My Newbie Experience Getting Into NAS

[drrich2]

Appreciate everyone's input on RAID; don't think I'd heard of any version between 1 and 5.

Someone recommended getting a UPS for power outages; it's my understanding the batteries in them may occasionally need replacing over time. I don't know just which models support that well, how much it costs, how long the interval is likely to be before that's needed or how often people just buy a new one instead. Another of those 'wander off into the weeds' topics, but one that might be helpful if anybody has some insight. UGreen makes one for its NAS; there are some brands I don't know the relative merits of (I'd Google reviews, check Wirecutter, etc.).

Also worth noting (didn’t see it or may have missed it) Synology kicks you to their drives on their newer models whereas UGREEN doesn’t.

Someone mentioned they stopped doing that on HDDs; if I understood correctly, they may still do it on NVMe's (check if that's important).

I use openZFS on my raid - the usual learn the open source approach and modify to suit your needs, I think your approach is less work than the openZFS approach

I hope people who went the DIY will post details of their setups and what the learning curve was like. It feels odd discussing it in Mac forum, since Macs are famous in part for intuitive ease-of-use and NAS are...perhaps I might say 'diamonds in the rough,' in that you have to do some 'mining' to get into it?

As for Thunderbolt, I couldn't imagine having a NAS in the same room as me; they are noisy! I keep mine in the storage area of the basement.

The noise thing is hard to convey even in YouTube reviews, to the point I've seen NASCompares use an instrument to measure decibels in a review.

I'm told lower capacity HDDs are quieter than the really big ones, but what about this - if someone had 2 12-terabyte HDDs and another had 4 6-terabyte HDDs, which would be noisier? Of course, the 1st would probably be in RAID 1 with 12 terabytes usable space, the later RAID 5 with 18-terabytes usable space.

The discs in the QNAP are Western Digital RED so they are quiet in a home environment and built to run continuously for very long periods - 1703 days of being powered on according to the current stats and no abnormal sectors.

Are they quiet like in would be no bother sitting beside your Mac and display, or more like okay sitting elsewhere in the room?

How noisy a NAS with HDDs would be was something I couldn't get a good feel for.

 

[mk313]

Someone recommended getting a UPS for power outages; it's my understanding the batteries in them may occasionally need replacing over time. I don't know just which models support that well, how much it costs, how long the interval is likely to be before that's needed or how often people just buy a new one instead. Another of those 'wander off into the weeds' topics, but one that might be helpful if anybody has some insight. UGreen makes one for its NAS; there are some brands I don't know the relative merits of (I'd Google reviews, check Wirecutter, etc.).

I know absolutely nothing about NAS's. I did get a synology last year to do time capsule backups. After a power failure corrupted the backups & made me start over, I purchased this UPS:

APC UPS Battery Backup and Surge Protector, 600VA/330 Watts Backup Battery Power Supply, BE600M1 Back-UPS with USB Charger Port​

Got it off amazon & it gets great reviews. The thing I liked best about it is it came with a cable that I could plug into my synology & now sinology mono tires the battery life remaining on the UPS & does a shut down it it starts to get close to running out of power.

I have had a UPS for a long time in my office (not for the NAS, but just for my internet & router, so I can keep working if the power goes out). They've always been APC brand and they've always worked well. The first one didn't have a replaceable battery, which is really the only fault I could find with any of the ones I've had. APC's have been solid, but make sure to get one with a replaceable battery.

 

[throAU]

Yes, it's a pity that none of the NAS vendor OSs use ZFS (no, QNAP's QuTS Hero doesn't use real ZFS).

ZFS is great, but honestly, bit-rot it protects from isn’t such a big deal if you do backups properly because you constantly have multiple copies to restore from if you DO encounter an issue in a file. Even ZFS won’t protect you against all failure modes (e.g., house fire), so you need multiple copies anyway.

As a priority: Worry less about what individual copy of your data is stored on and more about how many copies you have, where they are, and what different failure scenarios they protect against.

The big scenarios (that each wipe out different types of backup) being: drive failure, human error, malware, account compromise or something catastrophic like theft or house fire (where you may lose both your backup and your device if they’re in the same place!).

For most normies, time machine with two disks is a great start. Encrypt them both and keep the passwords in your password manager. Keep one disk at home and one somewhere else. Swap them once a month or so.

If you get into setting up a NAS, i’d still suggest using that for your primary backup over WIFI via time machine or some other 100% automatic method (because everybody is lazy and automatic just makes it painless) and then have a second copy either in icloud or a second time machine disk via external drive that you store at work or somewhere else.

Doing the above things i have zero concerns about losing data, ever. If any single device dies, gets stolen or catches fire, i have other copies in other locations. If my machine gets malware and the malware wipes out everything my machine is connected to, i still have a drive that was disconnected in a different physical location, and 30 days of version history in iCloud (and BackBlaze).

Once you’ve figured out how many copies and where to put them, then determine which physical storage mechanisms are the best fit for you (cloud, NAS, external drives, etc. - or a mix) based on price, technical ability, laziness, etc.




But yes, great write up OP!

 

[TheHareBear]

Appreciate everyone's input on RAID; don't think I'd heard of any version between 1 and 5.

Someone recommended getting a UPS for power outages; it's my understanding the batteries in them may occasionally need replacing over time. I don't know just which models support that well, how much it costs, how long the interval is likely to be before that's needed or how often people just buy a new one instead. Another of those 'wander off into the weeds' topics, but one that might be helpful if anybody has some insight. UGreen makes one for its NAS; there are some brands I don't know the relative merits of (I'd Google reviews, check Wirecutter, etc.).


Someone mentioned they stopped doing that on HDDs; if I understood correctly, they may still do it on NVMe's (check if that's important).


I hope people who went the DIY will post details of their setups and what the learning curve was like. It feels odd discussing it in Mac forum, since Macs are famous in part for intuitive ease-of-use and NAS are...perhaps I might say 'diamonds in the rough,' in that you have to do some 'mining' to get into it?


The noise thing is hard to convey even in YouTube reviews, to the point I've seen NASCompares use an instrument to measure decibels in a review.

I'm told lower capacity HDDs are quieter than the really big ones, but what about this - if someone had 2 12-terabyte HDDs and another had 4 6-terabyte HDDs, which would be noisier? Of course, the 1st would probably be in RAID 1 with 12 terabytes usable space, the later RAID 5 with 18-terabytes usable space.


Are they quiet like in would be no bother sitting beside your Mac and display, or more like okay sitting elsewhere in the room?

How noisy a NAS with HDDs would be was something I couldn't get a good feel for.

Elsewhere in the room would be better. They are pretty quiet but not silent so it’s going to be personal preference rather than how to deal with some noisy thing. Mine doubles as a Plex server and is in the same room as the TV and I’ve never thought about moving it elsewhere.

They are nowhere near as noisy as SCSI discs I’ve had in the past.

Andrew

 

[TheHareBear]

Elsewhere in the room would be better. They are pretty quiet but not silent so it’s going to be personal preference rather than how to deal with some noisy thing. Mine doubles as a Plex server and is in the same room as the TV and I’ve never thought about moving it elsewhere.

I did choose the WD RED deliberately as quieter discs and they are 4 x 3.something gig as that was cost effective when buying them a few years ago.

They are nowhere near as noisy as SCSI discs I’ve had in the past.

Andrew

 

[keksikuningas]

Maybe a weekend? Only because unraid has much more functionality than I expected. I initially just wanted bulk storage, but I found myself setting up Jellyfin for media streaming and a bunch of other utilities.



I bought a NAS case from Newegg - they have a ton of options for this sort of thing. From there I just went down to Micro Center for an ITX motherboard, a cheap ryzen APU, memory, cache SSD, and a pair of 12TB drives. I specifically went with Unraid so that I could add drives to the storage pool later of need be - not simple to do with something like ZFS, as I understand it.

I definitely see the appeal of an off-the-shelf solution, but I enjoy the build and testing and all that nerdy stuff.

what motherboard did you get and how many SATA and M.2 slots on it?

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Elsewhere in the room would be better. They are pretty quiet but not silent so it’s going to be personal preference rather than how to deal with some noisy thing. Mine doubles as a Plex server and is in the same room as the TV and I’ve never thought about moving it elsewhere.

They are nowhere near as noisy as SCSI discs I’ve had in the past.

Andrew

Depends on the drives, I suppose. Mine sounds like a loud geiger-counter sitting in a steel drum. I've always been sensitive to the sound of mechanical hard drives, though, and remember being annoyed by them even back in the 90s.

I didn't select for noise since it lives in the storage side of my basement.

2x12tb Segate Exos X16 Enterprise drives.

 

[ProbablyDylan]

what motherboard did you get and how many SATA and M.2 slots on it?

I forget what model exactly, but it has 4x SATA connections and 1x M.2. I'm only using 2 SATA drives, and the M.2 has a 1TB Samsung SSD working as a write cache and a home for docker containers.

 

[MGrayson3]

Unless I am much mistaken, TrueNAS uses ZFS (or derivative?) as its OS. My box has been running quietly in the corner for over two years. I have done some test restores, but have never needed to go to that level to restore older file versions.

 

[TheHareBear]

Depends on the drives, I suppose. Mine sounds like a loud geiger-counter sitting in a steel drum. I've always been sensitive to the sound of mechanical hard drives, though, and remember being annoyed by them even back in the 90s.

I didn't select for noise since it lives in the storage side of my basement.

2x12tb Segate Exos X16 Enterprise drives.

This gives relative stats and it’s fair to say the RED are way more quiet. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/VsgmIFxykZ
My old SCSI discs sounded like a plane taking off when spinning up, and the person from the flat downstairs in somewhere we used to live asked if there was a washing machine or something and could I move it I did…

 

[WarmWinterHat]

This gives relative stats and it’s fair to say the RED are way more quiet. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/VsgmIFxykZ
My old SCSI discs sounded like a plane taking off when spinning up, and the person from the flat downstairs in somewhere we used to live asked if there was a washing machine or something and could I move it I did…

Never been around SCSI, but I do remember those 10k Raptor IDE drives from a while ago. Had a college roomie running one in his desktop and it was awful! If it was anything like that, wow!

As for the Senate drives. I don't hear the drive whining, it's just the heads that make all the noise. Thanks for the link!

 

[ForkHandles]

I’m not remotely interested in Nas, raid etcetera, I doub’t I ever will be!

But well done for taking the time to put together such a detailed blog on the forum.

22 consecutive posts, macRumors, is that a record?

 

[nathan_reilly]

It's not the best time to get into NASs now, as HDD and SSD prices have gone up considerably due to AI company demand. Also RAM if you want to upgrade beyond what's included.

this is silly. you buy what you need & can afford. "getting into NASs" makes me laugh, like this is some elastic-demand hobby situation...we are not talking about labubus here. NAS is not the right solution for everyone but for some it is absolutely necessary no matter what small market fluctuation there is in the cost of memory. If your data (or your time to replace it) is worth millions who cares about a storage solution that costs $10k or $20k.

 

[klasma]

"getting into NASs" makes me laugh, like this is some elastic-demand hobby situation...

It’s from the title of this thread. And the solutions the OP discussed are hobbyist-level. If you have millions worth of data, you go for enterprise solutions, which is a different market segment.

 

[tonmischa]

you’re wrong about how RAID5 works

Sorry for not being precise. I just looked at one block of data and its distribution across the available disks. This was (imho) sufficient to get my specific point across.

For everyone who wants to learn about all the different RAID levels, this is an excellent starting point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

 

[deconstruct60]

Yes, it's a pity that none of the NAS vendor OSs use ZFS (no, QNAP's QuTS Hero doesn't use real ZFS).

Not lowest priced NAS ( and hardware getting a bit dated ), but :

TrueNAS Mini - Enterprise Storage Solution for Businesses

TrueNAS Mini is a powerful, enterprise storage solution for SOHO and businesses. Get more out of your storage with the TrueNAS Mini today!

www.truenas.com

[ TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) ]

If you want to skip ECC RAM (and trade some data integrity for lower costs ), then there are TrueNAS install guides at nascompares.com. For example

TrueNAS Terramaster NAS FULL Installation Guide (2025)

How to Install TrueNAS Scale/Core on a Terramaster NAS If you’re new to private server storage, you’ve probably heard the phrase “everything runs on Linux.” While that’s not entirely true (many other platforms exist with their own foundations), Linux remains the dominant base for much of the softwa

nascompares.com

nascompares has gotten harder to navigate/search but there are guides for a a couple of the "up and comers" vendors trying to take share away from QNAP and Synology. Newer sysetms coming with reasonably accessible M.2 SSD slots make it easier to install TrueNAS on one of those.

It doesn't trickle down to the sub $300 zone NASboxes very well. Pragmatically need x86 and a HDMI port to make the install of the alternative OS easier. ( P.S. also pragmatically minimal 8GB RAM. Preferably more if want higher storage traffic to LAN ).

 

[klasma]

Not lowest priced NAS ( and hardware getting a bit dated ), but :

TrueNAS Mini - Enterprise Storage Solution for Businesses

TrueNAS Mini is a powerful, enterprise storage solution for SOHO and businesses. Get more out of your storage with the TrueNAS Mini today!

www.truenas.com

[ TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) ]

If you want to skip ECC RAM (and trade some data integrity for lower costs ), then there are TrueNAS install guides at nascompares.com. For example

TrueNAS Terramaster NAS FULL Installation Guide (2025)

How to Install TrueNAS Scale/Core on a Terramaster NAS If you’re new to private server storage, you’ve probably heard the phrase “everything runs on Linux.” While that’s not entirely true (many other platforms exist with their own foundations), Linux remains the dominant base for much of the softwa

nascompares.com

I’m using TrueNAS (with ECC even), but it’s not a NAS hardware vendor OS.

I forgot about the TrueNAS Mini line, I guess because I was in the market for a 6-or-more-bay non-rack NAS with a better CPU, and its future prospects are unclear.

 

[deconstruct60]

I’m using TrueNAS (with ECC even), but it’s not a NAS hardware vendor OS.

iXSystems/TrueNAS doesn't sell hardware? Selling hardware is partially how the whole software development is funded. Is it 100% exclusive to their hardware? No. However, that doesn't put them out of the hardware business.
That is more a difference between 'proprietary' and 'open' than 'software' versus 'hardware'.

I forgot about the TrueNAS Mini line, I guess because I was in the market for a 6-or-more-bay non-rack NAS with a better CPU, and its future prospects are unclear.

It is odd. But likely just focused on the higher margin stuff. TrueNAS Scale ... what is the 'scale' if not on heftier hardware. And AMD Eypc 4004 series upgrade would likely work pretty decently for that series. (and TrueNAS has 8004 series boxes to support so the 'CPU' wouldn't be all that different. ). But they are missing a solution for a small business with no racks.

I think the 'problem' there is that the DIY market can do it cheaper ( or the 'no racks' businesses are too entrenched in Windows and GUI, simple solution, admin tools.

 

[klasma]

iXSystems/TrueNAS doesn't sell hardware? Selling hardware is partially how the whole software development is funded. Is it 100% exclusive to their hardware? No. However, that doesn't put them out of the hardware business.
That is more a difference between 'proprietary' and 'open' than 'software' versus 'hardware'.

I’m saying that the companies that are primarily NAS hardware vendors aren’t offering ZFS, at least in the consumer/small business space. Synology, QNAP, Asustor, UGreen, and so on.

I think the 'problem' there is that the DIY market can do it cheaper ( or the 'no racks' businesses are too entrenched in Windows and GUI, simple solution, admin tools.

IMO the issue is that it’s too expensive and risky for existing products to migrate from Btrfs to ZFS, and at present the former still offers more flexibility in terms of combining different drive sizes. Btrfs has been a proven solution on Linux for a long time now, whereas ZFS can’t be part of the official Linux kernel for licensing reasons, and has been more of a moving target.

 

[Abydos]

face it, at this point in time , any solution is either expensive, not quite as simple as we would like, or (most likely) both. I use both a openZFS solution using Darwin not macOS (for the simple reason Darwin evolves less quickly and less radically than macOS) and a kludge system consisting of three 5 tb hdd (western digital in this case) each partitioned into 5 logical units each of which has a complete backup of my financial records, photos, my collection of articles (pdfs of research papers) for a total of 15 copies , there is a master listing of the contents in each logical unit. I run a hardware check on each disk quarterly and rotate the disks out after 4 years - it isn't cheap or quick but I have a high probability of not losing something I can't replace. yes a bit paranoid but why not

 

[drrich2]

One thing I had in mind but didn't mention earlier; if someone wants simple, pretty cheap, easy-to-use without a lot of decisions to me made, one option is the Synology BeeStation (PC Magazine has a review on it). It uses BeeStation OS rather than Synology's DSM and has a built-in 4-terabyte HDD. It can do snap shots so, if space allowed, you can get back to prior restore points.

1.) No decisions to be made about RAID; it has a single non-user replaceable 4-terabyte HDD, so it can't do RAID.

2.) No decisions about HDD vs. SSD or drive size; Synology made that decision for you.

But it's roughly $220 + sales tax, and probably covers what a lot of people would use a NAS for. If it hosts data for use rather than just being a backup device itself, you could perhaps buy an external HDD to back the BeeStation up onto?

For some users, it might be a good fit.

 

[gericb]

I shucked two 18TB hard drives from some externals that were on sale at Best Buy a year or two ago, put them into a Synology enclosure, upgraded its RAM, and it's been humming along neatly ever since. I've been using it mostly for Plex (movies, TV, music) and as a Homebridge hub thing, basically enabling smart but non-Homekit devices to be controlled via Homekit and iOS's Home app.

I've been using the RAID configuration with redundancy. I've dealt with losing data and rebuilding libraries in the past and I am now at a point in my life where I'm much busier and have less free time than I did back in those days, so I'll take an ounce of prevention.

I did virtually the same thing. shucking the drives are cheaper than buying drive only options. Of course those drives are not officially geared as NAS application usage, but I've done this for years, never had issues, considering the average lifetime of the best of consumer drives only have a 5 year warranty, I don't think any consumer "NAS" drives have longer. Those shucked drives often time need that 3rd Pin to be covered in some way so they work in other enclosures.

Then there is/was the issues with CMR and SMR drives, (DM-SMR) / (HM-SMR). CMR being the best option for a NAS.

I didn't have a Synology enclosure to pop them into, but I did the next best thing, took a nice desktop, so better CPU, RAM, and used https://github.com/RROrg/rr where you create a USB boot loader and actually install Synology's DSM (920+) on that old machine just sitting around. I followed the old notion of KISS, just implementing RAID1, and I have to regularly backing up to BackBlaze for additionally redundancy.

For simplicity, these are setup as EXT4, but BTRFS is an option too. Less RAM hungry/comlicated than any ZFS implementations.

The several MacBooks at home, doing their SMB based TimeMachine hourly backup to that DIY Dell Synology, got it on a nice APC UPS, for additional whole machine protection for power outages/spikes.

No failed drives in 6 years, SMART testing still showing no errors or issues, and the drives are on 24/7 instead of hibernating.

 

[Runaway Train]

Primary use case for me for NAS is :

- File sharing
- Archives (data not needed on devices that does not change accessed infrequently if at all)
- Secondary backup

Backup(s)

- #1 - Time Machine to local SSD
- #2 - A) Write to NAS + B) 6TB WD Hard drive hanging off of the USB Port, not part of NAS drive array
- #3 - Secondary SSD’s independent of NAS structure
- #4 - Cloud (One Drive) + Photos, Videos to iCloud

UPS to the NAS (my STONG advice - a must!, has saved me already several times). No remote access to NAS.

Beyond that seems overkill.

 

[dropadrop]

I’ve had various NAS devices at home for over 20 years. Also at work have experience and certifications for professional storage gear (EMC, NetApp, HP EVA, 3par etc).

At home I’ve usually ended up disappointed when buying a NAS from a generic brand whose primary focus is not storage. Generally the devices would work ok, but long term support is not really a thing.

So I’ve ended up between Synology and Qnap. Both brands have been good, my preference is Synology as I mainly use my NAS for storage and Qnap seems to be focused on having ”more features” rather then polishing the core user experience. That said, I currently have a Qnap and it has worked fine for the last 5 years and still gets updates.

Biggest annoyance regarding NAS devices and macs is the lack of native iscsi. For desktop devices that would be a great way to extend system storage without worrying if ”iphoto libraries can be stored on a NAS” as iscsi drives are block devices and look like a regular disk to the OS.

 

[BaggieBoy]

U green concern me as they are too new ingot the market for my liking.

I decided to retire my 2TB Time Capsule a few weeks ago, seeing as it would no longer be operational with MacOS 27. Opted for a Ugreen DXP 2800 with two 4GB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs in RAID 1. I had a couple of 1TB M.2 SSDs spare, so they also went in the NAS for read/write caching. I also added the Ugreen US3000 UPS for safety.

So far all is working well. It's hosting my media, as well as Time Machine backup for my MacBook Pro. I'm also syncing my music library to it in real time.