NAS recommendations

tonyspurs

tonyspurs

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I have 2 Sonos play 1s and a play 3, I've been researching nas drives for the last 3 days to use to stream music to sonos and movie files to my smart tv, I started off looking at WD Mycloud but then read a lot of negative reviews regarding compatibility with Mac so then looked at Buffalo linkstation and Zyxel nsa 325 which both seemed to fit the bill but again a lot of negative reviews about working with mac, lastly looked at the entry level Synology Ds214se but yet again some neg reviews so now I'm totally confused do any NSA run with macs? I haven't got loads of files to back up as they are on a external hard drive so really just want it to store my music and movie files for streaming,I think 2tb would be plenty so don't want to spend more than £200 any advice would be appreciated cheers!
 
Any NAS will work fine with Macs!

Do you need to NAS to transcode the media files or just to distribute them?

Synology and Qnap are definitely the go to ones. I've running my DS214 play for a while now and it's a dream once it's setup.

Could look at building your own free NAS?
 
Uncle Bertie said:
I've got a Buffalo Linkstation that has been bulletproof. Ipad could read media successfully from it too.
Click to expand...

Sounds good Uncle B, are you using a PC or Mac? Have you streamed music or movies with no problems?
 
tonyspurs said:
Uncle Bertie said:
I've got a Buffalo Linkstation that has been bulletproof. Ipad could read media successfully from it too.
Click to expand...

Sounds good Uncle B, are you using a PC or Mac? Have you streamed music or movies with no problems?
Click to expand...

PC, android and iPad. No problems streaming any format audio or video.
 
Uncle Bertie said:
tonyspurs said:
Uncle Bertie said:
I've got a Buffalo Linkstation that has been bulletproof. Ipad could read media successfully from it too.
Click to expand...

Sounds good Uncle B, are you using a PC or Mac? Have you streamed music or movies with no problems?
Click to expand...

PC, android and iPad. No problems streaming any format audio or video.
Click to expand...

Brilliant thanks :icon_razz: good price for a 4tb duo over on Amazon so will have a look
 
You could always turn an old PC into a NAS, just add have a couple of disks and configure a RAID1 for the storage. Then put the OS on either a partition or on another disk, having the OS separate has the benefit of being able to easily move the data, but its not essential. Sure, it's not as slick as a off the shelf NAS, but it may save you some money. (You could always use an old laptop too),
 
Sadly though, you can't get something for nothing. I'm currently using a Artigo A2000 and I'm wishing that I'd gone for a HP Micro server instead as it's much closer to a PC, faster bus and would be able to do more processing where the disks are (batch photo resizing). I don't have the NAS on all the time, perhaps a few hours per week, so power drain isn't a real issue for me.
 
Went with a Zyxel nsa325-v2 with 1 x WD red 2tb hard drive in the end will get another hard drive later.
Set up pretty straight forward I emailed Zyxel while I was waiting for delivery and they sent me a link for Mac OSX NAS Starter Utility as the disc is windows.
Music and video folders transferred across quickly Sonos working fine through it, my films playing through the media server app on my panasonic tv along with photos,haven't tried the cloud bit yet but very pleased so far.

Also thanks to Erik for his offer and advice:icon_razz:
 
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