Looking at purchasing a NAS because HIPHOP isnt dead, and wondering what everyone here uses, dont need transcoding, essentially just to be used as a network drive.
Heard good things about QNAP and Synology but leaning towards the WD EX2 due to low power consumption.
Iām using a Synology DS215+ and Iām really happy with it.
Iāve been using QNAP for the last 9 years and Iāve been quite satisfied! QNAP devices truly are quality products, which often is reflected in the priceā¦ However, I do recommend that you are open minded regarding making your own NAS which I did some months ago 
I was thinking about getting QNAP TS-253B which is an expensive NAS, and when I started to list my requirements I found out that I just needed a linux device with great hard drive capacity. So, I bought two Tinkerboards and Iāve been running Armbian on them for some months now. Itās stable and Iām more free to do as I want as you can choose the OS etc. It doesnāt require as much competence either since there are thousands of guides out there for ARM devices as RPI.
My advice is that you buy a single-board computer like Tinkerboard, ODROID, KVIM, RPI etc which is extremely cheap and connect external hard drives to them. Here is my setup on one of them:
+1 To buying a single-board computer!
How many HDDās do you want to maintain?
I tried a WD My Cloud, single bay, because it was a good price for the 6tb HDD in it which I needed.
Quickly sold the enclosure+mainboard. Thereās a crippled busybox running on it. Not much room for customization here. An alternative os for it would leave me with just 60 mb/s network transfer speed via smb 
If you want to maintain just one HDD I can recommend Odroids HC2.
Put Armbian on there and install OMV via armbian-config commandline app. This way you get a improved OMV install. Voila, gigabit transfer speeds + room for other server apps.
Only thing is, using smb to transfer stuff or using the sbc to unpack stuff lets the temp go up quite a bit (cpu temp to 75 Ā°C, HDD temp to 51 Ā°C) but thatās also a config thing. Cpu has big and little cores, you can clock down big cores a but, etcā¦
Overall Iām verry happy with this sbc.
If you want to hook up more than one HDD and you can wait a bit, Iād try Odroids new upcomming sbc, the Odroid N1.
@RobertFlambour, itās allot easier to find out which NAS or SBC you should buy if you list your requirements. In my case, I was in the beginning going to buy a RPI, yet since all currently PIs donāt have 1 Gbit interface, I discarded the PIs.
If you have a high requirement of USB3 (30+ MB/s in read/write) the selection get even smaller. Then you probably should consider ODROID-XU4 which have 2 USB3 ports etc.
If he operates in a gigabit network and wants gigbit transfer speeds an Odroid xu4 wonāt do that.
The HC2 has the same old but powerfull SoC as xu4 but thereās a Sata interface connected to that.
With armbian and customized OMV I get 100 mb/s transfer speed.
@trohn_javolta, Mbit or MBytes? Cause 100 Mbit/s is quite low if you ask me. I guess you are using SMB? Iām getting around 330 Mbit/s with my Tinkerboard and the HDD is connected to a USB2 interface. So a XU4 connected to a USB 3 HDD should be allot faster than my case unless the CPU is the bottleneckā¦
100 MB/s -> 800 Mbit/s -> Gigabit speed (practical, in theorie itās 125 MB/s but you wonāt reach that)
@librenoob @CI6N0Z @trohn_javolta
Thanks for the awesome suggestions fellas! 
The homebrew style boxes sound very interesting. Iām looking to have a few networked drives for backups and some streaming. Gigabit would be awesome, I think the weakest link will be the r/w HDD speed, the routers are 86U, quite decent.
Iām using a HP Microserver Gen8 with OpenMediaVault. It was cheap (~130 EUR without disks) and it contains 5 HDD with all of my photography and movie and music collection.
Well, if āa fewā is more than 2 youād probably be better off with a full blown NAS I guess. One with strong cpu or hw transcoding ability.
For 2 HDDs, the Odroid N1 looks good to me. The Rockchip RK3399 seems like a very promising SoC for that.
Of course you could also stack up multiple Odroid HC2ās but I think itās gonna be more expensive.
There is also Helios4, a DIY Nas Kit for up to 4 drives with an armada 388 SoC. Of what I read, this SoC is great for handling data transfer, even raid stuff but its cpu isnāt very powerful.
If you deside to choose such ādiy-arm-sbcā nas Iād recommend you to check first if it has Armbian support.
I tried different os and so far I can say itās the best, imho. The guys seem to know what they are doing, the images are very stable, you get many device specific tweaks and improvement and support is also good.
ā¦Basicly same with the CoreElec crew here 
Canāt really join the discusion here, I have no experience with these Intel powered micro/mini servers or NUCsā¦
Just heard they generally use up way more power than arm boards but have stronger cpuās. And lack of hardware decoding/transcoding ability, except the recent Apollo/Kaby Lake NUCsā¦but yeah, just what I heard.
Well, all depends on what you find good enough. In my case a device that can do mostly everything except transcoding, and with around 40 MB/s in transfer speed from the box, I canāt really complain. Armbian supported devices are extremely stable and there are plenty of guides out there to help you on the way to a own NAS storage.
Regarding my own setup, which is much more silent than my old QNAP as my external hard drives do not spin unless Iām using them. Iām using a small RPI fan which is very silent and my Tinkerboard is running around 40-45Ā°C during normal tasks, and might get as high as 50-55 during high load operations with 80% + CPU usage. I currently have three external hard drives attached to it, yet since the drives most of the time is idle, high temperatures is not an issue. It takes 3-5 seconds to wake up a hard drive when in Idle which is not a problem for me at all since the setup is much more silent and the hard drives do get increased lifetime.
And I use 2 x Microserver N40L (modded BIOS) - each with 1 x SSD and 4 x 6TB IronWolfs + 530SFP+ 10Gb NICs.
Plus one ML350 G6 and one DL360 Gen8.
Iām using an old IBM server that I found. It has a SAS/SATA controller+onboard controller, up to 10 HD.
Installed Ubuntu, MergerFS, Docker and all my apps are running on containers. Fully automated with Ansible.
I have been using the open source rockstor nas which is free, scalable and works on almost any hardware you throw to it. it comes with several addons on docker like plex, owncloud, vpn transmission, couchpotato, headphones. runs on a small hhd for the server side and then just add tb of usb. best way to make use of an old laptop/pc with at least 4gb ram. my 2 cents worth. based on centos and BTRFS
While there are many ways to go with a NAS, I chose a hardware NAS rather than single board or self built. Primarily because I wanted a really nice clean and compact box with good ventilation so an purpose built enclosure offered the best solution. Very tidy and compact and no fussing around, but you do have a to pay a little more.
I looked hard a Drobo, QNAP and Synology and went Synology because of the wide range of support and features and functions. I really like how many different apps can be run on the Synology. Getting a newer version that supports Btrfs was also a big win. DS418Play was my choice. Enough memory and horsepower to do what I need and more (including transcoding support if thatās something you want to look into)
I use an old i7-860, 16GB RAM, 1GBit NIC desktop (repurposed). 4TB total space, runs Emby, TVHeadend, HomeAssistant and a few other things. Using OpenMediaVault.
Wow, that is pretty good (330 Mbps ~= 40+ MBps), especially through a USB2 port. BTW, is that a read or write speed?
I have a Seagate GoFLEX Home with 3 TB SATA HDD running on an ARMbian (stretch) OS with NFSv4.2 and is connected to my Gigabit LAN as my NAS. I can only get about 36 MBps write speed to my NAS which is way below what my 3 TB SATA HDD can do.
Thatās read speed Iāve measured with iperf3, and Iām able to play the 300 Mbit Jellyfish bitrate test file through Plex with PlexKodiConnect. Iām running a headless version of Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) and Iām actually not sure about the write speed, yet I think it is around the same as your NAS with 30-35 MB/s. The CPU seems to be the bottleneck, so if I overclock it the results would be even better.
I tested using the dd Linux utility with a 4 GB file from my Linux desktop computer running OpenSuSE 42.3 to my Seagate GoFLEX Home NAS through a Gigabit LAN (see below). During the write cycle, I notice the CPU Usage for the system was between 70% - 80%. On the read cycle, CPU usage was about 55%. TBH, I really donāt know if my R/W tests are any good.
[suse@linux:/home/local/PEOPLE/suse/Downloads/junk 729%] ~ dd of=/mnt/devel/junk/BigFile.dat if=/dev/zero bs=4M count=1024 oflag=direct
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 125.594 s, 34.2 MB/s
0.007u+2.267s=2:05.79e(1.7%) TDSavg=0k+0k+0k max=6116k 400+8388608io 1pf+0sw
[suse@linux:/home/local/PEOPLE/suse/Downloads/junk 730%] ~ dd if=/mnt/devel/junk/BigFile.dat of=/dev/null bs=4M count=1024 iflag=direct
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 56.9382 s, 75.4 MB/s
[suse@linux:/home/local/PEOPLE/suse/Downloads/junk 731%] ~
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