime support. (They just sent me a free replacement for a v key I just broke off.) Plus you will be supporting a Linux vendor.
   
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   https://system76.com/laptops
   
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   (WyattTechCourses has no affiliation with System76.com, I just buy all my laptops from them.)
   
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   Edit: reddit's formatting does not want to cooperate.

There's lots of options, but you don't specify a budget, and that makes it hard.

After many years in consulting IT, I wouldn't trust a thin client further than an ant could throw it; they're terribly engineered and are treated as disposable hardware for a reason.

Buy a two-bay consumer NAS, like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1537810617&sr=1-2&keywords=synology+to+disk

Doesn't have to be Synology - Buffalo makes some, as do a pile of other manufacturers. The NAS is only slightly larger than an external USB disk. Most of them can be configured as internet-accessible and support SMB and CIFS, and anything along these lines is going to be more power-efficient than any other setup I can think of.

Using just a raw external disks is a bad idea; you're going to run into problems with them not mounting correctly after a reboot and breaking your share configuration.

They're nice from what I've seen however for the most part, a NAS will function the same as all other NAS devices. It's from it's basic functionality where you will see a difference. I know that Synology is kind of the benchmark of NAS devices. They have great support and operate on a Linux based OS which is great. Also they have a lot of backup options and free appliances which from what I've read the WD MyCloud and other devices don't have.

On Amazon you're going to find the best price for most devices new. IMO this https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=synology&qid=1556817727&s=gateway&sr=8-2 plus 2X4TB WD Red drives is a better option.

Are you running Plex Media Server on another machine and want the NAS just for storage? If so, go cheap: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ?keywords=synology+ds218&qid=1539186120&sr=8-4&ref=sr_1_4

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Do NOT go that route if you want it to run PMS. You'd have to step it up a bit to something more powerful.

I'm using a Synology NAS. I tried to use my WD NAS but it's software was pretty limited it what it can do. If you're just starting out I'd recommend a 2-bay NAS, Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS218j (Diskless) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_a9D0BbA1AWCDS

Also the DS218j for $119. I think everyone should get one of those to use for HyperBackup.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076G6YKWZ

Hey JDM! I'm literally 5 minutes into my NAS server research. Looking to stream mostly music but movies/plex is absolutely something I'm looking at. Anyways I'm just curious why you call your build the NAS Killer? How is it better than say if I just went on amazon and bought something like this:

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https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218-Diskless/dp/B075N1BYWX?ref_=Oct_BSellerC_13436301_2&pf_rd_p=2028c04d-42d7-5f82-a3ec-2aaeb0d7bb30&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-6&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=13436301&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=RBXMZ9ZBTG36MNNW4N28&pf_rd_r=RBXMZ9ZBTG36MNNW4N28&pf_rd_p=2028c04d-42d7-5f82-a3ec-2aaeb0d7bb30

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or this:

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS218j-Diskless/dp/B076G6YKWZ?ref_=Oct_BSellerC_13436301_1&pf_rd_p=2028c04d-42d7-5f82-a3ec-2aaeb0d7bb30&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-6&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=13436301&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=RBXMZ9ZBTG36MNNW4N28&pf_rd_r=RBXMZ9ZBTG36MNNW4N28&pf_rd_p=2028c04d-42d7-5f82-a3ec-2aaeb0d7bb30

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Also your website looks like an amazing resource, I'm looking forward to digging through it!

Synology is very reliable and not too complicated. It has its own interface you access through a web browser plus you can attach additional drives to it. You can run 2 drives in RAID for redundancy or run them as a single drive (if you are daring).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076G6YKWZ

I also have a few of these:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003X26VV4

It doesn't have any management interface but works well for attaching to a USB interface such as to your modem/router and does different types of RAID.

Other than that, people suggest you get a cheap PC box and build your own, get some experience that way.

Edit: updated links

Why cloud? I would just buy a backup appliance. Something that the drives can be replaced.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076G6YKWZ/ref=psdc_13436301_t1_B00OZ0CTAU