Synology NAS on a Mac--Making Sure I'm Thinking this Through

July 23, 2018 4:15 AM

I'm thinking of getting the Synology DS418play. It will be my first NAS. I think I understand what I'm getting myself into, but could use a sanity check.

I understand Synology is well respected, plays well on the Mac, and (arguably) has the best software.

I am looking at the play version because it has the higher power Intel processor compared to the ARM in the 418 (I know Plex is working on getting their server software running on the ARM, but I'd rather have something I know works out of the box). I plan to get two WD Red 8gb drives two start and have to bays empty.

I want to use the NAS to:
-hold my music library which I plan to access through iTunes
-hold my video library, which I plan to access through Plex
-hold my photo library, which I plan to access through Lightroom
-hold various documents
-have some level of redundancy in a RAID 1 configuration

What I guess I don't really understand is:
-does iTunes play nicely with NAS? Should I be moving just the music, or the iTunes catalog? If the catalog, would I share the catalog between my various Macs?
-I don't rip 4K movies, and I assume Plex will run fine, but is this going to stutter and be annoying?
-Does Lightroom work OK with the photos stored on a NAS? I think the actual catalog has to stay on the computer. Am I thinking about this right?
-If I have documents on the NAS, what prevents multiple users trying to access simultaneously? And in particular--can I have something like my Quicken or Banktivity database on the NAS and not mess it up?

Lastly--a bunch of the setups I've seen have the NAS divided into different volumes (e.g., separate volumes for videos, music, documents). Do you have to set the Synology NAS up like that? Is that the best practice? I had been assuming I would just have one giant 8TB disk where everything was jumbled together--music, Plex server, Lightroom catalog. How do I set this up?

Thanks!

posted by Admiral Haddock to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I can only help a little with one question. The Synology NAS has an iTunes server package built in, so you can store music in three ways: just use it as a file server; as a remote library, or through the Audio Station package. In my experience, the remote library access doesn't work with large libraries - it times out. The Audio Station is also slow with large libraries and particularly doesn't work well with smart playlists.
posted by Grinder at 5:05 AM on July 23, 2018

Also I believe that more-recent iTunes clients (i.e., your Mac) won't use the Synology's iTunes library through the server application. I could be wrong: I gave up using mine that way a couple of years ago (I have a 412j, I think). I do just have my iTunes Library folder & music on one of the Synology's shares, and I mount that on my Mac to use it. (I believe that if you try to let multiple Macs use the same iTunes Library file -- never at the same time -- that there will be crying. But I have no cite for this.) This means that the Synology's music server called DS Audio can see these files, and that has an app for iOS and Android.

I put my four disks into two pairs, and divided those into different shares. A couple of the shares are filling up now and I kind of wish I hadn't been so inflexible....but I am a server sysadmin and it was habit. :7)

Be wary of the Plex server: I think that I had to go digging on the web recently when I blindly updated it and then discovered that my old, slow ARM processor had been dropped! I found a previous version of the server app, but now I am paranoid. And yeah, the slow CPU is starting to show its age: the web interface is super slow. (I rip all my movies on my Mac so that poor Synology doesn't have to transcode them. I think this is pretty important on a little CPU like this.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:16 AM on July 23, 2018

I'm quite happy with my DS416play, but I mostly use it as a Plex server and Time Machine volume.

Current gotcha: The version of Plex installed by the Synology package manager is 32 bit, while the newest Synology OS requires 64 bit apps. As a consequence, if you had auto-update on, Plex Media Server abruptly stopped working last Thursday. Fixing the issue was as simple as removing Plex, and reinstalling the 64 bit version manually.
posted by zamboni at 7:08 AM on July 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

If you're using it for Time Machine, you have to set up an additional share with a small quota so that Time Machine doesn't take over the whole NAS.
posted by scruss at 8:12 AM on July 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

I use a DS214play and it's great for serving movies through its regular video station (plex has been unreliable, but more because I use an older Roku to get stuff off than plex itself, I think). iTunes basically doesn't work on it — Apple fixed/fucked the protocol that networked drives used to use for access. Lightroom, I dunno. I use Adobe Bridge and that works fine with NAS drives, even though photo editing is hella slow if the photos aren't local.
posted by klangklangston at 7:07 PM on July 25, 2018