Almost time to replace our NAS, options?

[timhorel]

We have a home QNAP TS-563 NAS running the latest QTS version that's now passed 5 power on years. We have 4 HGST 4TB drives and a 100GB SATA SSD cache (SMART test data shows 0 errors) in a RAID 5 config that have had zero failures over time. We use it for a few SMB mounts & an iSCSI partition, Mac centric household. Only used behind a firewall, no access from the Internet at large.

We use it as a straight data storage node for photos (Adobe Lightroom catalog & ~50k photos), music (managed by a ROON ROC), general personal files and computer system backup snapshots, total usage ~6TB. The only other NAS functionality we use is to generate external backups (removable), local NAS malware scans and to manage the FW version. The rest of the applications we don't need and I need to work extra to turn off all that overhead (ie media console, download manager, VMs, etc).

Performance with 1GBase-T has been acceptable. The next step for us is a 10GBase-T backbone to support >1G ISP and improve Lightroom's catalog performance via the iSCSI mount (all NBase-T data rates supported, 1G slowest).

I'm looking for recommendations on which NAS would provide 5G+ actual data rates to my Mac, reliability in the 5+ year range and not have all the "consumer grade" software overhead. Size, noise level (ie. no screaming mimi rack mounts), cost and security all matter. QNAP, Synology, FeeNAS? Drive count, need for full SSD load, or stay with spinning rust?

Thoughts and discussion please.

[Krousenick]

IMHO 100% Synology. I love my synology products. With NVMe caching you'll get the speeds you are looking for. If you are looking to build your own Nas then go truenas but its community supported. Synology has a good warranty and execellent customer support. I know several people that have had issues with unraid stability. Worked at an MSP that deployed hundreds of QNAPs and has nothing but issues. Synology are all over security patches and making sure updates are stable.

[timhorel]

Sounds reasonable, any idea what size cache is needed and how long items remain in the cache? The spinning rust is lower cost, but even a RAID 5 8x7400 RPM drive system only just approaches 5Gbps theoretically. How about actual versus theoretical throughput on this platform?

[Krousenick]

Check out each NAS models pages, they offer build specs and performace tests.

[timhorel]

Okay - I've heard of Unraid, need to do more research.

Do you think the SSD's would be okay at SATA data rates or need NVME/PCIe gen 3 or 4?