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Kamil Klapka

New Around Here
Hello,

I have read few reviews and few folders with recommendations but still not entirely sure what I should buy in order to neither underspent or overspent too much.

I would like to get some advice which device to choose for my needs. It should primarily auto-back up our machines – 2 laptops, ipad, few mobile phones (photos documents).

Here is summary of my use cases:

1. it should store photos/videos, photo books data, documents – at this moment it is something like 500 GB but it will definitely grow over time.

2. if it would be able to serve multi-media data to our TV or Blue Ray player it would be welcome, so I would not have to bother with flash drives, etc… TV is dumb so it would be possible to serve only via HDMI. BD should be DLNA capable (Sony BDP-S4500). So model with HDMI is probably preferable but anything able to stream to BD player could probably do as well.

3. VM. I am running on my laptop some software using JAVA for online, PBEM play of boardgames (software is called VASSAL). This software does not have any iOS or Android version yet. So if NAS would allow me to run this on VM and it would be possible to remotely connect to this VM via some remote app from iOS or Android it would be welcome. This is not high on my list of priorities but would be nice additional feature. Although I know that some people here does not recommend enabling NAS to be available from internet.

My main need is to setup hassle free backup of laptops so all of those picture, home videos, some important documents are automatically backup on NAS. Because we already lost some of these during our laptop drive failure and would like to avoid that as much as possible. Also we have lost some data due to human errors, so due to this some important folders (those with data for photo books which are in proprietary format of that particular photo book maker) will be stored in few version and we will avoid possible removal via human error. I was previously hoping that NAS would be both storage and back-up but as most of you have pointed I will invest in some USB HDD to back-up NAS as well.


My budget is up to 500 USD on device itself (without drives). Around my limit here in Europe are machines like:

QNAP TS-453 mini

Synology DS-415

QNAP TS-253A

Synology DS-415

Asustor AS-5104

But all of these are already on high side of my budget. So maybe something cheaper could fill my needs as well.

QNAP TS-251

QNAP TAS-268

Synology DS-216 Play

Asustor AS3102

One thing I am still not sure whether benefit of 4 bay is such big and makes it that much more future proof or whether 2 bay is more than enough for my needs. Also it is important to say that NAS would be sitting in living room, behind TV so it should not be too noisy and ugly (if possible).

Thank you in advance
Kamil
 
I chose a 2 bay and don't run RAID as I consider it too risky, and I have described on these forums how I use two drives, two volumes. Synology DS212 still running fine. Zero problems. Runs all the software updates in the last 3 years. I've updated the drive sizes once. It's silent.

A disk-less 2 bay is a lot less that US$500

Asustor - good potential. Less proven than Synology or QNAP.
 
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