Guide to Choosing the Right NAS for Data Storage

[drabchurch]

Hi everyone!!

I am looking for a NAS device to store home data and support remote work. My main needs are automatic backup, access from multiple devices, and high security. I am confused between brands like Synology and QNAP. Can the forum advise me which one is suitable for beginners? Also, do factors like number of hard drives, RAM, and CPU have a big impact on performance?

Thanks in advance!

[Freeco]

I'd say it really depends on your personal situation. How will the clients access the NAS? Over multi-gig, gigabit, wifi? The faster the connection, the faster your NAS needs to be.

Security is of course important, but each brand will have problems. You mostly need to be sensible yourself, not making your device accessible over the internet for services you don't need publicly available, implementing proper security settings, and let the device auto-update the OS and apps.
I switched from Synology to QNAP because of its hardware. Syno is stuck in the 1 gig mindset for its cheaper NASs, while I was looking for 2.5GbE. I wouldn't say either software is worse or better, just different. Synology is more polished, easier for a novice. While on QNAP there's more stuff to tinker with, more freedom, which bring somewhat higher complexity. But if you just stick to simple file shares, both won't overwhelm you.

For simple file sharing the CPU and RAM don't matter too much. My first NAS from over 15 years ago could saturate a gigabit connection.
The more services you enable though, more RAM will be required. And certainly if you'd want to run containers or VMs on your NAS. That'll have higher CPU & RAM demands.

The speed and amount of your HDDs does matter somewhat. Certainly for multi-gig connections. I personally switched from 4 disks in RAID5 on my previous NAS to 4 disks in RAID10 in my current one. RAID5 with 4 disks has 3 times the read speed of a single disk, while no speed gains for writing. RAID10 on the other hand has 4 times the read speed, and twice the write speed. The downside however is you lose storage capacity. With 4 disks in RAID5 you have the capacity of 3 disks, while with RAID10 only of 2 disks. So the extra speed does also have an extra cost.
You can use an online RAID calculator for all this.