Qnap does have NAS that support ZFS however those are primarily enterprise level NAS ie. think 5-figure MYR pricing. ZFS is excellent but the hardware requirements are also pretty high eg. multicore CPUs, 8GB minimum RAM, hardware RAID, which is beyond the typical Atom/Celeron based home NAS.

What specific features from ZFS do you need?

If you want 4k then the ideal situation is your NAS box has a wired connection to your android box.
I've personally used FreeNAS and it works reliably. Unraid is not free as someone already pointed out. I've used it but didn't bother to try it beyond the 30-day trial. I've recommended and am using enterprise level TrueNAS at work so I know it's reliable.

Alternatively do what I do ie. download movies to a USB and plug it into your TV/android box. I have no desire to save many downloadable movies so that actually works quite well and has way less setup

Remember, RAID is not backups. You need both! Ransomware, fire, flood, theft, brick falling on your NAS will easily convince you that backups are important.

If your data is really valuable to you, then you would pay the money for backups. You can easily categorize your data into tiers, some that don't have to go to the cloud, some that do. Compression/deduplication will also reduce the space required by a huge amount!

One strategy I use to get "cheaper" cloud backup is using Office 365 Home. For ~RM359 per year, you get 6 accounts, 1TB each = 6TB total. You also get some legal copies of Microsoft Office as a bonus Compare this to AWS Glacier at ~RM240 per year for 1TB

Also when replacing drives, don't forget to check Backblaze Stats. Basically the most reliable tend to be Hitachi/Toshiba drives, followed by Seagate. WD has some very high failure rates


This post has been edited by tishaban: Apr 7 2020, 11:39 AM

Yes I've bought SSDs, USB drives, projectors from Amazon that's cheaper than buying locally. This is usually true for some brands eg. Samsung and for high end stuff eg. Asrock Rack motherboards that Malaysian vendors charge too much or don't even carry. For others eg Adata the price difference is very small eg. 2 x 1TB Adata SSD = ~US$265 on Amazon vs ~RM1,200 locally

For dead on arrival items, Amazon will refund your money and shipping costs up to a certain amount, based on my experience you have to top up RM50-100 to ship it back
I've not had to claim any warranty for my SSDs yet. I've been full SSDs in my house and homelab NAS since 2011

I started out with a nice 4-bay Qnap in 2012 but no longer use it.

In the end for me I made a tiering system. Irreplaceable scans/photos/videos are on the NAS (FreeNAS ~4TB usable, total spent maybe RM500?) backed up to OneDrive
Anything else that's downloaded can be deleted after watching

What sort of workflow is this? From what you stated, work is done on the local PC and only saved to the NAS for backups?
You're not actively working off the NAS?

How many clients are we talking about? What sort of PCs? What networking backbone do you have?

Working off the NAS ie. your active files live on the NAS will require more NAS resources compared to just backing up to NAS
More clients, more higher end PCs, 10Gbit networking = high end NAS with more RAM and spindles

Finally how important is the data on the NAS? Remember RAID or mirroring is not the same as backups.
If you get a ransomware, then everything on your RAID will be encrypted as well.

If you're just one person and have a lot of work stuff on your PC and only need a backup solution then a NAS is nice to have but probably overkill.

Synology and Qnap make some excellent NAS systems for home/SOHO use. You can start there.

This post has been edited by tishaban: May 29 2020, 04:44 PM

Haha so which one is the setup? One person or 5 people? How much data are we talking about roughly?
Backups is a different use case and is only one capability that a NAS can do.

The steps below works if your objective is for backups. Cloud would be for disaster recovery and is optional but highly recommended for you.

If one person:

1. get an external USB drive
2. install Veeam free, backup from one PC to that external drive
3. buy some cloud backup for offsite. Veeam can backup to cloud as well. Backblaze is cheapest but if your data is not a lot there are other cheaper options eg. Onedrive

If 5 people (or is it 1 person with 5 PCs?) backing up to NAS

1. make sure you have a wired network. NAS can work with wifi but it'll be slower
2. buy NAS
3. install Veeam free, backup from PCs to NAS
3b. or if you don't want to spend the money, buy one USB drive, setup one PC as the Veeam backup server to backup other PCs
4. buy cloud backup, sync from NAS to cloud. Qnap, Synology, etc all can backup to cloud

This post has been edited by tishaban: Jun 3 2020, 12:38 PM

Yes but the important part is to configure the alerts correctly so that you know when there is an error and respond appropriately whether it's a minor error (bad sector count starting to increase) or a major error (complete drive failure)

Some drives die slowly giving minor errors first. Others die suddenly.

If you don't have alerts configured (email etc) then you won't know when an error occurs. Some NAS will make a beeping/buzzing sound or blinking LEDs when there is a major error, but many people keep their NAS hidden in store rooms etc where you cannot hear or see these alerts

Also RAID is not backups.