I have the DS920, and it seems to be getting a little old at this point.
If your NAS is showing it's age for hosting applications, consider hosting applications that are not working well on a low power mini PC. Lots of people host Channels DVR on N100 based mini PCs running Windows or Linux. They draw very low power and do a nice job at serving up Channels DVR. With the Intel processor, transcoding works natively off of the iGPU placing very little demand on the CPU. The N150 CPU is very new and the future yet there are still some support issues for this new technology. If you need more CPU than the N100 can provide, choose something a bit more powerful.
I have Channels on a DS718+ and it's still running fine, but over the years playback in the web UI has gotten slower and slower to begin, to the point of being unusable. Apparently that's because of the transcoding required, which would also affect remote streaming if I used that feature.
I'm still happy with my Synology because it's low-maintenance and I only use it with my Fire TV clients at home, but when someone asked about choosing between an M1 Mac Mini and a Synology NAS, Channels developer @eric confirmed this is a known limitation:
The M1 Mac Mini is 4-5 years old now, is it still recommended? I do have a Mini PC with a Ryzen 9 and 32GB of ram, but that just seems like complete overkill.
Eric recommended the M1 MM only three months ago, so I'm guessing the answer is still yes.
Yep, the M1 Mac Mini is still a great machine. It's still my current DVR and I haven't run into anything where it hasn't been more than powerful enough.
I have a DS918+ which is also starting to show its age. I don't see myself investing in a new Synology, though. They are about to release "new" models which use processors dating back to 2018. And of course, they ditched processors capable of hardware transcoding years ago.
I loved my DS918+ for years, but I think my Synology journey is over. I am considering picking up a Mac Mini as a home server for Channels, Plex, Home Assistant, and other applications. I'll keep the Synology strictly as a back-up appliance.
Yeah I’m gonna keep my movies and arcade backups on mine going forward, and that’s about it, maybe keep the surveillance too.
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I currently use a DS920+ to run my channels server and host my recordings and media. Over the last few days I have started to notice that when I go to watch a tv show in my library, in this case Seinfeld, the whole NAS system just becomes unresponsive. Yesterday I had to restart the NAS since the drives were just spinning for about 10 mins and I was not able to load channels, log into my NAS or do anything. Now I got seinfeld episodes ripped in 4K but I dont think thats the problem. I also have other 4K media on my server and never had an issue.
I have my NAS updated. channels dvr firmware is always up to date. the drives don't show any messages about issues the system is picking up. I have been careful not to watch TV when I know I got recordings scheduled as I dont want them to get missed but long term something must be done. Not sure if how I have my volume set up is maybe responsible for the latest behavior. I got my media stored on two drives. I have them set up as "JBOD" with the drive storage combined. my DVR recordings are stored on another separate drive.
As anyone had this issue or something similar happen to them?
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