My Mac mini (2011) died. No warranty. I was using it with attached USB drives and a Drobo I replaced it temporarily with a laptop I had lying around and re-attached my existing drives to it to serve files. This is a temporary solution.

Before I had the mini I had a Netgear ReadyNAS with two drives in it.

I need to serve out video, back up photos and other important files from across my local network, and run Crashplan and such. Maybe Plex?

I was thinking of building a FreeNAS box myself, because it's the kind of thing I like to do. Then I stumbled across the FreeNAS Mini. Overkill? Probably. But that's when my middle name again reared its head: "Pay For Convenience." Also: This. Is. Head. Case.

But then I started thinking about Synology and QNAP boxen as well. Different flavors of overkill.

I want about 10TB of usable space, two parity disks to survive more than a single drive failure, expandable RAID would be nice, and I want something I don't have to fiddle with too much. I'm willing to make the investment in learning something new (although I'm guessing the Synology learning curve is a lot less steep than the FreeNAS curve).

Do people have direct experience with these technologies (especially with more than one flavor of solution)? The problem with asking in XYZ forum is that those who have invested their time and money into a particular branch of tech are overly invested in telling those who ask that The Solution They Decided On is the best.

Can someone tell me what to do? I mean about this particular quandary, not other stuff.

Does this sit in a closet, or is it furniture? Cause if it can be ugly then you can get a small server with more power for less money. Any version of *nix will run all the things you want without much trouble. I run a headless TS440 with Vortexbox/Fedora and it does everything you mention.

Have experience with QNAPs; TS-219P, TS-509 and TS-809.

The ARM equipped ones doesn't have horse power for much more than filesharing. Running Squeezebox Server works, but just barely.
The Intel based ones do have a bit more power, and runs Squeezebox Server just fine. But not more than that.
I have ran different RAID configurations on those, and usually end up in a situation where I need to use some SSH-client and do a bit of command line clean-up.
I do not use RAID any more. I run 4x single volumes on my TS-809 and have each mirrored on two TS-219P. Lost a RAID a few times on the small and noticed that a RAID-5 was rebuilding quite often on the 509 ... so skipped RAID on QNAP.

I have much the same requirement: I don't want to fiddle to much with such a box - most of the time I don't, but when the shit hits the fan I am usually thrown in to a lot of command line stuff that can't be done by the fancy GUI QNAP provides.

If I should do it all over I wouldn't buy a QNAP but rather a as Dsavitsk suggest a small server, you might opt for something where you can put in more RAM and maybe a more powerful CPU if needed.

 

The FreeNAS Mini seems pretty expensive for what it is especially considering it's only 4 bays.  If you were willing you could build your own FreeNAS box using a regular mini-tower pc case with 7-8 bays for half the cost.

I've had a Synology for many years and have been looking to upgrade/replace it.  Once I have the time I'm going to be building my own FreeNAS box.

Now I'm thinking Synology 1515+. Discuss.

The Synology I've had is the 1511+ it's worked well for me.  If you want a turnkey solution and don't mind paying for it then the 1515+ is a solid option.

I run FreeNAS on a TS140 and it works well for me.  I run usenet stuff, Plex transcoding, Murmur server, and a few other custom scripts. There is a bit of a learning curve but it is very configurable.  Expect 10-20 hours of learning.  Or spend the extra money and get a Synology.  It is much easier to learn but you sacrifice a lot of power.  If you plan on only using it as a fileserver, the Synology should be fine.  If you want to run anything else such as Plex transcoding, then you need the power from the Xeon.  Regarding Synology vs. Qnap, I would stick with Synology because the ecosystem is seeing faster development due to larger user base.

I got a Synology 1815+. It'll supposedly do decent transcoding but since I'll mostly be using it as a fileserver/Crashplan box, I should be fine.

I wrote zeros to the drives over the weekend before formatting and am rsyncing files over to it now. Will report back later.

Thanks for reporting back, am (and will continue to be) curious.