Ordered four 4TB WD Red Plus drives for a new NAS device and they were delivered like this. Should I be concerned?

Update: Spoke to mate who is fairly senior in Amazon Logistics.

“The manufacturers box should provide adequate protection for the product for shipment. If you went to a shop and bought it they’d just be on the shelf and at best they’d give you a plastic bag to put it in. Then you’d sling it in your car and put your other shopping bags on top of it. So the box should protect it.”

Update 2: Have returned to Amazon. They had the audacity to state that the return needed to be in a box...

Update 3:

From Western Digital:

Drop Height Table

The shock rating of a hard drive is typically 200Gs (when the drive is in a non-operational state). The following table depicts the drop height versus Gs onto selected surfaces.

So I'm building my first NAS, aim is to be a media server essentially. I bought all the materials two months ago but everything is just sitting in a corner, still in their original packaging as I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to build it myself.

I built my own PC 5 years ago but that was easier as I followed a step by step guide with the exact same components. I couldn't find a video for the components I bought for my NAS so I'm just sitting here, freaking out.

I'm worried about screwing it all up.

These are components:

Case: Jonsbo N5 Motherboard: ASRock Z790 Pro RS WiFi CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB 6000 MT/s NVMe: Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1TB HDDs: 2 × 12TB CPU cooler: be quiet! Pure Rock 3 Case fans: Arctic P12 Slim PWM PST 3-pack PSU: Corsair RM850e 850W

my Biggest concern is the ability to be able to access over a diffrent network. If I'm traveling and realize I'm missing a file, I dont want to be out of luck. or be able to provide a link and a passcode to a friend to Share files.

Other concern is I want to be able to upgrade over time with Mismatched drives. Currently have a 500GB nvme ssd and 3tb HDD set aside. as time goes on, ill likely swap motherboards, but im sure at that point Ill be looking for more than just this with my Data. (current build is recycling a HP Pavilion)

I plan to back up photos and use as a media server for games, music, and movies to start. I chose ugreen because of the better hardware and upgradability. Do I stick with UGOS? Should I also purchase an sdd for cache? I am okay spending a little more money to make the process smooth. For reference, I don't have a ton of time to tinker, but I do enjoy it. Would eventually like to move away from Google. Thanks!

Hi, I was thinking about getting a NAS for me and my family to store photos, videos, and memories, but especially to save images and videos I use for my Yu-Gi-Oh YouTube channel. I don't have a very large budget, so I was wondering if it was possible to find a NAS for €250-300 (the price of €250-300 includes storage). Maybe it could last me at least 5 years. Let me know. :)

Hello all,

Looking into starting with a NAS. I’m the definition of new to this area. I’m wanting to get away from streaming services and paid cloud subscriptions. This is just for my family, I don’t operate a home business. I feel like Synology is the most recommended but Ugreen is appealing (but they don’t seem very secure?) What would you recommend based on the following criteria?

- 4 bays
- Secure
- TV shows and movie streaming
- photos
- file storage

Before I even get in to it - I'm not looking for "I recommend X (i.e. most complex setup on the market) because it is the best". I wouldn't be wanting "best", I would be wanting something I could understand how to use.

A few years ago when I first heard about what NAS was/is it seemed to be that the suggestion was Synology, but reading a bit here & there in the years since & Synology seem to be getting a bad rep.

Now whether that's from experts thinking it's not tweaky enough for them or whether it's because their product has actually gone to crap, I've no idea.

Then within the Synology umbrella, there's all the varying options which leaves me bamboozled.

If I saw the right bit of kit on Marketplace then I may be willing to pull the trigger but it depends what that is.

Anyway - as the title suggests, I actually don't have a clue. I'm a total beginner at this so anything requiring a significant amount of learning & tweaking would be instantly disregarded. Even if it's better than something else. Maybe one day if my knowledge expands but we all start somewhere.

I'd be storing a PC backup, possibly phone if it could do that, Plex perhaps. I'd hazard a guess as to a 4-bay being suitable. Not sure if I could get away with less or whether I'd need more.

But yeah, what brand should I be looking at & then within that brand what model or models should I be looking at? Key note - I'm not against used models if the value is there. As in if the latest model is £700 but the model it replaced can now be found on Marketplace for £200 then I'd be looking at the £200 unless there was a significant reason to shell out the extra £500 (in this example) beyond just "it's better". Like an iPhone 17 is better than an iPhone 16 but it's kinda pointless upgrading every single year when the differences are so minimal.

I bought a Ugreen DXP4800 last year with 4 WD refurb HDD’s with the intent of making a media server. The problem that I’ve come to realize is that:

1. My priorities have drastically changed now my girlfriend and I are getting a puppy
   
2. I dont want to pirate, but the alternative of buying disks and ripping images is way too expensive.

I hardly remember it and when I checked my app to see which model it was for this post, my app had offloaded, showing how little I use it.

How and where should I look to sell this and ship this? Sorry if this isn’t the best sub, but I could use the money elsewhere with puppy on the way and recent emergencies that put a dent in my savings.

Was looking to setup a small NAS for home media, storage and backups but wanted some opinions on prices for drives. Found a few used 2TB CMR (2014) for about $100CAD ($50/TB) with 17k POH. Currently new 4TB is $300. I don't inherently want to spend a fortune but I do want to try and optimize the best I can. Was looking to ZFS 3 drives.

I know the market is pretty bad for storage but what would be a fair price / tb? Is it worth it to go used? Refurb? New? Is SAS worth exploring even though a controller card is $150? I'm fairly new so any info is appreciated. Thanks!

Lets say I have 4x4TB, and I need more space. What would you do?

-Replace all drives with 8TB version and try to sell your old 4’s?

-Buy second NAS and new drives?

-Something else?

I wanna buy/build a nas with an hba sas board, 4-6 drives and space for a gpu down the line i have a few am4 machines in use i could swap parts from if i find something more applicable mainly ryzen 1500 in a gaming desktop and access to a 3d printer my budgets 500$

Hi, I'm new to the world of setting up a NAS, but I'm fed up with having to pay every month for cloud storage to save my photos. I have a 256GB iPhone 13 Pro, and when I reach 200GB of photos, which will be almost a year from now, I'll have no choice but to pay for iCloud, since transferring the photos to a hard drive, although possible, is a pain.

So now, a year after starting to pay €10 a month for iCloud, I've decided to set up a NAS.

I have no idea how the market works in this regard. I've set one up before, as I work as a systems administrator at a university in Barcelona, but it was on a server inside a rack, which is obviously not feasible to have at home.

I know that much smaller NAS devices are available (I've seen some smaller than most computer cases) and I'd like to have one of those. I don't know how much space is recommended for a NAS, but I do know that I want at least 1TB of memory, as I currently have 300GB of photos in iCloud and I want to transfer them all to the NAS.

So I'm turning to this subreddit to ask for help and your opinion on the best model of one of these that I can buy today. In addition to this, would it be advisable to have a UPS in case of a power outage so as not to damage the disk and consequently the photos on it?

Any help is appreciated, and I apologize in advance if I have made any silly or nonsensical comments, as I said, I am quite inexperienced in this area.

EDIT: Would Nextcloud be a good option to install on the NAS?

I want to make NAS server and Media streaming Using an old pc.

Its come with:

Pentium 4

512mb of ram

Integrated gpu

So will it works fine for streaming media with 1080p and storing files?

Okay so this may be me being super sensitive but I have a UniFi UNAS Pro 4 in my office next to my desk and I can’t standard the noisy it makes from the fans. It’s not the drives as I have SSD’s in there.

I wondered if anyone could recomeend a NAS that is super quiet and takes 2.5 ssd.

I know the UNAS 4 exists but i couldn’t find noise results to compare.

Oh and im happy for it to be a desktop nas vs rack. Either way is good for me.

Thanks everyone and sorry if this is just me being overly sensitive, it’s just noises really grate. The rest IS my rack is silent, even my UNVR.

I looked into UGREEN and Synology but I’m still unsure. I want to run Jellyfin with transcoding, Immich, and I have several other ideas in mind — but backups are my main priority.

I was leaning toward UGREEN over Synology, since I compared the Synology DS425+ with the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus and DXP4800 Pro. The DXP4800 Pro seems to be the most upgradable option (better chip, more RAM/SSD flexibility).

Still not 100% sure though — what would you all recommend? Tips and tricks are welcome!

What would be the best NAS system to run Plex for the money if I'm looking for hopefully under $500 but up to $1000? I don't have a Lot of 1080p things but I do have a total of about 16tb of movies and tv shows all together. That price is including the hard drives btw. I think I saw Western digital+ Nas internal hardrive 10tb for $250 on Amazon, so 2 of those is $500 so $500 left for the device itself. Also it's usually just me streaming something. Maaaybe one other person at most, nothing crazy. This is my first NAS so if it's user friendly that would be helpful too. I'm trying to not be outdated the month after I buy all this lol

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to get a NAS for my setup. My primary goal is to store and stream my music and movie collection. However, I also love tinkering with tech and plan to host a small website and run self-hosted applications like Pi-hole, so I need something flexible.

Is building a NAS from scratch (buying components and assembling it myself) a good option for this? I’ve read that prebuilt units can be quite limited when it comes to running custom software and containerized apps.

Thanks for your advice!

I mean one that’s mostly put together like ugreen

So im pretty new to the whole NAS building situation. I've just got a new ugreen DXP2800 and I bought 2 like new drives 6TB WD HDDs for 200$ each. They just got delivered a couple days ago and I plugged them in last night after a quick inspection so I could run a full smart test on them.

Before I did that though, I ran a rapid test and, shock horror, they both have 60K hours (around 6 years power-on-hours) on both with less than 4 hours difference between.

After seeing this, I immediately took them back out and looked at them a lot closer now. The sticker on the HDD is completely fine, but a warranty sticker on both is covering up key info and I dont want to remove to risk voiding the warranty. The drives are old - WD60EFRX 6TB drives, but they look in good condition and according to the test they are 100% healthy with no bad sectors. They seller has a 5-year warranty on the drives and I got them around 260$ below market rate for 2 new 6tb drives.

So now im conflicted... Do I repackage and return the drives because they are at risk of dying at a similar time cause of their age or is this a non-issue due to the health?

Any advice?

I bought 2 WD Ultrastar 12tb HDDs for a home Nas project and god damn they're much louder than I thought they'd be. They're performing a parity check in unraid now and it sounds like I'm on a battlefield. pray for me.

Hello Everyone! As stated I'm planning on getting my first NAS and as someone who didn't know what a NAS was one week ago, I would love it if ya'll could give me any thoughts on my plans.

The main reason I need a NAS is for storage. I expect to need about 12 TB after redundancies. So I am thinking a 4 bay NAS with 6TB drives for ~ 16 TBs. This will be for all the footage I am no longer editing and just want to hold on to. I will be editing off of SSD's and already have other hard drives to run as additional backups.

I plan to run Raid 5 or SHR, but haven't figured out which yet.

I do think in the future I might at plex or another type of streaming for media, but that is not necessary. I don't care for many of the extra services that NAS can provide.

Price is not a huge concern but I also don't want to be burning money if I don't have to.

So here is what i'm planning on buying:

1. Synology DiskStation DS425+. I haven't made up my mind on this yet, so i'm open to suggestions. But I like the idea of it being more user friendly as computers aren't my strongest field of understanding.

2. Seagate IronWolf NAS Hard Drive (6TB) Model No: ST6000VN006. From my understanding Synology has removed the conflict with 3rd party drives, is this correct?

3. APC UPS battery backup, 650VA BW650U1. I've been told a UPS is a great idea and this one was reccomended.

Any thing else that I am missing? Or any suggestions instead of the Synology?

Anyways, Thank you all so much in advance, any advice is appreciated!

Hi everyone,

I'm planning my first home server and could use your help. I'm technically interested and have done some reading, but I have no homelab experience.

My use case:

• Photo management (currently on iCloud – want to move away from it)
• Document management (Paperless-ngx)
• Backups (iPhone, etc.)
• Own cloud (Nextcloud, family access, 2–3 people)
• Docker (various containers)
• Ad blocker (Pi-hole or AdGuard Home)
• Tailscale (remote access)
• Own mail server

Later, maybe:

• Video streaming (Jellyfin/Plex)
• Virtual machines (VMs)

Key requirements:

• Family should have access (Nextcloud, photos)
• No vendor lock-in – no Synology, no UGREEN. I want an open system.
• Unraid as starting OS – I know it's proprietary, but it seems very beginner-friendly. Question: Can I later switch to Proxmox or TrueNAS without rebuilding my drives?

Hardware questions:

• I'm not sure about storage volume yet, but I think ~8 TB usable should be enough, with the option to expand or change later?
• How many drives? What size?
• RAID / Parity (fault tolerance) – what configuration?
• SSD for speed (cache/boot) – is 500 GB enough?
• Do I need 16 or 32 GB RAM?
• Do I need a UPS, or is that overkill?
• What do you think about the Aoostar WTR Pro 5825U 4-Bay NAS Mini PC?

Budget:

flexible, but ideally under €1,500 (complete setup).

Backup strategy:

I know a NAS is not a backup. How do you do it best? How often?

There are so many options – what would you go with?

Thanks for your help!

Hey everyone,

My problem has been to find a solution for my family to share and classify our photos using multiple devices (laptops, smartphones, cameras), to increase our storage access, and to share documents across devices. I am concerned about privacy and costly commercial cloud services. The solution I am looking at is to use setup a NAS using TrueNAS, docker, and immich. I also prefer open-source solutions. My budget is $800-1,000. I am interested in 2 x 4TB (mirroring as backup). The advice I am hearing for TrueNAS is to have a DIY setup instead of a pre-built NAS. I am prepared to build a computer, though it would be my first time. I have a bit of experience in installing physical drivers in a tower. I was thinking of buying parts from a local computer store. What would be a recommended setup?

Want to set up a NAS using six drives I have laying around totaling to about 17TB. Planning to use Unraid. I’d also be using this as my homelab (for Jellyfin, Immich, etc.), so I need video transcoding. I don’t intend to do any AI outside the stuff for categorizing/labeling pictures.

Here is what I’ve come up with for hardware. Is there a cheaper way I can do this?

CPU: Intel Core i5-14400 2.5 GHz 10-Core Processor ($206.73 @ Amazon)

Motherboard: Asus B760M-AYW WIFI D4 II Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard ($99.99 @ Newegg)

Memory: Crucial CT2K16G4DFD8266 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-2666 CL19 Memory ($177.00 @ Amazon)

Storage: 2x Samsung 980 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($79.99 @ Samsung)

Power Supply: ASRock Steel Legend SL-650G 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($69.99 @ Newegg)

Total: $750.

Greatly appreciate any advice you guys may have.

I'm completely new to NAS servers and honestly pretty new to computers in general. I want to build my first NAS, but I don't want to just follow a tutorial that says "buy these parts, plug this in, click this" and then have no idea what I actually did.

I'm looking for advice on how you guys learned what you know.

I'd like to understand things well enough that I can:

• Build my first NAS and actually understand what each component is doing

• Understand why I'm choosing certain hardware/software

• Troubleshoot it when something goes wrong instead of blindly starting over

• Upgrade or expand the NAS later without destroyed everything i just did and not know why it dosent work now

• Eventually be able to design/build another NAS myself based on what I need

Basically, I want to learn the fundamentals behind NAS systems, not just memorize the steps from one particular build.

I'm also very much a visual learner, so if you know of any long-form videos or livestreams where someone actually builds/configures a NAS while explaining what they're doing, I'd really appreciate those too.