Synology NAS
DS1819+
The DS1819+ is the second Synology NAS that I bought. The reason that I upgraded to it really came down to the combination of performance and massive storage possibilities. As soon as I bought it I also purchased the 10GgE Ethernet card to take advantage of the extremely fast speeds available when you combine 8 drives in a RAID configuration.
Synology 10GbE Card
One of the primary reasons why I upgraded to the DS1819+ was the fact that I wanted to break the gigabit networking barrier, and go full on 10GbE. With this card and jumbo frames I have been able to get write speeds of over 500MB/s. Overall it has been a great investment!
IronWolf Drives
For my NAS drives I used 6, 4TB IronWolf drives in my DS1819+. I would highly recommend using NAS drives over regular drives as regular drives are not built to deal with the cross vibrations created when you have multiple spinning drives next to each other. NAS drives are also quieter, draw less power, have larger lifespans, and are designed to be constantly powered on.
RAM Upgrade
One of the best things you can do performance wise for a NAS is a RAM upgrade. The DS1819+ comes with only 4GB of DDR4 ECC memory, though it does come with two RAM DIMMs. So I bought a cheap 16GB stick and upgraded! The extra ram not only can be used for VM’s, but any spare RAM is used a file cache, speeding up your NAS.
External Drive
Having a local backup of your data is a cheap and easy way to protect yourself from a multitude of forms of data loss. I use cheap WD easy stores as a hyper backup destination. Plus they are great for RasperryPi’s as well because they come with their own power supplies.
RaspberryPi
RaspberryPi 4
The RaspberryPi 4 is a powerful upgrade to the RBP 3. The 4 not only has a true Gigabit ethernet connection, but it also has two USB3.0 ports. This sets the RBP 4 up to be able to be a very powerful, cost efficient home NAS!
Cooling Case
The RaspberryPi 4 gets hot. This case is not only super cheap, but also comes with heatsinks, and a fan to keep the RBP4’s chips cool.
SSD Drive
I love Samsungs T3/5 line of SSD’s. They are USB-C, ultra lightweight, compact, and fast. Whenever I go on trips I always take two of them to backup my photography, and to edit off of. They are also great for RaspberryPi’s because they do not require an external power supply, though they may be a slight overkill.
Micro SD Card
The RaspberryPi 4 takes a micro SD card rather than the standard SD card used on earlier generations. I have always used SanDisks, as I have never had any issues with them. It is also amazing how cheap these cards have gotten!
Unifi
Unifi 16 Port 10GbE Switch
My R630 has two 10GbE SFP+ ports, and in order to hook everything up together I selected this unifi switch. It has 12 SFP+ ports and 4 10GbE copper ports. All in all it gives more than enough throughput to host my entire network, as well as future upgrades.
Unifi Dream Machine Pro
The UDM Pro is an amazing router for my needs. I really wanted a powerful router which would allow for customization such as VLAN’s, VPN server, and threat detection. One of the other reasons that this is perfect for me is the 10GbE capability. I have this hooked up over SFP+ to my master switch so all 8 Gigabit ports can get full access into my Synology or my R630 without hitting a bottle neck.
Unifi FlexHD AP
I love this Unifi FlexHD Access Point. It is actually quite stylish and above all else fast. It has 4×4 MIMO radio system that allows for multiple clients to be sending / receiving data, all at the same time. Because of the looks it also can fit in just about anywhere, and because it is powered over POE there is only a single cable going to it.
The above are amazon affiliate links. No one has paid me to get their products on this list, however if you click the links and purchase an item I get a small fee from amazon as a referral.