NAS upgrade query I’m looking at buying or building a NAS. In the past, I set up and used WD Reds in a five-disk Synology (DS1518+), configured in a Synology RAID setup. I was happy, but that was six years ago, and the technology has changed a lot. It would be great if you could do a custom NAS build or a comparison shootout between prebuilt units— actually, both would be ideal.
I need a solution that provides scalability, reliability, and easy usability, especially for unskilled users. This would be for personal data storage and backup and not for an enterprise application, however, I would still desire good throughput speeds. Would spinning disks still be the way to go? SATA SSDs? Or is it possible to make an ultra-small form factor using M.2 SSDs?
—Jack Jordan
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The simplest solution would be to stick with what you know and upgrade to a new Synology. That’s because components for lowpowered self-build models are incredibly hard to source right now—mini-ITX mobos sporting embedded low-powered Pentium and Celeron chips, such as those showcased by ASRock (www.asrock.com/mb/index.asp#Intel CPU) are near-impossible to find, and that’s before you go hunting for a suitable chassis to house them in. Proprietary models such as those offered by Synology, QNAP, and Asustor are optimized for NAS use, so you’ll have more robust RAID support, for example. For a closer look at all available Synology models, search through its NAS selector tool (www. synology.com/support/ nas_selector) to see which models it recommends based on how you will use it.