Question What was your first NAS?

[fredbert]

My first was an AirPort Extreme ca. 2007. I plugged an external USB drive that the unit shared over AFP and SMB. It could also share out a USB printer to the network at the same time with a USB hub strung onto its one USB port.

I did this too. If my experience of this was mimicked by the Time Capsule then the Airport + disk would be better.

I still had the occasional Time Machine corruption issues back then and it was much quicker to attach the disk to Mac and fix (usually rm of the backup folder via Terminal) than any actions on the AFP mounted folder.

 

[kiriak]

My first NAS was a Qnap.

I left Qnap a few years ago, because they didn't care to support Linux with the PC client programs they had for windows and mac.
That time (about 4 years ago) Synology had linux versions of most of it's PC applications for the popular Linux distros.

Now for my Fedora PC I use the EOL Cloudstation Backup with the Drive on the NAS,
but I'm afraid that I will be forced to 3rd party tools in the near future (in conjuction with using Drive on Windows 10).

This is not a turn key solution it supposed to be and I'm wondering if Nextcloud would be a better fit for my needs.
I'm already testing FreeNas on an old PC I had.

I hope Synology will continue to support Linux users, some of them are just amateurs, like me.

 

[jann]

This is probably aimed at the old hands, rather than the recent NAS owners, but I'm curious to ask, "What was your first NAS?"

Mine was a Drobo (the FireWire 4-bay one) a decade ago.
Then I did the Drobo USB, then the Drobo 5C.

However in July I finally started using my brain and bought a Synology DS1520+!

 

[RonV42]

I had one of the first Western Digital My Cloud 2 bay (512 GB per bay) devices, it had a ethernet port, and a really underpowered gum stick processor. It ran a Linux OS and Samba for it's file sharing. It was easy to crash the thing with large video files. After about 6 months I found a site where people were able to crack into the OS and then with 3rd party support the issues such as the outdated Samba version was replaced with updated version. Then there was the add on's from the community. I was able to get Transmission and Transmission web running on this thing using Optware, and it became my download and sharing box. It had a short life of about 2 years for me after the ethernet port well belly up. I used the drives in other projects while the enclosure went into wall of shame in my museum of dead technology.

 

[Lewis]

Hi,
My fist NAS was Synology DS 411j with four WD green 3TB disk which started to have bad blocks after 2.5 years just after warranty has expired .

 

[Jan Janowski]

“What was your first NAS?"

Mine was an Addonics unit — a 2 or 3 something. In 2012-13, We were building our retirement home. It had no internet there, and at that time AC power often failed. But we wanted to install security cameras that would record motion detected images.

Threw together the Addonics, a laptop drive in a shirt pocket USBV2 enclosure for storage, 3x cameras, a 5 port 100mb switch to connect it all together, and a raspberry Pi as a time server with battery backed up clock, that everything else pointed at for time.
No UPS, just a surge protected outlet strip, but configured each device so they’d restart automatically on a power failure, which was quite frequent, and hid switch, NAS, drive & Time Server in the crawl space.
By golly if that combination of stuff didn’t work successfully for 3 years, until we retired, when it was removed from the crawl space.

It was replaced by DS215J in ~2016

 

[tjohns34]

HP MediaSmart Server EX475. Did all the available mods to it.

HP MediaSmart Server - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Next I tried a Drobo, can't remember the model #. Had to separately buy the Ethernet Dock that the Drobo unit sat on. The Drobo ended up being garbage.

Finally, tried a Synology DS212+. I love them so far, and haven't purchased any other brands. Currently have a DS718+.

 

[AdrianEarnshaw]

Mine was a Thecus, it was one of the first ones they made but cannot remember the model. I then moved to a qnap, which was short-lived before moving on to a Synology 916+.

 

[Robbie]

Infrant Technologies / Netgear ReadyNAS duo (2008) for me. Slow as molasses so ignored and only used as a backup device. When I really needed it I found that it had stopped updating the backups in late 2009 when I had a major failure in 2013. It reported everything as being fine but I could only actually recover the backup from before then end of 2009. Over 4 years of stuff lost but another 15 years saved. Big lesson learned!

(Although technically I had been using a PC as a server plus an Apple Airport + HDD as a network drive too.)

 

[Aggie88]

HP MediaSmart Server EX475. Still have it and use it.