NAS - what is recommended?

[MatthewL]

Any recommendations for a NAS?  I've used QNAP for years no issues, done what I need and been happy but open to options.

Looking to ugprade and have something with a bit more go in it.  New one will be where I access my main data from rather than just been a copy if the spec and price is right.

 

Purely for home use, looking to get a second and have it as a remote offsite backup.

[Bedders]

I've used Synologys for years and never really had an issue with them. Some of them are a pain to upgrade their memory if you want, but if you don't run a lot of programs on them, typically they're fine. Loads of programs available from the Synology store. 

That said, if you have to side-load anything onto there, you may find old or outdated versions e.g. Wordpress are actually underneath the Synology apps. 

[MatthewL]

Purely looking at them for storage not fussed about the other features but if there are some bonus.

[Sephiroth]

Depends on your requirements I guess, but I'd recommend a custom NAS running TrueNas. Much more flexibility, potentially cheaper, and more expandable.

[localzuk]

I've always liked QNAP tbh. Reliable devices and their support is good too, if you need assistance with any of their apps on the box.

[Dos_Box]

Bit of a thread bump, but I've just bought on  of these new Ugreen 2-drive NAS boxes - https://nas-uk.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dh2300-nas-storage?from=mega-menu

They have only been out a week and have a discount on ATM @£152.99, which compared to other 2 bay NAS devices is pretty good.
I've been running a HP Microserver Gen8 for about 12-13 years now and seeign as all of our stuff is now in the cloud have not been using it even a fraction as much as I had, but still need somewhere to put large files and photos\movies etc that isn't drawing a small PC's worth of power. This seems to fit the bill nicely.

[Davit2005]

+1 for TrueNAS. Was an avid Synology fan but the cost of *their* RAM then the debacle over the Supported HDDs I've gone TrueNAS. You can get a 2nd hand server relatively low power dirt cheap, put 10Gb cards depending on the availability of slots, etc. and much more expandability. If you don't need the feature rich apps of the Synology certainly worth a look.

[Dos_Box]

On 21/10/2025 at 10:24, Davit2005 said:

+1 for TrueNAS. Was an avid Synology fan but the cost of *their* RAM then the debacle over the Supported HDDs I've gone TrueNAS. You can get a 2nd hand server relatively low power dirt cheap, put 10Gb cards depending on the availability of slots, etc. and much more expandability. If you don't need the feature rich apps of the Synology certainly worth a look.

They have also removed drivers for HEVC and 264 transcoding on their NAS boxes in September.

On a more positive note, I bought one of those new 2 bay UGREEN DH2300 NAS boxes a couple of weeks back and I'm very impressed with it. My old HP Microserver Gen 8 was getting too slow and as it was running on Server 2012, much new software simply refused to install on it, and its 2 TB of storage, whilst a seemingly huge amount 13 years ago when we bought them, was now filling up. 
It can sync my cloud storage (Google Drive and OneDrive as well as iCloud), host Plex using Docker, Portainer and a modified version of Plex that enables hardware decoding on the DH2300 (basic Plex does not do this without paying for a Plex Pass).

This was an hour of faff, SSH, re-editing config files and one do-over from scratch. This has now taken almost all the video processing load off the CPU and 4k vids look gorgeous) 
I can also stream my music and videos to wherever I might be, even on my phone. Out of the box, thanks to the UGREEN NAS app. I'm looking at nerfing my Spotify subscription now.

I have stuck 2 x 14TB drives (mirrored)in there thanks thanks to @ICTDirect_Dave. If you need some affordable, warrantied, large capacity drives, give him a bell!.

 

The device is specced quite well with an 8 core ARM processor, VPU (for hardware codec and 264/HEVC encoding\decoding) and a NPU for AI stuff. Not only that, it has HDMI with 4k\60fps output, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen1 ports, USB C and 1Gb ethernet. It only has 4GB of RAM (un-upgradable), but so far I have not run any tasks that used more than a third of that.
With the aid of Docker you can also set it up as a web server and run VPN, Home Server and a whole raft of other things you might want to do with it.
It's also very small and quiet, so can live in the front room without annoying me.

 

If you are after a home NAS with a great feature set and price (currently for £152.99 without disks). It may go even lower on Black Friday.

 

*You may see a lot of reviews for the UGREEN DH2300 on YouTube for this little box (all very positive), but I have to let you know that I selected and bought this all off my own bat. It seems that many reviewers had been sent them.

 

 

[MatthewL]

I have seen UGREEN appear out of no where recently, good to see a actual review on it.

[Olliedawg]

We use a Synology 423+, never had any problems with it, but I understand why people steer clear.

[Davit2005]

On 05/11/2025 at 15:09, Olliedawg said:

We use a Synology 423+, never had any problems with it, but I understand why people steer clear.

My thoughts. The main issue with Synology is the cost of the RAM and HDDs if you want to go fully Synology brand. Such a mark up on the RAM and HDDs/SSDs. At the end of the day the GUI and the Apps make the Synology appetizing but they fall behind on CPU/RAM spec quite often considering the price point. Then if you want to run VMs you have a max of 4 networks without paying for a license and RAM matters mostly more than CPU. I have used 3rd party memory though mostly successful apart from one bad experience when the RAID got corrupted due to faulty RAM. RAID is not a backup and thankfully nothing was lost because I had a backup 🙂

 

There is a lot of emerging devices and I feel Synology need to up game 🙂 Especially as some of them can run TrueNAS on the box quite easily.

Edited November 17, 2025 by Davit2005

[TheHyperTechie]

On 05/11/2025 at 15:09, Olliedawg said:

We use a Synology 423+, never had any problems with it, but I understand why people steer clear.

We have the same model, been running non-stop for about 2 years with no issues. Mainly chose Synology due to their free "active-backup" feature for Office 365 and Google Workspace.

[Davit2005]

2 minutes ago, HyperTech said:

We have the same model, been running non-stop for about 2 years with no issues. Mainly chose Synology due to their free "active-backup" feature for Office 365 and Google Workspace.

The apps really sell Synology. I've was running them for at least 6 years, sometimes multiple where one is an on-site backup with the main Synology holding original important data backing up to a cloud service. Apart from the issue with the RAM I have been very pleased with them. As I no longer need the APPs I moved to TrueNAS and moved services to either docker or VMs.

[Olliedawg]

8 minutes ago, HyperTech said:

We have the same model, been running non-stop for about 2 years with no issues. Mainly chose Synology due to their free "active-backup" feature for Office 365 and Google Workspace.

Exact same as us. We only use the synology for backups, so suits us well

[gszech]

I've always liked Qnap until I've ordered Synology and now I prefer Synology. As someone mentioned the Active backup just works for backing up Google or Office 365 environment.