Choosing a NAS for home photo and video storage

[Markus_loy]

Hi,
over the years I’ve built up a pretty large collection of photos and videos, and it keeps growing. I’ve been looking into external storage options and ended up thinking that a NAS would probably be the best solution. From what I understand, it can handle automatic backups and should be reliable enough for long-term storage.
I’d like to have two backups, and the Synology DS223j looks like a good fit for home use.
I’d appreciate any advice on whether this is a good choice, what I should watch out for when picking a NAS, or if there’s a better option I should consider.
I want to be able to access my files from both my phone and my computer, and my main priority is long-term reliability.

 

[louie1961]

I personally think you cannot beat Synology. Their software is the best in the industry, hands down, in my opinion.Especially if you just want it to work and don't want to do a lot if tinkering. Their hardware always gets knocked as being under powered. If you are using your NAS as a server for other software (like docker apps), then yeah, it may not be the best hardware. But I find it more than adequate, especially because I have a real server, and I don't run anything extra on my NAS. I am not a fan of any 2 bay NAS. I would recommend 5-6 bays even if you don't fill them all initially. It will perform better, and it leaves you room for expansion. I had a DS-221+ for a long time. It was good, but about 9 months ago I upgraded to a DS-1621+. Its a discontinued model now, but I think its a good value, and you can still buy them new from many stores. It has the same CPU as the new DS-1825+, has a PCI slot if you want to upgrade the networking and it has six drive bays. I filled up 4 of them and I have room to expand if need be.I would stick with at least the "+" models, personally.

What does your budget look like?

 

[Markus_loy]

Thanks for the reply, it helped a ton!

 

[ServerSonic]

You did not mention how much storage you need, but agree with @louie1961 - the Syno is the easy button, especially if that's all you want to do. It's been a while since I've used one, but last I looked there were built in sync utilities for all the major cloud providers. I do recommend that anything that you backup to your NAS gets synced to the cloud.

The one factor to consider in this equation is how you will get your photos to your NAS. If you are copying them manually over SMB/CIFS, that's easy enough. If you plan on syncing via any given application, which perhaps may run containerized, ensure that this application is available on your Syno.

 

[louie1961]

I also think while the hardware on a Synology is not best in class, if you get the right device, you can make these fairly performant. On my DS-1621, because of the PCI upgrade slot, I put in an Intel X550T2 dual port RJ45 10g network card. This one cost me $100. There are cheaper cards around, but I like this one because it is backwards compatible and will support 5gbe, 2.5gbe. an 1gbe conections. This unit also can accomodate two NVME drives. I used the two drives to set up a read/write cache with the BTRFS metadata pinned to the cache as well. Works well as remote storage for my docker containers using the docker NFS driver directly from my docker compose files. No need to mess with FSTAB or mounting NFS shares. And the NVME storage even makes all the small data base writes efficient.

 

[gea]

Your options with preconfigured hardware
Synology=Linux + SAMBA SMB server + btrfs + web-gui with many apps

Main alternative with similar approach is Qnap with ZFS and often better hardware

Other Options based on your own/any hardware
Proxmox=Linux with ZFS, optimimized for VM usage but can be used as NAS with SAMBA or the faster ksmbd
Storage web-gui: Cockpit/Poolsman or the multi-os napp-it cs

OmniOS=Unix/Opensolaris fork + Solaris ZFS/kernelbased SMB server
most stable ZFS with lowest resource needs, only Linux/Unix option with similar ACL/permission advantages than Windows like group in groups, ntfs alike permissions, unique Windows sid instead simple uid/gid numbers as ACL reference
web-gui: napp-it se

Windows 11 Pro or Windows Server (best is a cheap Essentials up from v2019 with 25 users)
Best and fastest option if you want to edit 4k+ videos from NAS with SMB Direkt (25-100G RDMA nics and 3-10GByte/s over SMB)
Best of all ACL options, Active Directory, HyperV for VMs, Storage Spaces and OpenZFS (release candidate, nearly ready)
storage web-gui: Windows or napp-it cs (Storage Spaces and ZFS)

 

[louie1961]

Synology=Linux + SAMBA SMB server + btrfs + web-gui with many apps

Its the many apps part that makes a difference. For me and my uses, I have yet to find software packages that can replace Synology Drive, Synology photos or Hyberbackup. I tried Nextcloud, Opencloud, Owncloud, and oCIS. None of them were just as dead easy to use or maintain ad Synology drive. None of them could easily do what Synology Quickconnect can do. Same story with Synology Photos. I tried Immich, its OK, but it doesn't allow user accounts to share facial recognition data. In Synology photos, I can tag people in photos, and that applies to my wife's account as well. Can't do that with Immich. And there is nothing out there as easy to use as Hyberbackup. I use one app to backup to the Synology C2 cloud, Cloudflare R2 object storage, a multi copy version to a local USB drive and single version to a local USB drive. Its just so convenient.