Head is MELTED...

[Enquiries]

Hi Robbie/Ed,

So..... me again! Right, I had a bit of Black Friday madness and found a QNAP TS-464 for a ridiculous price, so I jumped on it. (Not sure why really - as 4 bay wasn't big enough.) Now however (before I even took it out of the box), I've come across a million articles about just how bad QNAP really is with security! (particularly the YT channel from Lawrence Systems - who really slates QNAP - although he is not alone.) We briefly touched on this before, where it was mentioned that with the right security settings, QNAP was supposedly ok and no worse/better off than the likes of Synology. However..... I've done some more digging and it seems like there is some merit to the concept that QNAP is really really quite bad. Synology (being more software focused - as you say Robbie "at least 60/40&quot seem to do a better job at reacting to vulnerabilities and developing patches. Way ahead of QNAP.

Anyway, aside from security issues, I (ahem) slightly overlooked that the TS-464 only offers Ext4 - with no zfs. Then I started thinking about Synology and their offering of BTRFS - not to mention SHR which would be more beneficial to me in the long run, so now I'm leaning more towards Synology again (not for the first time) and sending the TS-464 back. The conundrum........

The likes of the Synology DS1621+ etc, all come with the Ryzen (which is fine) but may struggle with Plex etc, owning to no onboard gpu. Whilst there is a PCI-e expansion slot on said device, it seems to be more geared towards improved networking - as opposed to adding a low profile gpu which I know it will not accept. So to the (long-winded) question...

Will the likes of the DS1621+ (or 1821+) handle Plex for the most part? (Not necessarily 4k I know, but will it crap itself with x265 (as you suggest on the Plex testing video)?

I did look at the DS1621XS+, but it's overkill for my needs.

In a nutshell, I am still looking for a 6-8 bay NAS mostly (predominantly actually) for media and with the ability to handle (mostly) 1080p x264 (but some x265 1080p and 4k - without insane bitrates). Mostly this will be via LAN (so I know that limits some security issues if I was to remove internet access), but ideally - who wants to invest £££ into a NAS in (alomst) 2023 and not have the benefits of it being connected to the internet so that you can access content or add content remotely?

Then another YT video put me onto TrueNAS, but I'm not sure I really want (or have the time) to get into all of that learning curve. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a 6-8 bay NAS that was secure while online, geared towards media, could easily handle x265 and 4K media files and was relatively plug & play, easy to set-up and forget about, knowing it would just work.... and without it costing thousands? Am I dreaming??

I've watched so many of your videos now, I think I've grown to hate seagulls too...

[ed]

Yes, Qnap might have a bad reputation for security. But they have improved since then. The problem with them usually lies on their focus on third-party developers. They often use admin privileges to run the app. If there is a hole, there is an attack on entire system.
But you can secure this. Create a separate user for apps and separate user for data. Make sure admin account is disabled or have no access to other user accounts.
Here are few more tips https://nascompares.com/2022/10/21/qnap-...-your-nas/
Once you stop using admin-level accounts, you will be safe.

SHR is handy for drive mixing. Qnap requires creating a secondary RAID to add more drive. This would mean 2x4TB one RAID1. And 2X6TB RAID1. Not very efficient.

Local streaming do not require transcoding. You could use any NAS.
Accessing media remotely is very different. Plex 4k will not work unless you have PCIe GPU card or Xeon CPU.
But you can handle 1080p with any quad core plus series model.

There is also an offline transcoding button that generates an additional smaller file for remote streaming.


I hope this helps.