Yes, considered QNAP but seem now to be settled on Synology.
Have also thought about Raspberry Pi (there is a version of the os for Ubuntu) but I think my days of meddling/experimenting with hardware are over 
Does anyone have an opinion (or advice) about this:
Terramaster was on my shortlist when I was getting a NAS. Several reviews noted a difficult setup and configuration. For me one important criteria is good user community support, and for Terramaster I could not see that. That’s why my list comprised only three: Synology, QNAP, Asustor. I picked Asustor: newish contender in the NAS market, eager to gain market share, good price level, responsive support for users, and I found a forum of French users with lively participation and good advice.
Answer on question “Reasons to use Linux” https://qr.ae/pN2obv
and then on the other side “If Linux is so good, why is everyone not using it?” https://qr.ae/pN2obz
Another Linux user saying hello 
In terms of NAS, I’m using FreeNAS (www.freenas.org), running on an old HP MicroServer I bought years ago when HP were almost giving them away, with a couple of TBs of storage from some old hard drives I had kicking about. Tempted to upgrade it all to something a bit more modern as hardware is really cheap these days.
3 Likes
We bought a Synology DS220j NAS in the end…
In the end, it was very simple to mount to Ubuntu using fstab but the help site took us initially down the wrong path using NFS protocols but it was much easier with smb.
Really nice piece of kit and can recommend it.
NFS is almost certainly preferable to SMB.
How so Paul?
We have no Windoze clients to connect to the NAS, only Linux…
Even less reason to use SMB then 
NFS is 2-3x the speed on the same hardware as SMB (though both can be, and often need to be, “tweaked”).
Hummm, interesting. 
The NAS is used as a data store on our discrete home network accessed by either of our Linux clients. I might just see if I can crack the fstab entry for NFS to do a comparison.
server:/exported/fs /mount/point nfs defaults 0 0
Need to make sure the required rpc services are running, especially rpc.idmapd - systemd (I think) grovels over the fstab and does this automatically, if not make sure the nfs-idmapd and nfs-mountd services are enabled & started.
Might need to edit /etc/idmapd.conf on client and server to make sure the domain entries match. You’ll need to make sure the server lists exported filesystems in /etc/exports (might be taken care of by the GUI if you are using FreeNAS)
It’s a while since I have actively looked at NFS - my setup has “just worked” for years so I might be slightly rusty on some points.
Well, I tried the reference provided here and got the same result as before:
mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting 192.168.1.117:/volume1/GnV_Common
in response to (from the terminal):
sudo mount 192.168.1.117:/volume1/GnV_Common /media/NAS/GnV_Common
So I’ll stick with SMB which works fine.
I’m not a FreeNAS expert - /etc/exports on the server would be where I’d check first.
Probably needs to look something like
/volume1/GnV_Common 192.168.1.0/24(rw,async)
Also check the logs on the NAS box.
1 Like
1 Like
I don’t seem to have an /etc/exports file…
Hmmm, probably a FreNAS quirk - that has been the default location on Unix systems of pretty much all flavours since NFS was invented.
IMO, the worst bit about NFS is the longstanding bugs that plague it depending on which version of NFS you are using and which distribution (client side) is accessing the share. We had NFS shares in a previous business setup, and they forever required tweaking with permissions, mount options, remounting/dismounting, a real sysadmin nightmare, but maybe that was due to the particular version of NFS we were using at the time, plus we had macOS clients as well, and Apple simply doesn’t put the work in to play nicely with anything other than SMB or APFS these days.
Still haven’t managed to crack NFS share on the Synology NAS and to be honest, I’m not really that bothered about it now since the NAS is only used as a shared files store between our Ubuntu clients and (very occasionally) iPAD clients using the propriety FE File Explorer utility.
SAMBA is doing the job we need and whilst respecting the view put by @anon88169868 about the speed benefits of NFS, my view is - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it 
1 Like
Interesting history lesson on pre windoze OS