First NAS Setup – Looking for Tips, Feedback, and Critiques

Ok so because I’m impatient and get geekily excited about own new tech, new to me, I ordered my NAS. Here’s what I went with.

Ater a couple of weeks of searching and reading subreddits that had to do with NAS, UGREEN, Synology, datahoarding, photography, smarthome, and photography, and very minimal internet webpage searching because that’s too much noise to filter through, and a week long conversation with ChatGP and Perplexity about my use case and hardware I’m considering I landed on the UGREEN KXP2800 and Seagate Iron Wolf HDDs.

NAS: UGREEN NASync DXP2800 https://a.co/d/aZjToJE

HDDs: 2 Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 20TB https://a.co/d/heCfNmF

I decided upon the UGREEN DXP2800 because it has newer more updated hardware specs versus comparable Synology NAS. Yes, it’s new to the NAS market. And their software doesn’t have as many options/software as the veteran and more experienced Synology. But after searching Reddit and conversations with ChatGPT and Perplexity, and some forums like Thurrott.com ?, I learned that the UGREEN software management is actually pretty good. Especially for a newbie and basic NAS user like me.

My use case will be backing up my personal files (documents etc.), photos, and media. But I’m also doing a massive photo and video scanning project for my and my wife’s side of the family. And I don’t want those files mixed in with my personal iCloud Photos…it’s too many and the vast majority of them I don’t want anyways. So I plan to use this NAS to create private password protected folder where I can share the link with each side of the family, a separate folder for each side. This way I don’t have to worry about how am I going to get these files to them, they live all over the country. They all have different devices and OSes. So they can take their time downloading the files. And they’ll be gated from all my other files on my NAS. This is going to be awesome…first have to figure it all out ?.

I went with the Seagate Iron Wolf Pros because going to 20TB jumped it to the Pro series. But also all the reviews and AI conversations I had recommended it for my use case.

Also, I was EXTREMELY impressed with how easy it was to “chat” with ChatGPT and Perplexity on this topic. And the information, EXACT information was delivered immediately! Not like the now old school way of Googling stuff via search engines. The LLMs remembered past conversations. I could ask questions days later like, compare this UREEN model number to the previous one I asked you about and put it into a table with a summarization and recommendation for my use case”…… <— that’s a computer/dot matrix sound of me verbally expressing how the results where being typed out lol. Man, it was just next level helpful. Now, there were some errors with both LLMs. They’d have some specs wrong or forget what mentioned in previous conversations, or just get something totally wrong but with a more specific prompt of telling it what to remember and compare it fixed that. So out of both LLMs ChatGPT vs Perplexity, I think I preferred ChatGPT, but only, based upon it being faster and I preferred the conversation style of it. Now I really liked that Perplexity is great about showing its citations, that’s important to. But it’s also not difficult to verify the information from ChatGPT by either asking it for a link/source for what it told me or just copying it and using the old school method of searching it online. This was a turning point for me using LLMs. I will be using them going forward for similar things I’m researching and highly recommend it for others!

And then 100% admit I’l be sailing the high seas to get the movies and TV shows I want. Now I know this is a controversial issue with some people. But as a Gen X’r there’s a lot of movies and TV shows I can find anymore, on any streaming device. I can find some of them on DVDs…sometimes. But there are a lot of old cheesy horror and sci-fi B-Movies that aren’t on any service or physical media anymore. Or old late night TV shows I used to watch either. So I’ll be adding those to my NAS and figuring out how to stream them to our TVs. This is going to be really great during hurricane season when we regularly lose power for short and long periods of time. EcoFlow batteries are awesome by the way for stuff like this.

Just thought I’d share my setup and get any critiques or tips from the community here, as this is 100% new to me. Thanks in advance!