4+ bay NAS w/btrfs support

[SemiChemE]

A NAS newbie here.

I'm looking for an economical 4+ bay NAS with btrfs support. This would mostly be a backup solution for my various devices and computers, as well as hosting your standard (not extremely large) photo and music collections. Cost isn't the biggest consideration, but I'd rather not spend a ton of money on features that I'd never use. On the other hand, as a newbie, I don't want to pass up any must-have features, just because I'm unaware of how useful they are. Ditto for future proofing for a substantially faster network sometime down the line. Most important is the back up capability and organization (hence btrfs and snapshots, which I've used at work and really like). I do think one of these might also motivate me to play around with an IP camera, though that's not a high priority.

I'm leaning toward the Asustor AS4004T, which, so far, is the cheapest system I can find that supports btrfs. PCmag recommends the AS5304T, which has a better processor, more memory, and is probably faster, but seems like overkill for my needs, especially considering that for the time being my home network is 1GBE and does not support link aggregation. I also see the AS6404T, but that's even more expensive and not clearly better than the newer AS5304T. On the Synology side, there's the DS418play, which is in the same price category as the AS5304T. Their lower-cost options do not appear to support btrfs, except for the DS718+, but that's only 2-bay and costs more than the AS4004T.

Anyway, am I on the right track? Any reason I should pass on the AS4004T and hold out for one of the more expensive solutions? On the other hand it looks like I could save a few bucks on the AS3204T or AS1004T, and truthfully, these would probably meet my needs, but then I lose btrfs and the future-proofing that comes with a 10GBE connection. Finally, I know there are other brands out there (QNAP, Buffalo, Netgear). Any interesting products I just have to check out before I make my final decision?

 

[L&LD]

I would not suggest anyone use the buggy/unstable BTRFS file system. Why are you looking for this specifically?

The QNAP/Synology equivalents (at least, cost-wise) would be a better buy for data you care about.

The QNAP 3Bay models and better are where I would start looking.

Also, keep in mind about this issue with WD RED drives, you want the 8TB/10TB models for best performance and reliability (heat).

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech

 

[Callinc]

I can say I’ve used An WD EXT4 and multiple Qnap NAS boxes and if strongly encourage you to look at either QNAP or Synology. From a ton of research they seem to be some of the best go to brands. If you are a tinkerer then a DIY solution could also be a much cheaper option (free nas, unraid etc.). You basically pay a King’s ransom for a prepackaged NAS. When you look at the hardware specs you could build a much more capable machine for far cheaper.

Some other notes: synology uses the Btrfs system but I’m not sure if I’d focus on that. Snapshots are definitely something to have but, an EXT4 system can do them as well. I have a Qnap 453be with snapshots enabled. Works great. Ext4 is also way more popular. ZFS seems to be the ideal but all the recommendations for it put it out of most people’s price range if you care about your data. It’s ram intensive and it’s recommended to use ECC ram making it that much more costly.

Also, once you have an always on “server” you will start to look for more things you can do with it. The cpu and ram will be a serious limiting factor so don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Go with more bays then you think you need and consider upgrading the cpu and ram over 10GBE. Reason for that is your cpu and HDDs will be a bottle neck before your LAN speed. 10GBE won’t get you anywhere faster if your using a standard 5400 rpm nas drive. SSD would make it matter but those darn things cost a pretty penny and don’t really have the capacity to make them a viable large storage option. They are best left for boot drives or cache drives.


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[SemiChemE]

@L&LD - I definitely want snapshot capability. BTRFS may have some issues, but it appears to be a very efficient way (in time, compute power, and storage) to implement it. I'll look into it more, though Synology seems to be a huge advocate for it. Thanks for the heads up on on SMR in WD RED. I'm certainly tempted by the low prices of those 6TB drives.

@Callinc - Synology is definitely on my radar. I haven't dug into the QNAP product line, but perhaps I should take a closer look. I take it you are not impressed with Asustor? They seem to have an impressive line up that matches Synology quite closely, but a bit cheaper. Of course, sometimes you get what you pay for. I expect customer support to be lacking, but they seem to have some nice features and are getting quite good reviews.

I'm not really keen on rolling together a DIY solution. I get enough tech everyday in the office, where I literally build transistors. (about a million billion a day!) I'm happy to pay someone else to do the design work and put it in a pretty package complete with nice software and automation tools. Besides, half of my interest is to better understand what they are packaging with these things. I keep hearing that Synology and Asustor systems have hundreds of downloadable apps and I can't help but wonder why on earth you need so many apps for such a simple appliance? Maybe I'm showing my ignorance?

Anyway, I'm really trying to understand what are the must-have features on these things. Clearly, speed is nice, but I'm going to be limited by my 1GB connection and like you said, a spinning hard drive can only go so fast anyway. Add in the fact that I'll often be connecting over WiFi and I can't help but wonder if I really need anything more powerful than a Marvel ARM processor w/ 2GB RAM? So, what am I missing, why is CPU and Memory so important? What does that Quad Core Celeron or a core i3 get me? Why do I need to upgrade to 8GB RAM? I mean I could understand if I was serving a ton of users, needed military grade encryption, or even for streaming 4K video to a few devices, but to serve up files in a home environment and do scheduled backups, isn't that overkill?

Admittedly, the techie in me would love to grab a DS1019+, jam it with five 10TB drives and be done with the matter, but that small voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that would be a huge waste. Where is the right balance? What's powerful enough, so I can explore the capabilities of an always on server, play around with RAID, get my backups done and ensure my data is safe?

 

[L&LD]

QNAP can do snapshots. Not a big (differential) selling point today.

Old school formats 'rock' because they are proven robust. BTRFS isn't there even now.

To me, the point of a NAS is (one way) of safeguarding my data. BTRFS isn't doing it.

 

[Callinc]

So I’m not trying to knock asustor as I have no experience with them. I can say the WD nas I got was the first setup I moved to for our small office. Figured the same thing, just sharing pdf and excel files right?!? Well the thing chocked on itself if you tried to run their built in virus scan. It was so under powered while it was scanning it was unusable. Spent a week dealing with their tech support before I learned the hard way it was just not up to the task. I then decided to move to a Qnap TVs-471 core I 3. Wow- the difference was indescribable. It’s quite capable especially with 16 GB of ram.

So what will you do with this thing and what does a good cpu do for you in a nas? Well if you have a large media library google emby or Plex. You can turn a capable nas into a private Netflix server. I’ll leave the details for another form.

Different raid modes can be used with a better cpu (in my opinion). For example, raid 5 is great for the amount of useable space you keep BUT the rebuilds are cpu intensive. Have an underpowered cpu and choose anything other than raid 1 or 10 and you could have a very large window of risk. If you loose another drive during the rebuild it’s all over but the crying.

*thats why you need to remember raid is not a backup.*

Another great thing you might want to tinker with are virtual machines. Qnap makes it super easy to do. You could create a virtual raspberry pi and run home assistant (open source home automation) or one of my favorites is pi-hole (network level ad blocking).

My point is the nas box costs a pretty penny. If all you want are file access see if your router has a USB port and use an external drive. Look for some syncing software and have your PC mirror it. If you want to try a demo of Qnap see the below link.

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/live-demo/


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[MichaelCG]

I looked at it this way for my home use:
- No more than 2-3 active users ever
- 1Gbps is more than enough for the next 3-5 years (WiFi is my choke point at 300-400Mbps)
- 4 bays is better than 2 (provides more future flexibility and doesn't require buying larger drives that aren't at the optimal price point)
- CPU - wanted x86 and more cores
- wanted to move 2 basic VMs off of a Windows server (retire server since it was doing NAS and VM duties)
- Memory - wanted more to support said VMs
- Plex - also running on the Windows box that I want to retire

I almost bought the DS418play as well but ended up with a DS918+ instead. I still wish it had more CPU behind it, but I wasn't willing to jump to the next price point to get it......yet. With my requirement for Plex and VMs, I didn't think the 418play would have enough CPU nor memory to meet my needs.

 

[Mark070]

I agree with @MichaelCG for most of his bullet points. I use a Synology DS1515+ (5 bays / Intel CPU). It is, by today's standards, an older setup. For me, its pure file storage in that I run it with 5 x 2 TB WD Reds in a SHR-2 configuration (EXT4). Yeah, I waste disk space. and I have external drives I back the data up to.

The rebuilds of the Array takes a few days to complete (especially when I added a drive and switched to SHR-2 from SHR-1; two rebuilds).

If I plan to run a server (Plex/VM etc), it will be a separate server; with the DS1515+ acting more like a SAN (iSCSI or what ever).

Also, agree with the more bays the better. I, personally, believe the 5 bays is the "slightly" overkill range for 2-3 users (which is what I have as well).