slurmsmckenzie
Occasional Visitor
Hello, would very much appreciate thoughts on my upgrade options - I have a Readynas 202 which I bought over 6 years ago and added my own WD Red 3TB disks - I'm using X-RAID and mirroring the drives. It has been largely fine, but I'm nearing capacity so would like to upgrade it. As it happens I've also got two 6TB WD Reds from around 2016-2017 (so before the SMR scandal) which are about to be removed from a different system and become available. The are both about 5-6 years old and have around 800 days power on time, HD Sentinel says they are PERFECT and have 1,000+ days of life remaining.
First up, would anyone caution against using the old 6TB drives in place of the existing 3TB drives in my Readynas 202, as a straight upgrade? Is it foolish to use old disks in this way, perhaps inviting potential issues in the not too distant future given it is just a 2-bay system?
The other factor is that I've noticed the 202 can't cope as well as I expected with media playback via DLNA on my new Sony A90K. Just watching medium-bitrate 1080p MP4s causes skips, and it takes an age to start watching a video in the first place - this shouldn't be my network which is wired gigabit between the TV and the Readynas. So I was thinking about whether I could upgrade the 202, given it is over 6 years old - but then stumbled upon the news that Netgear have discontinued Readynas, and so my first choice no longer exists. Also I'm concerned about whether Readynas OS 6 will get any updates in the future if they are shelving the product line, so this adds to reasons to move on from the 202. Any thoughts on that?
So, if I go for a completely new NAS, is there any particular reason to go with (or indeed avoid) any of the three main options of Synology, QNAP or Asustor? I realise that is a much-had discussion, but would appreciate any thoughts based on my use-case - we use the NAS for document / photo storage mainly, along with backups from various PCs in the house and I'd also like to use it to watch some media on my TV. I don't plan to use it for virtual machines etc. but I would like to have a capable system that will last a good few years. Oh and I have no intention of allowing access to the NAS from the outside world. Note that I currently back the NAS contents up to a USB drive on a daily basis via rsync.
One of the things about Synology is that their current HDD compatability list doesn't include my 6TB WD Reds (WD60EFRX) so I had thought about avoiding them for that reason, but then maybe I should be getting new drives anyway so that doesn't count against them? General thoughts would be much appreciated!
First up, would anyone caution against using the old 6TB drives in place of the existing 3TB drives in my Readynas 202, as a straight upgrade? Is it foolish to use old disks in this way, perhaps inviting potential issues in the not too distant future given it is just a 2-bay system?
The other factor is that I've noticed the 202 can't cope as well as I expected with media playback via DLNA on my new Sony A90K. Just watching medium-bitrate 1080p MP4s causes skips, and it takes an age to start watching a video in the first place - this shouldn't be my network which is wired gigabit between the TV and the Readynas. So I was thinking about whether I could upgrade the 202, given it is over 6 years old - but then stumbled upon the news that Netgear have discontinued Readynas, and so my first choice no longer exists. Also I'm concerned about whether Readynas OS 6 will get any updates in the future if they are shelving the product line, so this adds to reasons to move on from the 202. Any thoughts on that?
So, if I go for a completely new NAS, is there any particular reason to go with (or indeed avoid) any of the three main options of Synology, QNAP or Asustor? I realise that is a much-had discussion, but would appreciate any thoughts based on my use-case - we use the NAS for document / photo storage mainly, along with backups from various PCs in the house and I'd also like to use it to watch some media on my TV. I don't plan to use it for virtual machines etc. but I would like to have a capable system that will last a good few years. Oh and I have no intention of allowing access to the NAS from the outside world. Note that I currently back the NAS contents up to a USB drive on a daily basis via rsync.
One of the things about Synology is that their current HDD compatability list doesn't include my 6TB WD Reds (WD60EFRX) so I had thought about avoiding them for that reason, but then maybe I should be getting new drives anyway so that doesn't count against them? General thoughts would be much appreciated!
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