Not entirely sure which forum to post this into, but hey ho.
My trusty old Synology 212J NAS has finally died over the weekend. Anyone have recommendations for a good replacement? My needs have changed since the last purchase (well over a decade ago) in as much as I will be sharing this with family members. Also, I want to set up a Plex Media Server on it. Lastly, accessibility of the web UI will be needed for initial set-up, but I will enable SSH/sftp access which I will use more often. Of course, should work with Mac, but I'll also be accessing from Windows.
thanks much for any suggestions.
Comments
The Apple-Flavoured Option
Mac Mini plus your choice of internal or external storage.
Upside: perfectly compatible and full-featured Apple ecosystem integration, perfectly accessible, lots of room for growth of purpose, low power, strong performance.
Downside: expensive, RAID support is weaker than that of Linux, not great as a router, packaging noticeably less good than on Linux distros so you will need a VM to benefit from Linux package managers or Docker/containers.
I think the upsides are worth it, personally, in a world of lock-in and inaccessible firmware. But I do find the downsides to be irritating, if ultimately unimportant.
Only Know Synology
I've always wanted to explore the world of Network Attached Storage (NAS) but with the price for the NAS enclosure, then the many hard drives to install into those enclosures, I kept putting it aside.
Thankfully one day, when I was searching NAS enclosures on Amazon, after hearing Jonathan Mosen talking about his use of a Synology NAS, I added a Synology DS420J to my wish list to hopefully purchase one day. I shared it with a friend of mine who had never heard of a NAS before, and before I knew it, he had bought the model I was looking at.
Now, The one nice thing of this friend, a year or two later, he outgrew his NAS and, after buying himself a 6 bay uGreen NAS, he kindly gave me his old enclosure. So after several months of saving up and buying a total of 4 drives, each 8 TB in capacity, I finally was able to set it up.
Now, the Synology Disk Station Management tool isn't 100% accessible, but finding a article on Synology's website recommending that I use NVDA with Firefox, I found the UI to be decent. It's not perfect but it's definitely doable if you take the time to play around.
For me, I simply wanted to create a file server so I could dump my files into it and create drives in File Explorer to specific folders so I could easily access them and it works beautifully.
It's not the most powerful NAS, but for my use case, it works beautifully.
I don't know much about NAS but I am learning more and more everyday. As for uGreen, my friend has mentioned that the mobile application is very accessible on iOS and you can do a whole lot from the app.
I know this might not be helpful, but thought I would talk about my limited experience with the NAS I was given.