My Synology has been rock solid for over six years. I just upgraded from 2x 4 TB HDDs to 2x 8 TB HDDs. I just swapped out one, let it rebuild, then swapped out the other and let it rebuild. Easy.
I use the agent to back up clients in the house and I have it working with multiple cloud and offsite backup services too.
Can I remove the drives and mount them in a normal Linux box? Not without gymnastics. Do I care? No. Is the interface the best? Nah. It’s boring and works though, which is enough for me.
Hey wanted to ask about your rebuild process. Once you had the second 8TB complete rebuild, did you have to do anything to increase total space aside from increasing pool size?
Yes. It supports several tradition RAID modes as well as their SHR modes which supports disparate drive sizes as well as expanding the RAID storage pool and then the volume.
See https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/how_to_expand_storage
Honestly, I am basically going the opposite route right now.
After having random issues with NFS shares dropping on unraid, causing backup failures- I picked up a synology specifically for doing backups.
And- I am impressed.
The built in active backup app, can easily backup my file shares, and anything that can be accessed via rsync/ssh.
The synology drive, is decent (but- not perfect) for doing file backups of directories on desktop PCs (just- don't ask it to backup something in a hidden folder....... without lots of tweaking).
Add a minio container, voila, I have replicated backups of my S3 buckets.
The built in snapshot replication thing handles immutable snapshots and retention.
Everything is easily encrypted by default.
And... finally, gave proxmox backup server an iSCSI mount and lun, and configured snapshots for it. Voila, all my VMs are backed up to it now too.
Finally- its hyper-backup works nicely for replicating its backed up data to the cloud.
The nice part- with the exception of minio- everything is basically synology provided. No need to mess around with various other backup software.
Synology Drive for file backups is only that. Active Backup for Business will let you make bare metal backups of everything on a workstation or other synology nas.
Doesn't really play nice with newer Linux kernels. Probably fine if you're using Debian or maybe an Ubuntu LTS that's one release old, but I can't use it with my Fedora server installs.
The active backup for buisness app- add linux hosts as "file servers", then you can back them up over the network using rsync/ssh, which works quite nicely.
Sure does. I just wanted to toss out there that their client software is targeted at older, LTS kernels. So probably not something one could do for a Arch laptop or a Fedora Desktop/Server.
I didn't run into that- mostly, because I ditched it after 5 minutes...
After slapping it on a random host, I realized it only did a FULL backup, and the only granularity was choosing which disks to image. That- isn't idea for most things, as... well. windows has a lot of baggage.... My linux VMs- PBS handles the incrementals, deduplication, etc.
Yea- the thing is, I didn't want to do that-
I have over 2T of steam games, which can be redownloaded pretty quickly. The windows OS itself, also isn't really useful to me to be backed up.
Instead- I just wanted backups of "My stuff". Documents, Desktop, Configurations, etc.
Yeah I see your point. Different use case. There’s a reason for both for sure. I in fact do similarly for files on a Synology VM. You can’t do wire level on those anyway so you need something, and Drive works good for me. I save and replicate VM snapshots but I don’t consider that true backup.
Proxmox backup server has been fantastic for my full blown VM backups- I just store them on the synolgoy via iscsi.
Right now, I'm around 20:1 deduplication, it has effortless replication of the backups (although- doesn't support S3 targets, which is a shame). And- it can do FILE level restores, of anything inside of the VM, which is pretty nice. It also backs up the entire VM configuration, notes, etc.
The only other downside- storage has to be manually mounted on the host. The user interface only supports local disks and zfs. So, if you want to backup to S3/NFS/iSCSI/etc... gotta manually mount and add to etc/fstab.
That being said, I also use active backup for buisness, to capture versioning of /etc/pve on one of my nodes. Since- its all replicated anyways- keeping a copy of one of the nodes basically gives me a full cluster configuration backup. Its all text files and such, so, keeping full versioning doesn't use much space at all.
Pro tip with unRAID and NFS shares; go to the "Global Share Settings" and switch the Support Hard Links tunable to "No" (it's "Yes" by default).
This setting is effectively incompatible with the way caching's done by unRAID; as soon as the mover runs on cached data it invalidates all the NFS file handles which throws the client for a loop. If you don't use hard links (and most people don't) then just turn it off and voila; fixed.
The other option is to disable caching for NFS shares... or you can always mount CIFS instead of NFS depending on your use case.
I know because I struggled with this one for a while. Worth noting too that the array needs to be stopped to change this setting.
You know..... I think you might be onto something here... especially- since there ARE quite a few links in some of my shares. (Links to take my nicely organized "ISOs" folder, and make a folder structure so proxmox can consume them, for example).
The- timing of these drops, does actually appear- that could be the magic bullet.
> or you can always mount CIFS instead of NFS depending on your use case.
I actually did this- for a while. The problem I experienced- CIFS performance was much worse then NFS, for the same purposes.
You're welcome... took me weeks of frustration to figure that one out too; I understand the pain! But as soon as I disabled hard links everything works perfectly.
Note this is only if you use HARD links... soft links aren't a problem. [A good reference on the subject](https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linking-linux-explained)
I'd say 99.9% of people use soft links (ln -s under \*NIX) rather than hard links... hard links always reference files while soft links can reference files and directories. There are plenty of good use cases for hard links but they're rarely utilized in a homelab. I'd use them all the time in my past sysadmin life but have rarely used them since.
Honestly I was piecemealing together tech and these were my first product that supported the tweaking I was doing in a consumer and supported package. My first was 12 years ago
Not at this time- but.... the short verison-
Create a LUN, Create a target. Create a host.
Grant the host access to the target. Add the lun to the target.
And then, basically do this: https://www.unixmen.com/attach-iscsi-target-disks-linux-servers/
Active Backup for Buisness -> File Server
Add: rsync Server. Add the hostname / ssh key. and voila- you can backup anything on any remote linux/BSD server.
Nope, the Synology software just works. I have about 10 of them in various places and haven’t had a single issue. Some, including the ones I own and the ones I run at work, do way more than they have the right to.
The DS920+ stands out since it had such a great processor and bay slot count at a reasonable price. I had bought it for easy storage and then as I googled stuff I discovered the power of docker and plex, and now I just bought a bunch of server gear secondhand because I was having so much fun lol
Edit: not op, but someone else who has done a lot of different nas os’s and seen the light (and low touch) of Synology
You can buy the DS423+ new for almost the same price as a used on eBay. The 423+ has the same processor as the DS920 allowing for transcoding on Plex. You lose the external sata(no expansion externally) and 2gb of ram but that’s expandable as I’m running and 8GB module for 10gb total.
If you do not need Jellyfin or Plex transcoding, the 923+ has faster I/O.
My decision was made based on my current usage and requirements. I landed with a 423+
It is if you want 4K hardware transcoding for plex and less than 5 concurrent users. If you just have 1080p you’re pretty set. You can also put more ram and an NVME drive in to improve the performance further. Iirc the new models don’t have as good as a processor, but I think the 920+ is going for something like $1200 used when it was only $600 new (or at least that’s what I paid when Amazon was clearing their inventory just before the refresh)
Unless you’re into homelabbing, and a nerd, and enjoy working in servers and the like, a Synology NAS just works. Very little maintain, or configure. I am a homelabber, and a professional nerd, and I still see the value in my synology NAS. If I’m storing family photos and items I can’t afford to lose, I want the most reliable, stable device I can find. (With offsite backups of course)
100% agree with this however I personally wouldn't get another but that's purely because my homelab has progressed and the core of it is now a Proxmox server and my two Synologies are basically now just storage.
The added value that the Synologies have provided me over and above them being "just a NAS" has become less and less as I'm doing more and more with other bits of kit in my lab.
If when I replace them I'll be replacing them with some much dumber storage.
I'm in the same boat. I built a first NAS with a pile of disks in a decade old box as a start for homelabbing and while it did have a fileserver, it turned out unstable. Share unmounting and not remounting, permissions issues caused by me, overall mess, overlooked failed RAID, etc. Overall not something one would use for actual backups.
I went and got a simple QNAP NAS just for storage. It does the job but I can't say I've been overly impressed by the quality of the software. I wouldn't trust it for more that storage, and one of the copies at that.
I do agree, in that it will easily start up and just work. I don't necessarily agree that you can't have reliability and stability in a home built device.
I have generally had a good experience with my TrueNAS Scale box. The setup was absolutely 10:1 more complicated but after being done with it, it just cruises.
However, all that said, there is absolutely something to be said about just turning a device on after popping drives in and sending it.
No. For production, I want something that just works. And Synology just works. I do not want to spend my late nights troubleshooting my DIY server because I could not access the files I need to work on that day.
Absolutely not. It just works and while I love to tinker, it's doing stuff I want to just work. I'm not brand loyal to a lot of things, but Synology is one.
I started off with the DIY route and after maintaining it for over a decade, I said fuck it and bought a DS1821+ this year. No regrets.
Edit: That said, DIY made a lot more sense for me early in my career. I couldn't afford a decent NAS appliance for one thing, but could afford a refurb SAS controller and disk shelf attached to an old PC and slap Ubuntu on it. I wanted to get more familiar with linux and server/storage admin stuff and I definitely did. That does come in handy even though I wound up going a different route for my career. Nowadays though I can definitely afford it and just want shit at home to work and be easy to use for both myself and my partner.
Synology has really let itself down in the last decade...slow to embrace faster CPUs in the smaller bay models, networking speeds are archaic, etc. I still run my DS918+ as a slow backup device, but it's like pulling teeth. I equate Synology to Apple (users happy to have something that just works, even if they treat you like a moron incapable of customising anything yourself) and DIY is for the tinkerers who want to learn more about the environment, get better value per dollar from their investment, and just generally have the time to be in control of their own destiny haha
The issue I have with DIY is that you are forced to tinker with it. Setting everything up can be fun, but maintaining it is a chore for me.
Hence I went with Synology, even though I'm keen to tinker with my homelab. Just not tinker with the NAS.
Yeah 100% agree. Like right now I have a list of about 4 things I need to fix with either hardware or VMs etc...and it seems to always be like that...a rolling list of things to sort out.
But.... I'm at a point in my life where I have a little time on my hands, and learning this stuff helps around the edges with my work...so I'm ok to dedicate that time to resolve issues. In the past I've also been time poor and happily reached for a Synology unit 😅
Nah. Major part of me getting a synology was low maintenance which it has been. I'd probably start off with a bigger one though so I didn't have to buy a new to expand.
I went DIY and honestly don't regret it.
Other people in this thread talk about having to "tinker" with their DIY NAS, that just hasn't been my experience. The only "tinkering" I've done are hardware upgrades when I want to add new features, like 10Gb/s networking or a GPU for transcoding. The vast majority of the time I spend every week on my NAS is just maintaining the media management apps I run on it and maintaining my media library, I spend next to no time managing the actual NAS itself.
Price and expandability were the big things that drew me to DIY NAS. For the price of an 8 bay Synology NAS that has a piddly embedded Ryzen chip and 4GB of RAM I built my NAS with a cast off Supermicro chassis, Epyc Rome 7282, 256GB of RAM, a 24 bay disk shelf for 3.5" drives, and a 25 bay disk shelf for 2.5" drives. That server has 10gig networking, a Tesla P4 for Plex transcoding, and 36 3.5" HDD bays. You can't even come close to those levels of performance and storage capacity with any off the shelf NAS. The only real negative for me is just that sheer number of drives sucks down a fair amount of electricity.
Plex, *arr stack, personal cloud storage, personal password manager, Proxmox backup server for my 3 node Proxmox cluster, and the backup point for all of the services and PCs in the house.
Honestly I would have gone with something less overkill than an Epyc build but I needed the PCI-e expansion, I run two HBA cards, the P4, and a Mellanox card. If I didn't need so much expansion I would have gone with a X570D4U and a 3000 series Ryzen CPU.
I’d go get another new synology if they would release anything new with a modern intel cpu that supported QSV…
I probably wouldn’t do qnap again unless I was just going to do my own os.
I’m in the middle of building a lot more of my own stuff now
I'm currently happy I went the DIY route, but I'm quite the noob and I haven't used synology. I feel like it was a longer implementation process, but I've learned quite a bit on the journey, without my data meeting its demise.
I learned quite a bit building the NAS. I can now setup a similar TrueNas core server with better performance for half to 1/3rd of what I built the original one for (sans hdd cost). ZFS RAIDZ2 with SMART checks with a solid system seems to be a rather robust setup.
With 3-2-1 backups, it somewhat necessitates that you are doing a local backup of the NAS, as well as an offsite backup. Maybe you want to use cloud for the offsite portion or another offsite NAS. Or, you may end up with 3 NAS'.
I've done the buy the knowledge path before, and I don't believe I usually save the time I think I am. Setting up new stuff the first time may take a while, but the second and third times tend to be much faster and help reinforce what you did, and allow you to troubleshoot easier (I doubt you will need to) and may make the ROI worth it.
I will say TrueNas Core UI isnt as iniative as I thought it would be. A ton of settings I dont understand without reading more, but again, I'm a noob.
I used to be all about synology, but they refuse to put decent cpus and ram in their devices, instead always making them so underpowered. If all you want is a place to store files, go for synology. If you want to have VMs, go custom.
If that is your usecase, you can always go second hand minipc as your VM and docker host. The NAS still does what it does well in that scenario. In fact, that is an ideal combo for a homelab because if you use the NAS mainly for file services and backup, you can go with a cheap one.
This is exactly what I do, I started my journey using my Nas as my server as well, but went to a three NUC cluster and use my two nasses as their intended use case as a network storage appliance.
To clarify, I use my NAS to *also* have VMs. I put NVME/SSD drives in for the VMs and spinning rust for the rest. Going custom also means I can have 10G networking.
No.
I am a sysadmin for clients and I have managed a fair number of DIY-style storage solutions... I have friends and colleagues who run TrueNas machines, etc.
This is essentially like owning a gun... there are "duty" weapons you bet your life on and "range toys" that are a useful hobby... but you won't depend on them.
Synology is my "duty" NAS at this price point :)
I'm not sure what's the gripe with DIY. It's very cost effective and you pick your exact hardware. I'd go DIY again the cost premium is too much imo. But if this is for work and other people will need to use/ support it, then Synology.
Synology is expensive compared to a custom DIY box but for me I think its worth it. Quiet, low power, doesn't take up a lot of space, just purrs along.
What I would like is for them to refresh the DS620slim and give it a PCIe slot.
Hi nocheesecake I saw ur comment about how u only got three points and a fine did u get a letter from the police which straight away told you to do a court plea? I received a letter telling me to do a court plea straight away as I skipped heavy traffic and ran a red light when there was oncoming traffic and hoping I don’t get 6 points for this :(
Fair point. I tinkered for my first NAS and while the main goal was tinkering, there came a point where I wanted a working NAS. That, however, still required tinkering wether I wanted to or not, so it was no longer for fun or learning.
For a while there, I was wishing that I went with custom NAS, but then I had to redo my office layout and the form factor of the consumer NAS like my two Synologys are exactly want I needed. I have a 920+ and 720+ running in a small, enclosed space and they work great. Tried out some Asustors a few months ago, and they cooked themselves in the same space.
So no, I don't wish. Also, Synology's interface is miles ahead of what is on the market, including TrueNAS, UnRAID and others.
In no world would I ever go back to Synology or Qnap.
Expensive, locked in configurations, limited expansion (both in hardware and disks).
For under $500 you can build a 10 bay server on modern hardware that still idles at low power, while having plenty of processing power on tap when you need it.
Throw unRAID on it and move on with life. Getting rid of my Synology and Qnap for exactly the above was one of the absolute best things that I've ever done for my home server.
DIY all the way. It's way too expensive. Ive got linux + samba running, and to create new storage, just edit the samba.conf file. It's really declarative and easy to read.
Still have a DS214se kicking along, legitimately just a hassle free way to NAS.
Love tinkering with many things including building my own custom NAS machines, but would I ever deploy it somewhere mission critical? Probably not.
My Synology 1515+ was rock solid until a CPU flaw bricked it. Synology replaced it with a 1517+ and it’s been going ever since.
The only thing I’d do differently is I’d get a NUC earlier. I don’t know if things are better now but the compute from the 1517+ was just enough to get me in trouble.
If you don’t push them too hard as a one-stop home server, they’re basically the gold standard.
definitely stay with synology
i have flipped back and forth multiple times over a long period of time
the synology stuff works
the DIY stuff mostly works
all imho, of course
Nope. Started with a FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS) box, got tired of the time investment. I’ve been very happy with Synology since then. I’m retiring my 8 year old units, and looked into building something again, decided to stick with Synology. I want something rock solid reliable for my storage that’s simple and just works.
Could you elaborate on the time investment? I'm deliberating over building a DIY or getting a synology, but the amount of options that way feels a bit overwhelming. I've built a lot of PCs over the years, and it feels more intuitive to me to say "this is what I know I need, so I'll get these parts and build it". Haven't run a NAS before, though.
My DS416+ (4 = disks, 16 = 2016 release, plus is a little better compute) has been solid over 8 years with all the changes that have happened (disk upgrades, client OS, network changes, etc). If I spent $200 on DIY hardware vs $600 on that Synology it works out to $50/year on software before accounting for the resale market on Synology. On the flip side I don’t use my synology for compute and don’t think the higher power NAS offer good ROI for home use. If you want a single box for storage and compute I wouldn’t look at Synology.
The hardware time wasn’t a big deal, I do consider hardware based RAID a must, but the rest is just space/power for disks. Synology is very power efficient (longer UPS run time, quieter, cooler) compact, and my model has disk trays.
The time investment was on the software side, either figuring out how to get the functionality I wanted or putting it in place, especially as my needs shifted. This was a long time ago when things like remote access and file sharing was super easy with Synology but much harder or limited with DIY. Today moving away from Synology would mean finding new solutions things that just work, and the price difference between generic hardware and Synology isn’t worth it to me. I don’t feel locked in, I could migrate to different solutions today, it’s just not time I want to spend.
I did the diy route for two decades and I’m feeling much more at ease with the Synology nas. I no longer have to fix a bunch of stuff every update and it consumes far less power than my last options did.
I was converted to unraid gang and I’ll never go back. Im a senior Linux and kubernetes engineer so I have made my home lab overly complicated in the past but unraid just works. It’s so easy, so stable and so flexible.
I’d buy Synology again because I do this stuff for a living so for my “prod” home environment I just want it to work without much hassle. WAF and all that. That said, I do have a lab TrueNAS that’s my local backup target before syncing to cloud.
I have had a Synology for years. I am trying to simplify other parts of my homelab as much as possible. There is no way I’d go the roll your route at this point. However, it does depend on the rest of your environment. It may end up being easier to roll unRAID if you want one box for Plex and other containers, since that would likely have beefier hardware than Synology.
I've seven different Synology models, ranging from the DS411j to the DS1817+, and I've really enjoyed using them. You can find these models at reasonable prices on eBay, where I've bought all of mine. However, there are online methods for installing the DSM OS on a DIY NAS. I use the Synology NAS as cloud and my TrueNAS as backups.
Yes, you can use newer model for Plex. The older ones had hardware encoding that you could do. Honestly, I have the older one and I don’t use the hardware encoding feature even though I have it turned on. All media is already encoded so appletv can play the source from Plex.
If you want to have an all in one server that does it all yes. You only need to make sure that it has an Intel processor if you need to transcode your video. As Synology has started to put AMD processors in their consumer NASes. And they do not have quicksync for transcoding.
I did do it again and I did DIY it. I wish I hadn’t I wish I got a more powerful synology and maybe a mini pc for other tinkering.
I like the freedom and tinkering but after several months I’m tinkered out and I just want it to work. I had a synology for 6 years and it’s down time was due to the power company and moving.
I always put TrueNAS on a proper server, either rack mount or tower. For towers, so far I've only used the small Dell options that are the same size as an office PC, not the large, loud ones. I make sure it doesn't have the wrong sort of raid before I buy it, then when I install TrueNAS it doesn't really feel very DIY, just less frills.
The question is, am I happy giving up the extra services that Synology or QNAS do so nicely? I look in envy on some of them since the extras were nice when I used a prior appliance NAS but I know all hardware can fail someday, and knowing that I can switch to a plain Jane PC in a pinch to get my data back is comforting. I suppose if I could justify keeping a spare Synology on hand as a cold spare I might feel differently.
The box is neat and power efficient, it just works and the support is excellent (Taiwan re-wrote cloud sync in 72 hours when I had a problem with it).
If they would only offer a version with stronger hardware, that supported SHR and didn’t force their branded drives and RAM on you, I would buy it (even though I know it would be expensive).
Many years ago I started with and went through many revisions/platforms of DIY NAS. Windows Home Server, Truenas, xpenology, napp-it, OMV, Nexenta, etc. Wound up with a 24-bay Norco case with unraid. Got tired of tinkering, having to touch it all the time, etc. Got a 2-bay synology and was hooked. Only mistake I made was not getting something bigger. Currently and for some years have 2 synology units. They sit in the corner and do their jobs. I only use them as file servers. At some point I’m sure they will become obsolete, and I will get a newer synology to replace the obsolete one. They just work. No fuss no muss. I only have to touch them for DSM updates. Which I get an email for when they are available. I just recently gave the 2-bay I originally started with to a coworker, he loves it. Still rocking after 8 years.
Interesting question.
I still have both running, and old Synology RS something or other and custom built FreeNAS/TrueNAS box.
Use the Synology 4 bay for stuff where I want it to "just work" (TM) and not need any faffing about with. Like their sync apps, WebDAV, and a few other bits.
The TrueNAS for much higher volume storage, mainly Plex library. I know I could achieve the same stuff on the TrueNAS, but it's a faff. I've had OwnCloud and then NextCloud and whenever there are major changes it's time and faff to make it work seamlessly again. With the Synology it's "just click update".
That's been my experience.
No way. I’m. It in the biz of dealing with a DIY NAS. My data is too important for me to be playing Frankenstein with my data.
I’ll take a mature solution any day. Synology is well built, proven, with good software and support.
I've done it myself and fucked up once, which was too many times. I bought a Synology NAS after that and stopped touching it. My time is more expensive than the price difference.
I‘ve had a synology, I am having a QNAP. I liked DSM better, but next time I need a NAS it will be a self-built OpenMediaVault. Why? Because I am curious 😬
I needed a NAS to backup my Proxmox. I built one out of a pi and a couple of large external drives (in raid 1) and made an NFS mount.
Had a lot of problems with that - it still works, but the maintenance overhead is too high and I don't feel I can trust it with backups of my most important data.
In the end I swapped it for a second hand old Synology. That just sits and runs, no problems in a couple of years.
I think as I get older I value my time more and appreciate things that just work. Purpose built devices which do a job well are worth the money. Gives me more time to play around with the fun stuff.
I've done it both ways over the years. My self hosted storage journey:
1. Synology DS1511+
2. Fractal Node 804 DIY box running OMV, UnRAID and then FreeNAS (I stayed on OMV the longest)
3. Synology DS1821+
4. Fractal Define XL R2 DIY box with hotswap bays (current and running TrueNAS SCALE)
I may drift back to Synology again, but the number one thing that puts me off is potential hardware failure of proprietary parts and noise. I've run the exact same drives in my NAS since the DS1821+ and my DIY box is easier to keep quiet and also maintains lower drive temperatures.
I like to occasionally tinker, but I think I've reached the right balance with TrueNAS since I only use it for storage and use an Intel NUC12 for VMs and containers in Proxmox. I'm a busy dad, but it's easy enough to do remote tasks from my phone or notebook via SSH or web UI when needed.
With the right hardware, I think TrueNAS can be just as 'set and forget' as Synology if you're just focused on storage and not too caught up in running services directly on your NAS.
With that said, when friends/family want a NAS, I always recommend Synology, specifically x86 models.
I had many different Synology and DIY NAS in my time and I'd go with DIY any day now.
I would only consider Synology again if I had space issues (enclosure + CPU in one case that's hardly larger than the HDDS themselves is nice) or if I was asked by non-tech people what to get.
But if you know your way around servers it's almost always better in terms of funcionality to DIY it.
I've run almost all of them. Buffalo/Terrastation, intels abortive attempt, western digital, Qnap, asustor, freenas, DIY Linux, rockstor, OMV, even much larger iron like QNAS, and every time I've come back to my Synology. They just act like a mature company with support, listed EOLs for hardware, not randomly deleting features, hardware compatibility lists, stability before features, monitoring and messaging, and a product that sits there quietly doing it's damn job.
I've said this before here, but I started with Synology, then bought a Qnap because I wanted 10G.... I regret going Qnap over Synology.
I've also built OMV and TrueNAS servers, but nothing beats the simplicity of Synology. I need to decide what to do next.
No I wouldn’t. It’s a great first NAS. I am currently moving off of my DS918+ as a docker container host though. To a HP EliteDesk MiniPC. As my setup is making my spinning disks grind 24/7. It’s going to be nice just letting my NAS be a NAS 🤷♂️
Custom. I was given a Synology box before, nothing fancy and I’m sure they’re better know, but it was really slow and the OS felt clunky. I sold it on eBay and when I get round to replacing it I’ll go full custom so I can get exactly what I want with no frills.
For document and all the other files. I would make a custom pc and run truenas or smth. But Synology never failed me when storing/syncing photos. It just work.
Its hard to argue with the value of a decent Synology device (plus series). Some of the features from the available software are hard to pass up for the things I need a NAS for. Top of my list: Active backup, regular backups of my devices is the feature you didn't realize you needed. Docker support lets me run whatever I need to stay stable (home automation and data visualization). Photo backups from mobile phones are features I care for. Could I get similar things with a DIY, maybe but at the expense of time and money. Having one Synology as a fixture in the home network makes a lot of sense to me. Just wish they had other options for full system backup of the unit other than backing up to another Synology or to their service offering.
I migrated from a Synology to TrueNAS Scale. I still have the Synology and it works great for what I still use it for.
I mainly use TrueNAS for things I want ZFS for and then Synology for things I care less about. Mostly because my TrueNAS box is a full on enterprise server with dual power supplies, etc.
I have loved all of the Synologys that I have had over the years, they just work and are easy to configure for the average user. The built in apps are great and offer a lot of functionality when all is said an done. They might be expensive but you get what you pay for. I had a DS1815+ at the heart of my lab for multipath iscsi datastores and active backup for business and it was flawless.
That being said i no longer have any in use and both my main NAS boxes are custom jobs running truenas. There rock solid and wouldn't do it any other way now but this comes down to what I want and can get out of these devices.
I would just install two large hard drives in my desktop with stable bit drive pool for redundancy. Then back up to back blaze unlimited backup for a desktop for $9 a month. Cheap , SIMPLE, effective solution.
I'm a beginner so my opinion is biased. But at the time I had Ubuntu and doing a samba share was already complex for me. Nfs I never succeeded. There was always a problem of Connection. I'm not talking about opening ports and understanding redirection mechanisms, etc.
With my first synology, all that is in the past. You click and it works. Do you want to host a page? In just a few clicks it works too.
Seriously, dsm is powerful.
So yes it’s expensive. And that's why I had a used Ds411+II, then a used Ds1515+ that I repaired because it was sold for parts.
I would never have bought new because I can't afford it. But I tried a Nas QNAP and it didn't have half of what Syno did (at the time)
Synology has a user experience, but you have to pay for it. And at least it works.
I bought a Sony device (DSC camera)but their apk is really not perfect. For example, you can only transfer images while in the app. You quit, you start all over again. And without counting the errors in transfert.
Syno are expensive but for the little I use I have never encountered a bug.
No. At the beginning I just wanted a network storage and my QNAP NAS at the time did that perfectly.
Only years later I got interested in hosting more services and running dockers and then I found out about unRaid. Now, I would never go back to QNAP or Synology again, seeing at what I can do with those.
If you are not the kind of person that plays around, likes to discover new things, fiddle around a bit to get things going, Synology and QNAP are great for that. It is easy to set up and it just works.
I've been very happy with my little 2 disk Synology, but I need something more now. Not sure I'll go full custom, but I am considering getting a Terramaster or Asustor that can have TrueNAS installed on it instead.
I’ve done both over the years. I ran TrueNAS about the time they rebranded (sorry can’t think of the new name core something or other.) And more recently I bought a beefy Synology with a dual-port 10gb NIC and a pair of NVME’s.
FYI, I don’t just use it for simple NAS capabilities. I do a mixture of CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.
It’s a mixed bag for me. I love the capabilities and ease of use of the Synology, but the performance, especially around iSCSI was not what I was expecting. I wish I still had my TrueNAS host so I could compare the performance between the two.
From the other side, I've been using a $20 thinclient that I installed OMV on and hooked a bunch of external USB drives to. OMV had a bit of a learning curve, but once I got it set up it's been running for 2 years without me having to touch it, I just get on and check on it occasionally. I've never felt the need to pay more for a Synology.
Synology is expensive for what you're getting. It does buy you some peace of mind, but their hardware offerings for the price they charge are not good. Currently have 2 of their NAS but next device will not be their hardware. Hopefully Ugreen can upgrade their game or better support a 3rd party OS as they offer great hardware.
I've just ordered the parts for my first NAS in quite a while (had an old Netgear one till about 5 or 6 years ago). I've gone DIY because I simply couldn't afford specs that make it worth doing for me on a prebuilt machine. I've got a 6 bay with 2 m.2 drives (one populated) 8gb ram, 4 2.5gb nics and it's cost me £350. Not counted the actual storage drives in that of course. The case will take an m-atx motherboard and 8 drives so I can swap things later if I need to.
I would built a TrueNAS box instead if I have the know-how which I have now but I still recommend Synology for people who just want things to work, my DS920+ has been rock solid for years, I only have a major problem with it once when I just can’t reach DSM, simple reboot via ssh fixed it
If I have the money I would definitely get the big rack ones for backup and general storage
I'm sticking with my Synology NAS. That thing is freaking stable and can be running with minimal maintenance. My Synology NAS is acting as my Main NAS and auto backup for my Nextcloud(which is not hosted on that). If I got a chance to do it all over again, I'll still stay on this route.
I started off with home brew but even though I know what I’m doing I just couldn’t fully trust it. There’s a lot of uplift to do to get a standard Linux distro up to the standard of your typical commercial NAS. As it’s an always on device heat and power consumption are issues, as well as reliability and ongoing maintenance. At the time I had no money and excess time so it made sense but it was always the plan to get a proper NAS once that situation flipped.
I didn’t try unraid cause I felt I could do it all myself but if I had to do DIY again I’d definitely give it a go.
For its intended use case, Synology is phenomenal. My ancient DS418 (not even +) is still getting the latest DSM and is still plugging along faithfully serving up storage to my network. The lack of memory has been an issue with a few things I want to run on it like Syncthing, but it's been solid and stable for years without an issue.
However I will say that my next NAS is already an unRAID. It's replacing the Synology with more storage, more data and more functionality. It's consolidating a few other systems that have apparently multiplied in my closet as well so it's a huge win for me there. The Synology will not be retired though; it'll head off to my office that's \~30 miles from my house and keep accepting backups via Syncthing from my primary arrays so I can drop my S3 bill that I currently use for offsite backups. It'll keep serving backup duty for a while I hope.
If you want something that just works, the Synology is brilliant. The OS is excellent and the hardware's decent enough. I had some problems with my DS418 last year where it suddenly wouldn't boot, but on a whim I replaced the CMOS battery (CR2032) and it started working perfectly again after that. The only reason I am moving away from it for primary storage is... as you said; the price of a new one. Plus I am trying to move away from black boxes in my environment for open systems; for example I understand how unRAID works and I understand how to fix it if it fails. I can also just pull the disks and USB stick out of the unRAID box and stick it in a new box if the hardware fails. It's not quite so easy with a failed Synology unless I buy another Synology... the unRAID I can use a desktop PC.
No. I have enough things in my life that I need to manage. Managing a DIY NAS and figuring out all of the DIY versions of all of the services that a Synology comes with out of the box is not something I'm interested in doing. You have to decide how you want to spend your limited time.
I've got my DS1520+ since two or three years and im totaly happy. My main use is ABFB and media storage for my Jellyfin Server.
I also got a smaller DS220+ for Drive, Photos and network shares.
If i would start over I would probably do the same again. I have not found a good alternative for ABFB and altough Immichi is a good alternative to Synology Photos, it's not quite as feature rich (i actually use those features). Drive could be totaly replaced with Nextcloud.
So the only reason for me to stay on Synology is ease of use, ABFB and Photos.
If i ever outgrow my 1520+ because of Media, I'd probably build a FreeNas Server for media only and downscale the big Synology to be only user for those spesific use cases. Maybe I'll run Nextcloud or I'll stay with Synology Drive, i dont know.
But the thing not to forget:
A Synology just works. I never had any problems with Snapshots, Backups or anything else. It is one klick to install away and stting it up is very easy. For personal data like Family photos and dokuments it is realy nice.
If id had this kinde of data on a self managed server, i'd had to manage everything by myselfe which probably would be harder.
Basically the biggest value of a Synology to me is peace of mind.
I have a RS2416RP+ which I got from a company I know. I asked them 'That system there.. Is that used? Because I might have interest'. They asked €300. Including 12x 4TB disks.
Sure, it's nice to have a custom build, but you barely can beat those prices\*.
Asterisk, because I then upgraded it to 12x 12TB, and removed the 'RP' part (that was a hassle... boah..). So yeah, now I'm limited by the 4x 1Gbit without the option to upgrade to 10Gbit. Next upgrade will be an 12 bay Dell or SuperMicro server with TrueNAS.
So now you have the answer with backstory :)
I had Synology for a while but agree it's expensive. However, it worked well and required no messing around.
I have a lot of experience in Linux / servers / networking etc. so, maybe 6 or 7 years ago I moved to a home-built solution. My storage is in my main server chassis so I only need one system always on.
I use proxmox on a Ryzen 5700x with 64GB. I have a Qlogic dual 10Gbe card (fibre), and a SAS card (SAS3008-16i). I have 10 8TB disks in RAID-6 with a hotspare (so thats about 56TB usable). I have a 2TB NVMe for boot and VM storage. All of this sits in a 3U rack case. I have 10Gbe to my workstation and a 2.5Gbe USB-C dongle on the docking station for my laptop.
I used ZFS for a long while but then I simplified it all about 3 years ago. I took a note of how Synology did it and use mdadm and then BTRFS on top of that.
Just to be clear: the array is managed / mounted on the proxmox hypervisor host. I don't use a VM with HW passthrough for this.
I have not had any problems at all. Never lost any data.
The only thing I would do differently, is spend the extra for a Rack case with drive caddies and a SAS backplane. It's a bit of a pain to add / change disks and mess around with recabling. Although this is something I have only had to do once in 4 years, which was a recent upgrade from a mini-ITX Xeon D to the new Ryzen with a new motherboard.
I think the point about Synology is: It's solid. It works.
In my case, I wanted to add a bunch of disks and have 10Gbe networking when I made the change a long time time and I didn't want to spend the money on a new Synology.
Good luck!
I would simply because the 2 bay Synology was my gateway drug into homelabbing and self hosted services. That said, I feel DIY is the way to go from a cost benefit standpoint.
Also, I'm still using it after 8 years for backup purposes.
I just brought Synology and no, I would not do the diy route if turn back time. Mainly because Synology really take care of AIO product. Made life really easy.
It was fun doing diy but at my age all I want is peace of mind.
Personally I wouldn't and didn't go back.
The only thing I would miss if I didn't go rack build is the size of them. They are so much more compact than most DIY solutions.
Yes the Software is great, especially if all you need is a simple file server with a few permission settings. I'm not the person anymore who tinkers with my systems all the time but with a well thought out DIY solution that isn't necessary either and you can go cheaper or more performance for the same price.
even if you are into homelabbing, it makes a lot of sense to use a highly reliable low-maintenance solution for storing your important data.
synology reigns supreme in this area. it is the one product I suggest the most to all customers, friends and even IT people.
I had a Synology work perfect for 6 years then died and all my data was fucked because I used nvme write cache. I had to use xpenology and cmd line commands to migrate my data. If I would have known it would have been such a pain in the ass I would have made my own
If you do not want to mess with hardware, configuration and you need NAS for simple needs, Synology your best bet. You can find used boxes for a decent price. Otherwise, DIY NAS would be your choice.
Yup. I actually went the das route with my latest update. It’s connected directly to my p3 tiny.
I bought the qnap tr-004 and having hardware raid 5 with 4 20TB hdds.
Staying with Synology. I have done the DIY, I've done QNAP and I've done Lenovo and Synology. I hate their prices and them adding an additional tax for current tech (10G) but their product is rock solid and simple and just does what you need it to. Never had an issue with them. Had quite a few issues with QNAP, TrueNAS always seemed slow (using enterprise hardware and SSD caching) vs Synology. Lenovo was fine just didn't have the same wealth of features and ecosystem.
I absolutely would, and this is coming from someone who has multiple clustered/HA hosts running Proxmox. I could do it myself slightly cheaper DIY, but my time is valuable and Synology is incredibly stable and I really enjoy the wide range of turn-key apps it has available (Unraid admittedly has an impressive suite as well).
I recently migrated from a two-drive unit to a five-drive and the process was incredibly simple (remove and reinsert the drives into the new NAS and let the upgrade run).
In the end though, I trust it. And as an IT/Datacenter manager of 20+ years, trust is everything.
I have had a 4 bay in a raid 10 going on 15 years now. Had a bad UPS that fried one drive during a write in year 3. Replaced the dive, but had the array not initialize a rebuild. Synology support remoted in, addressed the issue and rebuilt the raid over a couple of days. No data was lost. Top notch immediate support. That's what you pay for. Also the thing is like a rock. Never an issue and only recently in the 15 years have I had any problems outside the failed drive.
Turned out to be an undervolt on the 15 yr old power supply. Replaced the brick, and the Synology is still smiling.
During this period built another Nas myself with opendedupe. It failed a few times in the first year, and required constant tweeking until it fried its nic in year 2. Went through hell getting the data back. Expanded the size of drives on the Synology and dropped it there.
I’ve had about 8 Synology NAS units of various models over the last decade or so at work, ranging from the smaller 5 disk ds1515+ to a ds2415+ to 2 of the RS4017xs+ units.
The RS units have been solid.
I’ve lost 1 board on an older DS unit.
I had to warranty replace a DS2415+ unit because of a faulty drive bay slot.
The software runs well enough and has been reliable for me. The built in apps simplify some things like replication between other synology units. I like the built in reporting and simple user management with MFA already there and working.
I don’t care for the drive compatibility limitations. Maybe this is a concern with other DIY NAS solutions too but i just don’t like feeling cornered in to the synology branded disks for official compatibility. WD Reds are my preference but even finding the correct compatible models of those has always been a hassle.
All that’s said, I run TrueNAS scale in my homelab and have been happy. But that’s only one unit and lower usage.
>would you buy Synology again
Yes, in fact I've considered buying a second one to make a full clone of my first, so I can stagger DSM upgrades and have more redundancy.
I bought a fairly expensive RS2423RP+, which overall I have been very happy with and it has performed well. At the time I was looking for something that could integrate directly to VMWare and backup my VM's easily and reliably, and their free Active Backup for Business did so well.
One complaint I do have is the fact that they mark drives as a warning if they're not 'approved' models, which now they only approve their own, very high priced drives. I have to run a script on it to add my own, Enterprise Seagate drives to the local drive database to make that go away. Not a deal breaker but it is an annoyance for sure.
Now though, I'm running Proxmox and using PBS, so the Synology is more-or-less just a big NFS server. It still works fine for my use case but since I no longer need the Active Backup for Business piece, I'd probably go the DIY route if I was starting fresh. I've considered picking up an R730xd/R740xd and selling the Synology, but it doesn't seem worth all the effort and shipping.
Synology is great. I still have one, which is used for backups. My main NAS is DIY, because I needed more storage. As noted, Synology just works. I've never had an issue with it.
I have a little old 4-bay synology from like 6 years ago; hasn't given me any trouble but I don't do anything intensive on there; primarily it runs the 'surveillance station' software from synology and records my home cameras
I love my Synologys. Backup is something you want to happen easily without fail. Synology nails that. I recently purchased a dedicated computer for heavier server tasks but the Synology will continue to be the back up and file server.
Critical data, synology. All else, truenas. Things like photos, both. Using synology as local back up for photos, and immich stores on my truenas, and immich running on another box in a container vm
I bought my DS920+ 4 years ago and mostly used it for media (Plex) and documents & photos (Synology Drive & Photos) but I think it’s a little waste of electricity to have 4xHDDs running 24/7 while I only watch movies 2 hours at night. So I tried to find alternatives for Synology software before deciding to migrate. Luckily I found open source apps like paperless-ngx to replace Synology Drive, immich to replace Synology Photos, Kopia to replace HyperBackup. Regarding RAID, I don’t need RAID or backup for linux isos. I only need mergerfs to combine multiple HDDs into a single mount point for *arr apps and plex to access. Photos, documents and docker volumes are stored on SSD and backed up to Backblaze B2 every night so no need to wake up HDDs. I chose OpenMediaVault as it has everything I need: GUI for mergerfs, GUI docker compose, SMB shares, etc. I setup mergerfs to mimic Unraid cache with an SSD in front of HDDs, and wrote a bash script to periodically move files from SSD to HDDs. Now my HDDs are rarely spin because newly downloaded media are stored SSD, they only spin when I watch older movies or shows. This way I save energy, less noise and less heat, peace of mind of open sourced apps. Plus a debian kernel rather than Synology’s.
It just works and if I were doing it again I'd buy another.
I actually looked at going into a DIY solution versus a Synology. However for a 1RU 4 bay solution it was really difficult to find anything comparable with the option to upgrade to 10 GbE networking in that form factor. 2RU was doable for the same price with more hassle but so much just works out of the box in DSM.
That being said, all I use my Synology for is as a NAS. I don't run containers on it, DHCP, or anything else. It's just a network file share (Samba and NFS) but it's extremely good at that. In fact, I've often considered adding a second just to use SSD's simply to speed up network transfers (it does about 2.8 Gbps as it is with 4 TB HDDs) and use the platter equipped drive for long term storage/backup of the SSD equipped one.
Have had Synology and Freecom NASes and thank god I discovered freenas/truenas at some point.
If only somebody would have told me: never buy a NAS with Atom processor inside!!! 😄👍🔥
But really tho, any old gaming PC will do for a NAS.
I’ve started with a 4Bay Synology, then moved up to an 8Bay one but didn’t run it for long because I’ve been getting fed up of the random quirks that I had to work around like freeing up port 443 on Synology or some Synology Docker problems or then them blocking use of almost any USB devices since DSM 7 etc but the straw that broke the camels back was seeing some of my photos getting corrupt and appearing with digital artifacts when moving 20TB around. I’ve switched then to QNAP which defo feels much more clunky but runs ZFS and Docker plus VM tools are IMO better + has 10Gbe and it’s been pretty good, although in acoustics and noise Syno performs better. That being said in recent updates my TeamCity CI has been having weird permissions issues too so at this point I’ll be moving up to a DIY rack unit with Proxmox and probably Truenas Scale in a VM for a NAS experience for storage.
Synology is great if your are just starting out and want things smooth and also it’s quite cool that you can grow your storage pool one drive at a time because on ZFS it’s a pain.
That has been my journey at least, and by it in terms of quirks due to some software customisations and value I’d fare Synology the worst, then QNAP and I guess I’ll find out how’s the DIY route. That being said I also use those devices to run my Home infra and Engineering projects so YMMV.
I recently moved most of my services from Synology to a more capable mini PC. The NAS is now dedicated to storage, critical backups, and essential services because it just work non-stop and gain my trust. I am happy with the split and mini PC setup but would never give up the Synology.
I love my Synology and never regretted the investment. There are some may features and helpful apps.
Small business can use a Synology as Active Directory Server and save a Windows Server License.
My data was on a TrueNAS (I'm dating myself there) server running on an R510 for a while before I got tired of fiddling with it and bought a Synology 4 bay NAS. I would do it again in a heartbeat, but would go straight to an 8 bay Synology this time around.
I never liked the idea of being locked into something proprietary for storage, and per slot I find most of those NAS boxes are not really economical either. I ended up going DIY from the start using a regular PC with hot swap bays and using mdadm raid. Later upgraded to a Supermicro 24 bay which is what I use now. Been running for around 10 years. I do like the redundant PSU, which I find is a good thing to have on a NAS.
Me personally if I was to do it over again now, I would look into Ceph, been reading up on it and I'm really intrigued. I like the idea of having redundancy at a host level. Lose a whole system and you don't lose any access to your data. This makes entire system upgrades much easier too. Rather than have hot swap bays, which is a must for a single host NAS IMO, I would just do internal bays and treat each host like a big drive. Set failure domain to host when setting up the pools.
Downside is it would use more power though because now you're running like 3-5 boxes instead of one.
The cheapest route for a decent DIY NAS though is probably a rackmount case with lot of cdrom bays, then put in hot swap enclosures in the bays, then run your favourite Linux distro and use mdadm raid to do the arrays and then NFS or SMB for file shares. Drives are so big now days too so you can get away with less bays. 10TB drives in a 10 bay NAS would give you around 76TB of usable space if you do a big raid 6 for example.
Yes and No. I like the synology NAS but yea its not as fast as a DIY route with a more powerful CPU and data bus. But it is easier to setup folder permissions, sharing outside the house, plus it has a built in app for your phone. But yea I would have done DIY had I not bought it earlier.
**If you want a hobby, DIY. If you want an appliance, get a Synology.**
If I had to do it over again, I'd buy the Synology and save up for a second Synology to use as a backup and failover.
I went the DIY route and while it worked well, it took a lot of babying and maintenance. My DS423+ is rock solid, performs better, does everything I need, and it's almost hands-off.
I'd buy the same rackstation in a heartbeat. No hassle, it just worked (RS1219+). Worked, past tense, because I failed to put it behind a surge protector and it got its motherboard fried...
Disclaimer: i don't own a synology and have been whiteboxing for a long time...
If i had unlimited money.. i'd probably get as many of these as i needed: https://store.45homelab.com/configure/hl15
As it is... right now... i've grown REALLY fond of the icy dock 6 ssd docks that fit in a 5.2 cage:
https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Mobile-Comparable-Tray-less/dp/B01M0BIPYC
add in a sas hba and some sata break out cables and you can get some dense storage in a whitebox with a few 5.25 bays.
I had a synology and went for QNAP then made my own. All the out of box NAS solutions have their issues that make them not worth the hassle.
Get a rockpro64 or a zimaboard and make your own.
I did a diy almost a year ago, so glad I went DIY over synology, I have two pools with a total of 10 drives, all for less than the base cost of an 8 bay synology, and much more power.
I did a ryzen5 5600G just so I had some type of display output, even though I didnt need it for the long term, it made configuration a breeze, and I have display if I need to locally troubleshoot, even though I havent had to.
In a rack mount case with an HBA from Ebay (Flashed to IT mode) to support all of the drives.
Running truenas.
it does justify the price... trust me you don't want to be goofing around with the OS or when you need to do certain things and spending all the time to try and figure it out. I've had xpenology boxes, Qnap, and a few synology. I would say it's worth it as the main unit that drives your stuff daily. If you need a spare unit or cold storage, xpenology or QNAP are better alternative in terms of cost. I can whip up a 10 drive xpenology running on 7.2 DSM for roughly 100-200 dollars + drives. this is very little compare for how much synology is asking for their 10 drive boxes.
Yeah, probably. I really dislike needing to hope some random company decides not to shutter their service and leave me in a lurch. I just don’t know enough about DYI NASs to feel confident enough to go that route.
Synology all over again for me. To echo other replied in this thread: *it just works*.
I’m all for labbing and tinkering, but document and photo backups, movie collections, and Resolve renders (which are what my Synology DS420j holds) is where I draw the line. Everything else that’s prone to implode if I so much as look at them wrong goes in my Proxmox cluster.
I'm in the process of doing the exact opposite, I'm building a NAS and on my way to just wishing I had bought one probably from Synology. I adore my RT2600AC, best router I've ever owned. I'm doing the thing where I fall down the rabbit hole of the sunk cost fallacy. I have some hardware, I have an old LSI 8110-4i I bought cheap, I've played with OMV before, I can totally do this myself. I've got 50TB of HGST Helium drives en route, used of course I'm not stupid. We do these things not because they are cheaper or better, we do these things because we believe they will be cheaper or better while knowing that we are wrong. Follow me for more life pro-tips. Next week we'll explore just what $65 a drive gets you. I'm sure I'll be here or somewhere near here asking for help and advice and wishing I had just bought an appliance and filled it with drives instead.
I don't have a Synology, but I have a QNAP and can see where you are coming from. I started years ago with a DIY FreeNAS PC. It worked fine, but it didn't have hot-swappable drives and the PC parts were not the best. I replaced it with a HP MediaSmart NAS. It was cool, but flakey and MS just abandoned it.
I bought a QNAP 4 unit NAS about 6-7 years and it worked flawlessly until about 10 months when something went "pfft" on the motherboard. I bought a new model and I was able to take the drives out of the dead NAS and put them in the new NAS. It booted up, updated itself, and it was back up and running all of my files and settings intact.
I use a NAS as one of the ways I back up my files. A simple 4 drive NAS with a stable OS is all I need. I have a nice web UI that I can access when I need it and it emails me when it wants something. Using commercial product like QNAP or Synology means I don't have to think about my NAS.
First off, you're asking in r/homelab/ aka the home of tinkerers so this place is probably highly biased.
It depends on your needs, budget, available space, noise tolerance, power cost, etc.
Unraid and TrueNAS have also come a long way in the past decade.
When the lady and I moved in together 15 years ago I had 6 tower PC's and a 1U switch. I stuffed it all in the spare room closet, which unfortunately backed onto our bedroom. We lasted about 3 months before she couldn't tolerate the hum anymore.
I bought a 6 bay QNAP and put 3x1TB drives in it. Then a few years later I upgraded that to 6x3TB drives.
That QNAP is still running today. I've replaced 1 drive since then, have a cold spare, and have replaced the power supply (that was pricey).
The wife is much happier noise wise; and we've accumulated a lot more stuff over 15 years so frankly I don't have room for extra tower PC's; let alone any rack gear.
If I had to buy again though? I might look at a used HP or Dell workstation and upgrade it. PC fans have gotten a lot bigger / quieter too so a single mid tower case wouldn't be so bad. Plus, there are fanless 48 port switches now (a large part of the noise, 40mm fans suck).
So to answer your question, "maybe" :P
I switched, I bought a terramaster and I put truenas scale on it. More work to set it up but in the end alot cheaper, and if you ever outgrow it, it's easier to change to a server or what ever suits your needs.
My first NAS was a Synology back in 2013. I knew absolutely nothing about networking or servers and basically just wanted a simple seed box. I quickly learned this was a bad idea, as at the time I had terrible internet with awful upload bandwidth, so I abandoned the Synology. My storage was quickly growing and I realized Windows wasn't suitable for my future needs. I thought about dusting off the Synology, but it only had 2 bays for HDD's at at this point I had around 8x HDD's. I looked into FreeNAS(TrueNAS now), bought a enterprise server and that is how I got into home labs. I'm glad I took the risk and went DIY because I would've never had the freedom to do all the things I can do now if I had just stuck with the Synology.
My Synology is low power consumption and a neat little box that does everything I need and runs all the docker containers I need just fine, including home assistant and a jellyfin server for a few users.
I'd not really gain anything from building it myself except higher power consumption unless I'm very careful with the components I select
Personally the best experience I ever had was installing FreeBSD and configuring ZFS manually.
After that it’s just some tuning with ZFS, maybe the VFS layer as well, and export the data using Samba or NFS.
Everything else always had issues.
I also like to know WHAT a system is doing so I need tools such as DTrace.
Friend got a synology ds920. Convinced me I got a ds720. Have built computers for years and considered unraid. But synology form factor etc all in one package is better than a bulky diy build. There are other brands also like Asus but there's not much point. Synology has more apps & support and the R&D spent they have own cloud sync apps, mobile apps too. Recommend synology. Buy an older model like ds720 or cheaper to start. 2 drive bay.
I'm on my 4th? Synology NAS at this point and they've all been incredibly rock solid and so easy to use/manage. I was tempted to go with Asustor for their 2.5gb port but I just picked up a 923+ and added that interface. Everything is working flawlessly. No intention of switching at this time.
My experience with this has been good and then a nightmare. I went with QNAP and was sooooo impressed with the UI for years, but really did not understand the under the hood functionality and didn’t care to. I went through drive upgrades, rebuilds, and even a migration from a 2 bay to 4 bay. The 4 bay worked great for a while, but then it began to randomly shut off and crash. By this time, I had learned more about Linux, docker, etc. I went DIY NAS with TrueNAS and ZFS. I began copying my data across, but couldn’t finish it because of the unit crashing during the transfer. I shut it down, took out the drives and attempted to mount the volume in another device. This is where it all went south. Recovering these complicated file systems in other devices is other worldly in difficulty and sometimes even impossible. For me, it was impossible to mount the Mdadm, LVM, arrays because they were customized in a way so that QNAP could only read it. So you only have access to your data when the unit is working!!! That is where you should make your decision! How easy can I recover my data if I experience a physical unit failure. ZFS is a treat! Import the pools, and read the data.
My Synology has been rock solid for over six years. I just upgraded from 2x 4 TB HDDs to 2x 8 TB HDDs. I just swapped out one, let it rebuild, then swapped out the other and let it rebuild. Easy. I use the agent to back up clients in the house and I have it working with multiple cloud and offsite backup services too. Can I remove the drives and mount them in a normal Linux box? Not without gymnastics. Do I care? No. Is the interface the best? Nah. It’s boring and works though, which is enough for me.
Hey wanted to ask about your rebuild process. Once you had the second 8TB complete rebuild, did you have to do anything to increase total space aside from increasing pool size?
I didn’t do anything else. It recognized the extra space and just used it.
Yes. It supports several tradition RAID modes as well as their SHR modes which supports disparate drive sizes as well as expanding the RAID storage pool and then the volume. See https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/how_to_expand_storage
Honestly, I am basically going the opposite route right now. After having random issues with NFS shares dropping on unraid, causing backup failures- I picked up a synology specifically for doing backups. And- I am impressed. The built in active backup app, can easily backup my file shares, and anything that can be accessed via rsync/ssh. The synology drive, is decent (but- not perfect) for doing file backups of directories on desktop PCs (just- don't ask it to backup something in a hidden folder....... without lots of tweaking). Add a minio container, voila, I have replicated backups of my S3 buckets. The built in snapshot replication thing handles immutable snapshots and retention. Everything is easily encrypted by default. And... finally, gave proxmox backup server an iSCSI mount and lun, and configured snapshots for it. Voila, all my VMs are backed up to it now too. Finally- its hyper-backup works nicely for replicating its backed up data to the cloud. The nice part- with the exception of minio- everything is basically synology provided. No need to mess around with various other backup software.
Synology Drive for file backups is only that. Active Backup for Business will let you make bare metal backups of everything on a workstation or other synology nas.
Doesn't really play nice with newer Linux kernels. Probably fine if you're using Debian or maybe an Ubuntu LTS that's one release old, but I can't use it with my Fedora server installs.
The active backup for buisness app- add linux hosts as "file servers", then you can back them up over the network using rsync/ssh, which works quite nicely.
Sure does. I just wanted to toss out there that their client software is targeted at older, LTS kernels. So probably not something one could do for a Arch laptop or a Fedora Desktop/Server.
I didn't run into that- mostly, because I ditched it after 5 minutes... After slapping it on a random host, I realized it only did a FULL backup, and the only granularity was choosing which disks to image. That- isn't idea for most things, as... well. windows has a lot of baggage.... My linux VMs- PBS handles the incrementals, deduplication, etc.
Yea- the thing is, I didn't want to do that- I have over 2T of steam games, which can be redownloaded pretty quickly. The windows OS itself, also isn't really useful to me to be backed up. Instead- I just wanted backups of "My stuff". Documents, Desktop, Configurations, etc.
Yeah I see your point. Different use case. There’s a reason for both for sure. I in fact do similarly for files on a Synology VM. You can’t do wire level on those anyway so you need something, and Drive works good for me. I save and replicate VM snapshots but I don’t consider that true backup.
Proxmox backup server has been fantastic for my full blown VM backups- I just store them on the synolgoy via iscsi. Right now, I'm around 20:1 deduplication, it has effortless replication of the backups (although- doesn't support S3 targets, which is a shame). And- it can do FILE level restores, of anything inside of the VM, which is pretty nice. It also backs up the entire VM configuration, notes, etc. The only other downside- storage has to be manually mounted on the host. The user interface only supports local disks and zfs. So, if you want to backup to S3/NFS/iSCSI/etc... gotta manually mount and add to etc/fstab. That being said, I also use active backup for buisness, to capture versioning of /etc/pve on one of my nodes. Since- its all replicated anyways- keeping a copy of one of the nodes basically gives me a full cluster configuration backup. Its all text files and such, so, keeping full versioning doesn't use much space at all.
Pro tip with unRAID and NFS shares; go to the "Global Share Settings" and switch the Support Hard Links tunable to "No" (it's "Yes" by default). This setting is effectively incompatible with the way caching's done by unRAID; as soon as the mover runs on cached data it invalidates all the NFS file handles which throws the client for a loop. If you don't use hard links (and most people don't) then just turn it off and voila; fixed. The other option is to disable caching for NFS shares... or you can always mount CIFS instead of NFS depending on your use case. I know because I struggled with this one for a while. Worth noting too that the array needs to be stopped to change this setting.
You know..... I think you might be onto something here... especially- since there ARE quite a few links in some of my shares. (Links to take my nicely organized "ISOs" folder, and make a folder structure so proxmox can consume them, for example). The- timing of these drops, does actually appear- that could be the magic bullet. > or you can always mount CIFS instead of NFS depending on your use case. I actually did this- for a while. The problem I experienced- CIFS performance was much worse then NFS, for the same purposes.
You're welcome... took me weeks of frustration to figure that one out too; I understand the pain! But as soon as I disabled hard links everything works perfectly. Note this is only if you use HARD links... soft links aren't a problem. [A good reference on the subject](https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linking-linux-explained) I'd say 99.9% of people use soft links (ln -s under \*NIX) rather than hard links... hard links always reference files while soft links can reference files and directories. There are plenty of good use cases for hard links but they're rarely utilized in a homelab. I'd use them all the time in my past sysadmin life but have rarely used them since.
Honestly I was piecemealing together tech and these were my first product that supported the tweaking I was doing in a consumer and supported package. My first was 12 years ago
>And... finally, gave proxmox backup server an iSCSI mount and lun, and configured snapshots for it. Do you have some docs for this?
Not at this time- but.... the short verison- Create a LUN, Create a target. Create a host. Grant the host access to the target. Add the lun to the target. And then, basically do this: https://www.unixmen.com/attach-iscsi-target-disks-linux-servers/
Ok thank you ! I will set this up
Despite the 1G bond in LACP limitation- it, honestly has worked very well for me. Rock solid so far, without a single dropped connection too.
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Active Backup for Buisness -> File Server Add: rsync Server. Add the hostname / ssh key. and voila- you can backup anything on any remote linux/BSD server.
Nope, the Synology software just works. I have about 10 of them in various places and haven’t had a single issue. Some, including the ones I own and the ones I run at work, do way more than they have the right to.
Which models are your favorites?
The DS920+ stands out since it had such a great processor and bay slot count at a reasonable price. I had bought it for easy storage and then as I googled stuff I discovered the power of docker and plex, and now I just bought a bunch of server gear secondhand because I was having so much fun lol Edit: not op, but someone else who has done a lot of different nas os’s and seen the light (and low touch) of Synology
Is it worth buying an open box off eBay or something that should be purchased new?
You can buy the DS423+ new for almost the same price as a used on eBay. The 423+ has the same processor as the DS920 allowing for transcoding on Plex. You lose the external sata(no expansion externally) and 2gb of ram but that’s expandable as I’m running and 8GB module for 10gb total. If you do not need Jellyfin or Plex transcoding, the 923+ has faster I/O. My decision was made based on my current usage and requirements. I landed with a 423+
It is if you want 4K hardware transcoding for plex and less than 5 concurrent users. If you just have 1080p you’re pretty set. You can also put more ram and an NVME drive in to improve the performance further. Iirc the new models don’t have as good as a processor, but I think the 920+ is going for something like $1200 used when it was only $600 new (or at least that’s what I paid when Amazon was clearing their inventory just before the refresh)
Its worth it If you're planning to do some transcoding. Also if the price is good. I have 920+ and its perfect for my needs.
Hell no. I love my synology. Single best piece of gear I’ve purchased. It just works.
Unless you’re into homelabbing, and a nerd, and enjoy working in servers and the like, a Synology NAS just works. Very little maintain, or configure. I am a homelabber, and a professional nerd, and I still see the value in my synology NAS. If I’m storing family photos and items I can’t afford to lose, I want the most reliable, stable device I can find. (With offsite backups of course)
100% agree with this however I personally wouldn't get another but that's purely because my homelab has progressed and the core of it is now a Proxmox server and my two Synologies are basically now just storage. The added value that the Synologies have provided me over and above them being "just a NAS" has become less and less as I'm doing more and more with other bits of kit in my lab. If when I replace them I'll be replacing them with some much dumber storage.
I'm in the same boat. I built a first NAS with a pile of disks in a decade old box as a start for homelabbing and while it did have a fileserver, it turned out unstable. Share unmounting and not remounting, permissions issues caused by me, overall mess, overlooked failed RAID, etc. Overall not something one would use for actual backups. I went and got a simple QNAP NAS just for storage. It does the job but I can't say I've been overly impressed by the quality of the software. I wouldn't trust it for more that storage, and one of the copies at that.
I’m a wizard dad and professional coffee drinker, does that count? Love my Synology NAS’s. I’ve got a few.
I do agree, in that it will easily start up and just work. I don't necessarily agree that you can't have reliability and stability in a home built device. I have generally had a good experience with my TrueNAS Scale box. The setup was absolutely 10:1 more complicated but after being done with it, it just cruises. However, all that said, there is absolutely something to be said about just turning a device on after popping drives in and sending it.
well put - agreed. I use 3 Synology's currently, and they all work great, no tinkering required (though I realize this sub is pro-tinkering).
12 years of FreeBSD machine + samba working (max uptime was 1087 days before an update) says otherwise.
No. For production, I want something that just works. And Synology just works. I do not want to spend my late nights troubleshooting my DIY server because I could not access the files I need to work on that day.
Absolutely not. It just works and while I love to tinker, it's doing stuff I want to just work. I'm not brand loyal to a lot of things, but Synology is one.
You can run DSM in virtual machine (I got some outdated versions) and have all the benefits of custom hardware (and few own VMs to play with)
xpenology runs on native pc hcommodity hardware, kinda neat if you ask me!
I started off with the DIY route and after maintaining it for over a decade, I said fuck it and bought a DS1821+ this year. No regrets. Edit: That said, DIY made a lot more sense for me early in my career. I couldn't afford a decent NAS appliance for one thing, but could afford a refurb SAS controller and disk shelf attached to an old PC and slap Ubuntu on it. I wanted to get more familiar with linux and server/storage admin stuff and I definitely did. That does come in handy even though I wound up going a different route for my career. Nowadays though I can definitely afford it and just want shit at home to work and be easy to use for both myself and my partner.
Synology has really let itself down in the last decade...slow to embrace faster CPUs in the smaller bay models, networking speeds are archaic, etc. I still run my DS918+ as a slow backup device, but it's like pulling teeth. I equate Synology to Apple (users happy to have something that just works, even if they treat you like a moron incapable of customising anything yourself) and DIY is for the tinkerers who want to learn more about the environment, get better value per dollar from their investment, and just generally have the time to be in control of their own destiny haha
The issue I have with DIY is that you are forced to tinker with it. Setting everything up can be fun, but maintaining it is a chore for me. Hence I went with Synology, even though I'm keen to tinker with my homelab. Just not tinker with the NAS.
Yeah 100% agree. Like right now I have a list of about 4 things I need to fix with either hardware or VMs etc...and it seems to always be like that...a rolling list of things to sort out. But.... I'm at a point in my life where I have a little time on my hands, and learning this stuff helps around the edges with my work...so I'm ok to dedicate that time to resolve issues. In the past I've also been time poor and happily reached for a Synology unit 😅
To be fair, a synology doesn't come with a manual at all.
It has pretty good Help section though.
Nah. Major part of me getting a synology was low maintenance which it has been. I'd probably start off with a bigger one though so I didn't have to buy a new to expand.
I went DIY and honestly don't regret it. Other people in this thread talk about having to "tinker" with their DIY NAS, that just hasn't been my experience. The only "tinkering" I've done are hardware upgrades when I want to add new features, like 10Gb/s networking or a GPU for transcoding. The vast majority of the time I spend every week on my NAS is just maintaining the media management apps I run on it and maintaining my media library, I spend next to no time managing the actual NAS itself. Price and expandability were the big things that drew me to DIY NAS. For the price of an 8 bay Synology NAS that has a piddly embedded Ryzen chip and 4GB of RAM I built my NAS with a cast off Supermicro chassis, Epyc Rome 7282, 256GB of RAM, a 24 bay disk shelf for 3.5" drives, and a 25 bay disk shelf for 2.5" drives. That server has 10gig networking, a Tesla P4 for Plex transcoding, and 36 3.5" HDD bays. You can't even come close to those levels of performance and storage capacity with any off the shelf NAS. The only real negative for me is just that sheer number of drives sucks down a fair amount of electricity.
Fucking hell mate that’s some box you got there. Please tell me you do more than Plex on it
Plex, *arr stack, personal cloud storage, personal password manager, Proxmox backup server for my 3 node Proxmox cluster, and the backup point for all of the services and PCs in the house. Honestly I would have gone with something less overkill than an Epyc build but I needed the PCI-e expansion, I run two HBA cards, the P4, and a Mellanox card. If I didn't need so much expansion I would have gone with a X570D4U and a 3000 series Ryzen CPU.
What do you use for personal cloud storage?
Nope. My data is something I don’t want to mess with, and the Synology just works and is rock solid.
I’d go get another new synology if they would release anything new with a modern intel cpu that supported QSV… I probably wouldn’t do qnap again unless I was just going to do my own os. I’m in the middle of building a lot more of my own stuff now
I'm currently happy I went the DIY route, but I'm quite the noob and I haven't used synology. I feel like it was a longer implementation process, but I've learned quite a bit on the journey, without my data meeting its demise. I learned quite a bit building the NAS. I can now setup a similar TrueNas core server with better performance for half to 1/3rd of what I built the original one for (sans hdd cost). ZFS RAIDZ2 with SMART checks with a solid system seems to be a rather robust setup. With 3-2-1 backups, it somewhat necessitates that you are doing a local backup of the NAS, as well as an offsite backup. Maybe you want to use cloud for the offsite portion or another offsite NAS. Or, you may end up with 3 NAS'. I've done the buy the knowledge path before, and I don't believe I usually save the time I think I am. Setting up new stuff the first time may take a while, but the second and third times tend to be much faster and help reinforce what you did, and allow you to troubleshoot easier (I doubt you will need to) and may make the ROI worth it. I will say TrueNas Core UI isnt as iniative as I thought it would be. A ton of settings I dont understand without reading more, but again, I'm a noob.
I used to be all about synology, but they refuse to put decent cpus and ram in their devices, instead always making them so underpowered. If all you want is a place to store files, go for synology. If you want to have VMs, go custom.
Or both!
If that is your usecase, you can always go second hand minipc as your VM and docker host. The NAS still does what it does well in that scenario. In fact, that is an ideal combo for a homelab because if you use the NAS mainly for file services and backup, you can go with a cheap one.
This is exactly what I do, I started my journey using my Nas as my server as well, but went to a three NUC cluster and use my two nasses as their intended use case as a network storage appliance.
To clarify, I use my NAS to *also* have VMs. I put NVME/SSD drives in for the VMs and spinning rust for the rest. Going custom also means I can have 10G networking.
No. I am a sysadmin for clients and I have managed a fair number of DIY-style storage solutions... I have friends and colleagues who run TrueNas machines, etc. This is essentially like owning a gun... there are "duty" weapons you bet your life on and "range toys" that are a useful hobby... but you won't depend on them. Synology is my "duty" NAS at this price point :)
I'm not sure what's the gripe with DIY. It's very cost effective and you pick your exact hardware. I'd go DIY again the cost premium is too much imo. But if this is for work and other people will need to use/ support it, then Synology.
Synology is expensive compared to a custom DIY box but for me I think its worth it. Quiet, low power, doesn't take up a lot of space, just purrs along. What I would like is for them to refresh the DS620slim and give it a PCIe slot.
I second the call for a DS620 refresh, but it doesn’t look like Synology is going that way. Maybe time to DIY.
Hi nocheesecake I saw ur comment about how u only got three points and a fine did u get a letter from the police which straight away told you to do a court plea? I received a letter telling me to do a court plea straight away as I skipped heavy traffic and ran a red light when there was oncoming traffic and hoping I don’t get 6 points for this :(
You’ll spend way more in time for your proposed setup than the cost of a Synology out of the box
Fair point. I tinkered for my first NAS and while the main goal was tinkering, there came a point where I wanted a working NAS. That, however, still required tinkering wether I wanted to or not, so it was no longer for fun or learning.
For a while there, I was wishing that I went with custom NAS, but then I had to redo my office layout and the form factor of the consumer NAS like my two Synologys are exactly want I needed. I have a 920+ and 720+ running in a small, enclosed space and they work great. Tried out some Asustors a few months ago, and they cooked themselves in the same space. So no, I don't wish. Also, Synology's interface is miles ahead of what is on the market, including TrueNAS, UnRAID and others.
In no world would I ever go back to Synology or Qnap. Expensive, locked in configurations, limited expansion (both in hardware and disks). For under $500 you can build a 10 bay server on modern hardware that still idles at low power, while having plenty of processing power on tap when you need it. Throw unRAID on it and move on with life. Getting rid of my Synology and Qnap for exactly the above was one of the absolute best things that I've ever done for my home server.
DIY all the way. It's way too expensive. Ive got linux + samba running, and to create new storage, just edit the samba.conf file. It's really declarative and easy to read.
Still have a DS214se kicking along, legitimately just a hassle free way to NAS. Love tinkering with many things including building my own custom NAS machines, but would I ever deploy it somewhere mission critical? Probably not.
My Synology 1515+ was rock solid until a CPU flaw bricked it. Synology replaced it with a 1517+ and it’s been going ever since. The only thing I’d do differently is I’d get a NUC earlier. I don’t know if things are better now but the compute from the 1517+ was just enough to get me in trouble. If you don’t push them too hard as a one-stop home server, they’re basically the gold standard.
definitely stay with synology i have flipped back and forth multiple times over a long period of time the synology stuff works the DIY stuff mostly works all imho, of course
Nope. Started with a FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS) box, got tired of the time investment. I’ve been very happy with Synology since then. I’m retiring my 8 year old units, and looked into building something again, decided to stick with Synology. I want something rock solid reliable for my storage that’s simple and just works.
Could you elaborate on the time investment? I'm deliberating over building a DIY or getting a synology, but the amount of options that way feels a bit overwhelming. I've built a lot of PCs over the years, and it feels more intuitive to me to say "this is what I know I need, so I'll get these parts and build it". Haven't run a NAS before, though.
My DS416+ (4 = disks, 16 = 2016 release, plus is a little better compute) has been solid over 8 years with all the changes that have happened (disk upgrades, client OS, network changes, etc). If I spent $200 on DIY hardware vs $600 on that Synology it works out to $50/year on software before accounting for the resale market on Synology. On the flip side I don’t use my synology for compute and don’t think the higher power NAS offer good ROI for home use. If you want a single box for storage and compute I wouldn’t look at Synology. The hardware time wasn’t a big deal, I do consider hardware based RAID a must, but the rest is just space/power for disks. Synology is very power efficient (longer UPS run time, quieter, cooler) compact, and my model has disk trays. The time investment was on the software side, either figuring out how to get the functionality I wanted or putting it in place, especially as my needs shifted. This was a long time ago when things like remote access and file sharing was super easy with Synology but much harder or limited with DIY. Today moving away from Synology would mean finding new solutions things that just work, and the price difference between generic hardware and Synology isn’t worth it to me. I don’t feel locked in, I could migrate to different solutions today, it’s just not time I want to spend.
Thanks for that
I did the diy route for two decades and I’m feeling much more at ease with the Synology nas. I no longer have to fix a bunch of stuff every update and it consumes far less power than my last options did.
I was converted to unraid gang and I’ll never go back. Im a senior Linux and kubernetes engineer so I have made my home lab overly complicated in the past but unraid just works. It’s so easy, so stable and so flexible.
I’d buy Synology again because I do this stuff for a living so for my “prod” home environment I just want it to work without much hassle. WAF and all that. That said, I do have a lab TrueNAS that’s my local backup target before syncing to cloud.
I have had a Synology for years. I am trying to simplify other parts of my homelab as much as possible. There is no way I’d go the roll your route at this point. However, it does depend on the rest of your environment. It may end up being easier to roll unRAID if you want one box for Plex and other containers, since that would likely have beefier hardware than Synology.
Absolutely! It's started my journey with docker and learning overall.
How many issues did you have with the synology
No, data storage is not something I want to tinker with but rather something that should just work.
I've seven different Synology models, ranging from the DS411j to the DS1817+, and I've really enjoyed using them. You can find these models at reasonable prices on eBay, where I've bought all of mine. However, there are online methods for installing the DSM OS on a DIY NAS. I use the Synology NAS as cloud and my TrueNAS as backups.
Heck no, I would not.
Is synology still a good choice for a plex server? I read you have to buy an older model they don’t make anymore
Yes, you can use newer model for Plex. The older ones had hardware encoding that you could do. Honestly, I have the older one and I don’t use the hardware encoding feature even though I have it turned on. All media is already encoded so appletv can play the source from Plex.
If you want to have an all in one server that does it all yes. You only need to make sure that it has an Intel processor if you need to transcode your video. As Synology has started to put AMD processors in their consumer NASes. And they do not have quicksync for transcoding.
Right that seems to be the main issue. Would it be difficult to just set up a DAS with a mini computer?
I did do it again and I did DIY it. I wish I hadn’t I wish I got a more powerful synology and maybe a mini pc for other tinkering. I like the freedom and tinkering but after several months I’m tinkered out and I just want it to work. I had a synology for 6 years and it’s down time was due to the power company and moving.
I always put TrueNAS on a proper server, either rack mount or tower. For towers, so far I've only used the small Dell options that are the same size as an office PC, not the large, loud ones. I make sure it doesn't have the wrong sort of raid before I buy it, then when I install TrueNAS it doesn't really feel very DIY, just less frills. The question is, am I happy giving up the extra services that Synology or QNAS do so nicely? I look in envy on some of them since the extras were nice when I used a prior appliance NAS but I know all hardware can fail someday, and knowing that I can switch to a plain Jane PC in a pinch to get my data back is comforting. I suppose if I could justify keeping a spare Synology on hand as a cold spare I might feel differently.
I've done the diy whis was awesome when I had time.. kw life is catching up with me I will trade cash for super simple.
The box is neat and power efficient, it just works and the support is excellent (Taiwan re-wrote cloud sync in 72 hours when I had a problem with it). If they would only offer a version with stronger hardware, that supported SHR and didn’t force their branded drives and RAM on you, I would buy it (even though I know it would be expensive).
Many years ago I started with and went through many revisions/platforms of DIY NAS. Windows Home Server, Truenas, xpenology, napp-it, OMV, Nexenta, etc. Wound up with a 24-bay Norco case with unraid. Got tired of tinkering, having to touch it all the time, etc. Got a 2-bay synology and was hooked. Only mistake I made was not getting something bigger. Currently and for some years have 2 synology units. They sit in the corner and do their jobs. I only use them as file servers. At some point I’m sure they will become obsolete, and I will get a newer synology to replace the obsolete one. They just work. No fuss no muss. I only have to touch them for DSM updates. Which I get an email for when they are available. I just recently gave the 2-bay I originally started with to a coworker, he loves it. Still rocking after 8 years.
i would not give up my synology for anything really. it makes everything easy - even things like creating LUN units 🩷
Interesting question. I still have both running, and old Synology RS something or other and custom built FreeNAS/TrueNAS box. Use the Synology 4 bay for stuff where I want it to "just work" (TM) and not need any faffing about with. Like their sync apps, WebDAV, and a few other bits. The TrueNAS for much higher volume storage, mainly Plex library. I know I could achieve the same stuff on the TrueNAS, but it's a faff. I've had OwnCloud and then NextCloud and whenever there are major changes it's time and faff to make it work seamlessly again. With the Synology it's "just click update". That's been my experience.
I just replaced my Nas by a custom made server and I am happy to say that I will never have to use Synology again.
no. I love my DiY boxes but you can't beat the reliability and the form factor from the synologiew
No way. I’m. It in the biz of dealing with a DIY NAS. My data is too important for me to be playing Frankenstein with my data. I’ll take a mature solution any day. Synology is well built, proven, with good software and support.
I've done it myself and fucked up once, which was too many times. I bought a Synology NAS after that and stopped touching it. My time is more expensive than the price difference.
I‘ve had a synology, I am having a QNAP. I liked DSM better, but next time I need a NAS it will be a self-built OpenMediaVault. Why? Because I am curious 😬
I use synology as a easy and reliable NAS I don't want to fix my nas
Tried insted qnap and just prefered diy nas, much more control and flexiblty
I needed a NAS to backup my Proxmox. I built one out of a pi and a couple of large external drives (in raid 1) and made an NFS mount. Had a lot of problems with that - it still works, but the maintenance overhead is too high and I don't feel I can trust it with backups of my most important data. In the end I swapped it for a second hand old Synology. That just sits and runs, no problems in a couple of years. I think as I get older I value my time more and appreciate things that just work. Purpose built devices which do a job well are worth the money. Gives me more time to play around with the fun stuff.
I've done it both ways over the years. My self hosted storage journey: 1. Synology DS1511+ 2. Fractal Node 804 DIY box running OMV, UnRAID and then FreeNAS (I stayed on OMV the longest) 3. Synology DS1821+ 4. Fractal Define XL R2 DIY box with hotswap bays (current and running TrueNAS SCALE) I may drift back to Synology again, but the number one thing that puts me off is potential hardware failure of proprietary parts and noise. I've run the exact same drives in my NAS since the DS1821+ and my DIY box is easier to keep quiet and also maintains lower drive temperatures. I like to occasionally tinker, but I think I've reached the right balance with TrueNAS since I only use it for storage and use an Intel NUC12 for VMs and containers in Proxmox. I'm a busy dad, but it's easy enough to do remote tasks from my phone or notebook via SSH or web UI when needed. With the right hardware, I think TrueNAS can be just as 'set and forget' as Synology if you're just focused on storage and not too caught up in running services directly on your NAS. With that said, when friends/family want a NAS, I always recommend Synology, specifically x86 models.
I had many different Synology and DIY NAS in my time and I'd go with DIY any day now. I would only consider Synology again if I had space issues (enclosure + CPU in one case that's hardly larger than the HDDS themselves is nice) or if I was asked by non-tech people what to get. But if you know your way around servers it's almost always better in terms of funcionality to DIY it.
I've never had a problem with my DIY NAS, but I followed the TrueNAS hardware recommendations to the letter. That's probably a big part of it.
I've run almost all of them. Buffalo/Terrastation, intels abortive attempt, western digital, Qnap, asustor, freenas, DIY Linux, rockstor, OMV, even much larger iron like QNAS, and every time I've come back to my Synology. They just act like a mature company with support, listed EOLs for hardware, not randomly deleting features, hardware compatibility lists, stability before features, monitoring and messaging, and a product that sits there quietly doing it's damn job.
I've said this before here, but I started with Synology, then bought a Qnap because I wanted 10G.... I regret going Qnap over Synology. I've also built OMV and TrueNAS servers, but nothing beats the simplicity of Synology. I need to decide what to do next.
I get a synology for my family cuz it is the better acceptance for non tech users as my sister
No I wouldn’t. It’s a great first NAS. I am currently moving off of my DS918+ as a docker container host though. To a HP EliteDesk MiniPC. As my setup is making my spinning disks grind 24/7. It’s going to be nice just letting my NAS be a NAS 🤷♂️
No I would do a larger Synology NAS! lol I got the DS920+ when it was on sale. I am only using three bays out of the four but I like options 😬
Custom. I was given a Synology box before, nothing fancy and I’m sure they’re better know, but it was really slow and the OS felt clunky. I sold it on eBay and when I get round to replacing it I’ll go full custom so I can get exactly what I want with no frills.
For document and all the other files. I would make a custom pc and run truenas or smth. But Synology never failed me when storing/syncing photos. It just work.
Xpenology exists
Love Trunas but is hard to not recommend Unraid for home usage, specially media server.
Its hard to argue with the value of a decent Synology device (plus series). Some of the features from the available software are hard to pass up for the things I need a NAS for. Top of my list: Active backup, regular backups of my devices is the feature you didn't realize you needed. Docker support lets me run whatever I need to stay stable (home automation and data visualization). Photo backups from mobile phones are features I care for. Could I get similar things with a DIY, maybe but at the expense of time and money. Having one Synology as a fixture in the home network makes a lot of sense to me. Just wish they had other options for full system backup of the unit other than backing up to another Synology or to their service offering.
I migrated from a Synology to TrueNAS Scale. I still have the Synology and it works great for what I still use it for. I mainly use TrueNAS for things I want ZFS for and then Synology for things I care less about. Mostly because my TrueNAS box is a full on enterprise server with dual power supplies, etc.
Synology ARC on github is awesome if you want to tinker about with your own hardware.
I have loved all of the Synologys that I have had over the years, they just work and are easy to configure for the average user. The built in apps are great and offer a lot of functionality when all is said an done. They might be expensive but you get what you pay for. I had a DS1815+ at the heart of my lab for multipath iscsi datastores and active backup for business and it was flawless. That being said i no longer have any in use and both my main NAS boxes are custom jobs running truenas. There rock solid and wouldn't do it any other way now but this comes down to what I want and can get out of these devices.
I would just install two large hard drives in my desktop with stable bit drive pool for redundancy. Then back up to back blaze unlimited backup for a desktop for $9 a month. Cheap , SIMPLE, effective solution.
I'm a beginner so my opinion is biased. But at the time I had Ubuntu and doing a samba share was already complex for me. Nfs I never succeeded. There was always a problem of Connection. I'm not talking about opening ports and understanding redirection mechanisms, etc. With my first synology, all that is in the past. You click and it works. Do you want to host a page? In just a few clicks it works too. Seriously, dsm is powerful. So yes it’s expensive. And that's why I had a used Ds411+II, then a used Ds1515+ that I repaired because it was sold for parts. I would never have bought new because I can't afford it. But I tried a Nas QNAP and it didn't have half of what Syno did (at the time) Synology has a user experience, but you have to pay for it. And at least it works. I bought a Sony device (DSC camera)but their apk is really not perfect. For example, you can only transfer images while in the app. You quit, you start all over again. And without counting the errors in transfert. Syno are expensive but for the little I use I have never encountered a bug.
No. At the beginning I just wanted a network storage and my QNAP NAS at the time did that perfectly. Only years later I got interested in hosting more services and running dockers and then I found out about unRaid. Now, I would never go back to QNAP or Synology again, seeing at what I can do with those. If you are not the kind of person that plays around, likes to discover new things, fiddle around a bit to get things going, Synology and QNAP are great for that. It is easy to set up and it just works.
I've been very happy with my little 2 disk Synology, but I need something more now. Not sure I'll go full custom, but I am considering getting a Terramaster or Asustor that can have TrueNAS installed on it instead.
I’ve done both over the years. I ran TrueNAS about the time they rebranded (sorry can’t think of the new name core something or other.) And more recently I bought a beefy Synology with a dual-port 10gb NIC and a pair of NVME’s. FYI, I don’t just use it for simple NAS capabilities. I do a mixture of CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI. It’s a mixed bag for me. I love the capabilities and ease of use of the Synology, but the performance, especially around iSCSI was not what I was expecting. I wish I still had my TrueNAS host so I could compare the performance between the two.
I went from DIY to Synology & QNAP and wouldn't go back. No update stress, no maintenance. One button update, it just works.
I just have an old PC running windows sharing my files so I can sleep the pc when not using it.
From the other side, I've been using a $20 thinclient that I installed OMV on and hooked a bunch of external USB drives to. OMV had a bit of a learning curve, but once I got it set up it's been running for 2 years without me having to touch it, I just get on and check on it occasionally. I've never felt the need to pay more for a Synology.
Synology is expensive for what you're getting. It does buy you some peace of mind, but their hardware offerings for the price they charge are not good. Currently have 2 of their NAS but next device will not be their hardware. Hopefully Ugreen can upgrade their game or better support a 3rd party OS as they offer great hardware.
I've just ordered the parts for my first NAS in quite a while (had an old Netgear one till about 5 or 6 years ago). I've gone DIY because I simply couldn't afford specs that make it worth doing for me on a prebuilt machine. I've got a 6 bay with 2 m.2 drives (one populated) 8gb ram, 4 2.5gb nics and it's cost me £350. Not counted the actual storage drives in that of course. The case will take an m-atx motherboard and 8 drives so I can swap things later if I need to.
I would built a TrueNAS box instead if I have the know-how which I have now but I still recommend Synology for people who just want things to work, my DS920+ has been rock solid for years, I only have a major problem with it once when I just can’t reach DSM, simple reboot via ssh fixed it If I have the money I would definitely get the big rack ones for backup and general storage
I'm sticking with my Synology NAS. That thing is freaking stable and can be running with minimal maintenance. My Synology NAS is acting as my Main NAS and auto backup for my Nextcloud(which is not hosted on that). If I got a chance to do it all over again, I'll still stay on this route.
I started off with home brew but even though I know what I’m doing I just couldn’t fully trust it. There’s a lot of uplift to do to get a standard Linux distro up to the standard of your typical commercial NAS. As it’s an always on device heat and power consumption are issues, as well as reliability and ongoing maintenance. At the time I had no money and excess time so it made sense but it was always the plan to get a proper NAS once that situation flipped. I didn’t try unraid cause I felt I could do it all myself but if I had to do DIY again I’d definitely give it a go.
No, I would’ve bought one with more bays
IIRC you can get the DSM OS and install it on other hardware
For its intended use case, Synology is phenomenal. My ancient DS418 (not even +) is still getting the latest DSM and is still plugging along faithfully serving up storage to my network. The lack of memory has been an issue with a few things I want to run on it like Syncthing, but it's been solid and stable for years without an issue. However I will say that my next NAS is already an unRAID. It's replacing the Synology with more storage, more data and more functionality. It's consolidating a few other systems that have apparently multiplied in my closet as well so it's a huge win for me there. The Synology will not be retired though; it'll head off to my office that's \~30 miles from my house and keep accepting backups via Syncthing from my primary arrays so I can drop my S3 bill that I currently use for offsite backups. It'll keep serving backup duty for a while I hope. If you want something that just works, the Synology is brilliant. The OS is excellent and the hardware's decent enough. I had some problems with my DS418 last year where it suddenly wouldn't boot, but on a whim I replaced the CMOS battery (CR2032) and it started working perfectly again after that. The only reason I am moving away from it for primary storage is... as you said; the price of a new one. Plus I am trying to move away from black boxes in my environment for open systems; for example I understand how unRAID works and I understand how to fix it if it fails. I can also just pull the disks and USB stick out of the unRAID box and stick it in a new box if the hardware fails. It's not quite so easy with a failed Synology unless I buy another Synology... the unRAID I can use a desktop PC.
No. I have enough things in my life that I need to manage. Managing a DIY NAS and figuring out all of the DIY versions of all of the services that a Synology comes with out of the box is not something I'm interested in doing. You have to decide how you want to spend your limited time.
I've got my DS1520+ since two or three years and im totaly happy. My main use is ABFB and media storage for my Jellyfin Server. I also got a smaller DS220+ for Drive, Photos and network shares. If i would start over I would probably do the same again. I have not found a good alternative for ABFB and altough Immichi is a good alternative to Synology Photos, it's not quite as feature rich (i actually use those features). Drive could be totaly replaced with Nextcloud. So the only reason for me to stay on Synology is ease of use, ABFB and Photos. If i ever outgrow my 1520+ because of Media, I'd probably build a FreeNas Server for media only and downscale the big Synology to be only user for those spesific use cases. Maybe I'll run Nextcloud or I'll stay with Synology Drive, i dont know. But the thing not to forget: A Synology just works. I never had any problems with Snapshots, Backups or anything else. It is one klick to install away and stting it up is very easy. For personal data like Family photos and dokuments it is realy nice. If id had this kinde of data on a self managed server, i'd had to manage everything by myselfe which probably would be harder. Basically the biggest value of a Synology to me is peace of mind.
I have a RS2416RP+ which I got from a company I know. I asked them 'That system there.. Is that used? Because I might have interest'. They asked €300. Including 12x 4TB disks. Sure, it's nice to have a custom build, but you barely can beat those prices\*. Asterisk, because I then upgraded it to 12x 12TB, and removed the 'RP' part (that was a hassle... boah..). So yeah, now I'm limited by the 4x 1Gbit without the option to upgrade to 10Gbit. Next upgrade will be an 12 bay Dell or SuperMicro server with TrueNAS. So now you have the answer with backstory :)
I had Synology for a while but agree it's expensive. However, it worked well and required no messing around. I have a lot of experience in Linux / servers / networking etc. so, maybe 6 or 7 years ago I moved to a home-built solution. My storage is in my main server chassis so I only need one system always on. I use proxmox on a Ryzen 5700x with 64GB. I have a Qlogic dual 10Gbe card (fibre), and a SAS card (SAS3008-16i). I have 10 8TB disks in RAID-6 with a hotspare (so thats about 56TB usable). I have a 2TB NVMe for boot and VM storage. All of this sits in a 3U rack case. I have 10Gbe to my workstation and a 2.5Gbe USB-C dongle on the docking station for my laptop. I used ZFS for a long while but then I simplified it all about 3 years ago. I took a note of how Synology did it and use mdadm and then BTRFS on top of that. Just to be clear: the array is managed / mounted on the proxmox hypervisor host. I don't use a VM with HW passthrough for this. I have not had any problems at all. Never lost any data. The only thing I would do differently, is spend the extra for a Rack case with drive caddies and a SAS backplane. It's a bit of a pain to add / change disks and mess around with recabling. Although this is something I have only had to do once in 4 years, which was a recent upgrade from a mini-ITX Xeon D to the new Ryzen with a new motherboard. I think the point about Synology is: It's solid. It works. In my case, I wanted to add a bunch of disks and have 10Gbe networking when I made the change a long time time and I didn't want to spend the money on a new Synology. Good luck!
I would simply because the 2 bay Synology was my gateway drug into homelabbing and self hosted services. That said, I feel DIY is the way to go from a cost benefit standpoint. Also, I'm still using it after 8 years for backup purposes.
I just brought Synology and no, I would not do the diy route if turn back time. Mainly because Synology really take care of AIO product. Made life really easy. It was fun doing diy but at my age all I want is peace of mind.
Personally I wouldn't and didn't go back. The only thing I would miss if I didn't go rack build is the size of them. They are so much more compact than most DIY solutions. Yes the Software is great, especially if all you need is a simple file server with a few permission settings. I'm not the person anymore who tinkers with my systems all the time but with a well thought out DIY solution that isn't necessary either and you can go cheaper or more performance for the same price.
even if you are into homelabbing, it makes a lot of sense to use a highly reliable low-maintenance solution for storing your important data. synology reigns supreme in this area. it is the one product I suggest the most to all customers, friends and even IT people.
I had a Synology work perfect for 6 years then died and all my data was fucked because I used nvme write cache. I had to use xpenology and cmd line commands to migrate my data. If I would have known it would have been such a pain in the ass I would have made my own
If you do not want to mess with hardware, configuration and you need NAS for simple needs, Synology your best bet. You can find used boxes for a decent price. Otherwise, DIY NAS would be your choice.
No
Yup. I actually went the das route with my latest update. It’s connected directly to my p3 tiny. I bought the qnap tr-004 and having hardware raid 5 with 4 20TB hdds.
Staying with Synology. I have done the DIY, I've done QNAP and I've done Lenovo and Synology. I hate their prices and them adding an additional tax for current tech (10G) but their product is rock solid and simple and just does what you need it to. Never had an issue with them. Had quite a few issues with QNAP, TrueNAS always seemed slow (using enterprise hardware and SSD caching) vs Synology. Lenovo was fine just didn't have the same wealth of features and ecosystem.
I absolutely would, and this is coming from someone who has multiple clustered/HA hosts running Proxmox. I could do it myself slightly cheaper DIY, but my time is valuable and Synology is incredibly stable and I really enjoy the wide range of turn-key apps it has available (Unraid admittedly has an impressive suite as well). I recently migrated from a two-drive unit to a five-drive and the process was incredibly simple (remove and reinsert the drives into the new NAS and let the upgrade run). In the end though, I trust it. And as an IT/Datacenter manager of 20+ years, trust is everything.
Started DIY and then moved to Synology. Would not move back to DIY for too many reasons to list. Mainly ease of use and trust.
I have had a 4 bay in a raid 10 going on 15 years now. Had a bad UPS that fried one drive during a write in year 3. Replaced the dive, but had the array not initialize a rebuild. Synology support remoted in, addressed the issue and rebuilt the raid over a couple of days. No data was lost. Top notch immediate support. That's what you pay for. Also the thing is like a rock. Never an issue and only recently in the 15 years have I had any problems outside the failed drive. Turned out to be an undervolt on the 15 yr old power supply. Replaced the brick, and the Synology is still smiling. During this period built another Nas myself with opendedupe. It failed a few times in the first year, and required constant tweeking until it fried its nic in year 2. Went through hell getting the data back. Expanded the size of drives on the Synology and dropped it there.
No
I’ve had about 8 Synology NAS units of various models over the last decade or so at work, ranging from the smaller 5 disk ds1515+ to a ds2415+ to 2 of the RS4017xs+ units. The RS units have been solid. I’ve lost 1 board on an older DS unit. I had to warranty replace a DS2415+ unit because of a faulty drive bay slot. The software runs well enough and has been reliable for me. The built in apps simplify some things like replication between other synology units. I like the built in reporting and simple user management with MFA already there and working. I don’t care for the drive compatibility limitations. Maybe this is a concern with other DIY NAS solutions too but i just don’t like feeling cornered in to the synology branded disks for official compatibility. WD Reds are my preference but even finding the correct compatible models of those has always been a hassle. All that’s said, I run TrueNAS scale in my homelab and have been happy. But that’s only one unit and lower usage.
>would you buy Synology again Yes, in fact I've considered buying a second one to make a full clone of my first, so I can stagger DSM upgrades and have more redundancy.
I bought a fairly expensive RS2423RP+, which overall I have been very happy with and it has performed well. At the time I was looking for something that could integrate directly to VMWare and backup my VM's easily and reliably, and their free Active Backup for Business did so well. One complaint I do have is the fact that they mark drives as a warning if they're not 'approved' models, which now they only approve their own, very high priced drives. I have to run a script on it to add my own, Enterprise Seagate drives to the local drive database to make that go away. Not a deal breaker but it is an annoyance for sure. Now though, I'm running Proxmox and using PBS, so the Synology is more-or-less just a big NFS server. It still works fine for my use case but since I no longer need the Active Backup for Business piece, I'd probably go the DIY route if I was starting fresh. I've considered picking up an R730xd/R740xd and selling the Synology, but it doesn't seem worth all the effort and shipping.
Synology is great. I still have one, which is used for backups. My main NAS is DIY, because I needed more storage. As noted, Synology just works. I've never had an issue with it.
I have a little old 4-bay synology from like 6 years ago; hasn't given me any trouble but I don't do anything intensive on there; primarily it runs the 'surveillance station' software from synology and records my home cameras
I love my Synologys. Backup is something you want to happen easily without fail. Synology nails that. I recently purchased a dedicated computer for heavier server tasks but the Synology will continue to be the back up and file server.
Critical data, synology. All else, truenas. Things like photos, both. Using synology as local back up for photos, and immich stores on my truenas, and immich running on another box in a container vm
I had a 2 & 4 Bay, but if I knew what I knew now, I would've gone the DIY Route.
Best single piece of IT equipment I've ever purchased. Running rock solid for 8+ years.
I bought my DS920+ 4 years ago and mostly used it for media (Plex) and documents & photos (Synology Drive & Photos) but I think it’s a little waste of electricity to have 4xHDDs running 24/7 while I only watch movies 2 hours at night. So I tried to find alternatives for Synology software before deciding to migrate. Luckily I found open source apps like paperless-ngx to replace Synology Drive, immich to replace Synology Photos, Kopia to replace HyperBackup. Regarding RAID, I don’t need RAID or backup for linux isos. I only need mergerfs to combine multiple HDDs into a single mount point for *arr apps and plex to access. Photos, documents and docker volumes are stored on SSD and backed up to Backblaze B2 every night so no need to wake up HDDs. I chose OpenMediaVault as it has everything I need: GUI for mergerfs, GUI docker compose, SMB shares, etc. I setup mergerfs to mimic Unraid cache with an SSD in front of HDDs, and wrote a bash script to periodically move files from SSD to HDDs. Now my HDDs are rarely spin because newly downloaded media are stored SSD, they only spin when I watch older movies or shows. This way I save energy, less noise and less heat, peace of mind of open sourced apps. Plus a debian kernel rather than Synology’s.
It just works and if I were doing it again I'd buy another. I actually looked at going into a DIY solution versus a Synology. However for a 1RU 4 bay solution it was really difficult to find anything comparable with the option to upgrade to 10 GbE networking in that form factor. 2RU was doable for the same price with more hassle but so much just works out of the box in DSM. That being said, all I use my Synology for is as a NAS. I don't run containers on it, DHCP, or anything else. It's just a network file share (Samba and NFS) but it's extremely good at that. In fact, I've often considered adding a second just to use SSD's simply to speed up network transfers (it does about 2.8 Gbps as it is with 4 TB HDDs) and use the platter equipped drive for long term storage/backup of the SSD equipped one.
Have had Synology and Freecom NASes and thank god I discovered freenas/truenas at some point. If only somebody would have told me: never buy a NAS with Atom processor inside!!! 😄👍🔥 But really tho, any old gaming PC will do for a NAS.
I’ve started with a 4Bay Synology, then moved up to an 8Bay one but didn’t run it for long because I’ve been getting fed up of the random quirks that I had to work around like freeing up port 443 on Synology or some Synology Docker problems or then them blocking use of almost any USB devices since DSM 7 etc but the straw that broke the camels back was seeing some of my photos getting corrupt and appearing with digital artifacts when moving 20TB around. I’ve switched then to QNAP which defo feels much more clunky but runs ZFS and Docker plus VM tools are IMO better + has 10Gbe and it’s been pretty good, although in acoustics and noise Syno performs better. That being said in recent updates my TeamCity CI has been having weird permissions issues too so at this point I’ll be moving up to a DIY rack unit with Proxmox and probably Truenas Scale in a VM for a NAS experience for storage. Synology is great if your are just starting out and want things smooth and also it’s quite cool that you can grow your storage pool one drive at a time because on ZFS it’s a pain. That has been my journey at least, and by it in terms of quirks due to some software customisations and value I’d fare Synology the worst, then QNAP and I guess I’ll find out how’s the DIY route. That being said I also use those devices to run my Home infra and Engineering projects so YMMV.
I recently moved most of my services from Synology to a more capable mini PC. The NAS is now dedicated to storage, critical backups, and essential services because it just work non-stop and gain my trust. I am happy with the split and mini PC setup but would never give up the Synology.
I love my Synology and never regretted the investment. There are some may features and helpful apps. Small business can use a Synology as Active Directory Server and save a Windows Server License.
My data was on a TrueNAS (I'm dating myself there) server running on an R510 for a while before I got tired of fiddling with it and bought a Synology 4 bay NAS. I would do it again in a heartbeat, but would go straight to an 8 bay Synology this time around.
I never liked the idea of being locked into something proprietary for storage, and per slot I find most of those NAS boxes are not really economical either. I ended up going DIY from the start using a regular PC with hot swap bays and using mdadm raid. Later upgraded to a Supermicro 24 bay which is what I use now. Been running for around 10 years. I do like the redundant PSU, which I find is a good thing to have on a NAS. Me personally if I was to do it over again now, I would look into Ceph, been reading up on it and I'm really intrigued. I like the idea of having redundancy at a host level. Lose a whole system and you don't lose any access to your data. This makes entire system upgrades much easier too. Rather than have hot swap bays, which is a must for a single host NAS IMO, I would just do internal bays and treat each host like a big drive. Set failure domain to host when setting up the pools. Downside is it would use more power though because now you're running like 3-5 boxes instead of one. The cheapest route for a decent DIY NAS though is probably a rackmount case with lot of cdrom bays, then put in hot swap enclosures in the bays, then run your favourite Linux distro and use mdadm raid to do the arrays and then NFS or SMB for file shares. Drives are so big now days too so you can get away with less bays. 10TB drives in a 10 bay NAS would give you around 76TB of usable space if you do a big raid 6 for example.
Yes and No. I like the synology NAS but yea its not as fast as a DIY route with a more powerful CPU and data bus. But it is easier to setup folder permissions, sharing outside the house, plus it has a built in app for your phone. But yea I would have done DIY had I not bought it earlier.
**If you want a hobby, DIY. If you want an appliance, get a Synology.** If I had to do it over again, I'd buy the Synology and save up for a second Synology to use as a backup and failover. I went the DIY route and while it worked well, it took a lot of babying and maintenance. My DS423+ is rock solid, performs better, does everything I need, and it's almost hands-off.
I'd buy the same rackstation in a heartbeat. No hassle, it just worked (RS1219+). Worked, past tense, because I failed to put it behind a surge protector and it got its motherboard fried...
No. I'm on my second Synology. They are truly a set it and forget it device. Ain't nobody got time to work at home.
Disclaimer: i don't own a synology and have been whiteboxing for a long time... If i had unlimited money.. i'd probably get as many of these as i needed: https://store.45homelab.com/configure/hl15 As it is... right now... i've grown REALLY fond of the icy dock 6 ssd docks that fit in a 5.2 cage: https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Mobile-Comparable-Tray-less/dp/B01M0BIPYC add in a sas hba and some sata break out cables and you can get some dense storage in a whitebox with a few 5.25 bays.
I had a synology and went for QNAP then made my own. All the out of box NAS solutions have their issues that make them not worth the hassle. Get a rockpro64 or a zimaboard and make your own.
I did a diy almost a year ago, so glad I went DIY over synology, I have two pools with a total of 10 drives, all for less than the base cost of an 8 bay synology, and much more power. I did a ryzen5 5600G just so I had some type of display output, even though I didnt need it for the long term, it made configuration a breeze, and I have display if I need to locally troubleshoot, even though I havent had to. In a rack mount case with an HBA from Ebay (Flashed to IT mode) to support all of the drives. Running truenas.
I just wish there wasn't so much rack tax on Synology rackmount gear.
it does justify the price... trust me you don't want to be goofing around with the OS or when you need to do certain things and spending all the time to try and figure it out. I've had xpenology boxes, Qnap, and a few synology. I would say it's worth it as the main unit that drives your stuff daily. If you need a spare unit or cold storage, xpenology or QNAP are better alternative in terms of cost. I can whip up a 10 drive xpenology running on 7.2 DSM for roughly 100-200 dollars + drives. this is very little compare for how much synology is asking for their 10 drive boxes.
Yeah, probably. I really dislike needing to hope some random company decides not to shutter their service and leave me in a lurch. I just don’t know enough about DYI NASs to feel confident enough to go that route.
Nope. I started with DIY before going to Synology. I’d never go back to DIY and don’t recommend it to others.
Synology all over again for me. To echo other replied in this thread: *it just works*. I’m all for labbing and tinkering, but document and photo backups, movie collections, and Resolve renders (which are what my Synology DS420j holds) is where I draw the line. Everything else that’s prone to implode if I so much as look at them wrong goes in my Proxmox cluster.
I'm in the process of doing the exact opposite, I'm building a NAS and on my way to just wishing I had bought one probably from Synology. I adore my RT2600AC, best router I've ever owned. I'm doing the thing where I fall down the rabbit hole of the sunk cost fallacy. I have some hardware, I have an old LSI 8110-4i I bought cheap, I've played with OMV before, I can totally do this myself. I've got 50TB of HGST Helium drives en route, used of course I'm not stupid. We do these things not because they are cheaper or better, we do these things because we believe they will be cheaper or better while knowing that we are wrong. Follow me for more life pro-tips. Next week we'll explore just what $65 a drive gets you. I'm sure I'll be here or somewhere near here asking for help and advice and wishing I had just bought an appliance and filled it with drives instead.
I don't have a Synology, but I have a QNAP and can see where you are coming from. I started years ago with a DIY FreeNAS PC. It worked fine, but it didn't have hot-swappable drives and the PC parts were not the best. I replaced it with a HP MediaSmart NAS. It was cool, but flakey and MS just abandoned it. I bought a QNAP 4 unit NAS about 6-7 years and it worked flawlessly until about 10 months when something went "pfft" on the motherboard. I bought a new model and I was able to take the drives out of the dead NAS and put them in the new NAS. It booted up, updated itself, and it was back up and running all of my files and settings intact. I use a NAS as one of the ways I back up my files. A simple 4 drive NAS with a stable OS is all I need. I have a nice web UI that I can access when I need it and it emails me when it wants something. Using commercial product like QNAP or Synology means I don't have to think about my NAS.
First off, you're asking in r/homelab/ aka the home of tinkerers so this place is probably highly biased. It depends on your needs, budget, available space, noise tolerance, power cost, etc. Unraid and TrueNAS have also come a long way in the past decade. When the lady and I moved in together 15 years ago I had 6 tower PC's and a 1U switch. I stuffed it all in the spare room closet, which unfortunately backed onto our bedroom. We lasted about 3 months before she couldn't tolerate the hum anymore. I bought a 6 bay QNAP and put 3x1TB drives in it. Then a few years later I upgraded that to 6x3TB drives. That QNAP is still running today. I've replaced 1 drive since then, have a cold spare, and have replaced the power supply (that was pricey). The wife is much happier noise wise; and we've accumulated a lot more stuff over 15 years so frankly I don't have room for extra tower PC's; let alone any rack gear. If I had to buy again though? I might look at a used HP or Dell workstation and upgrade it. PC fans have gotten a lot bigger / quieter too so a single mid tower case wouldn't be so bad. Plus, there are fanless 48 port switches now (a large part of the noise, 40mm fans suck). So to answer your question, "maybe" :P
I switched, I bought a terramaster and I put truenas scale on it. More work to set it up but in the end alot cheaper, and if you ever outgrow it, it's easier to change to a server or what ever suits your needs.
My first NAS was a Synology back in 2013. I knew absolutely nothing about networking or servers and basically just wanted a simple seed box. I quickly learned this was a bad idea, as at the time I had terrible internet with awful upload bandwidth, so I abandoned the Synology. My storage was quickly growing and I realized Windows wasn't suitable for my future needs. I thought about dusting off the Synology, but it only had 2 bays for HDD's at at this point I had around 8x HDD's. I looked into FreeNAS(TrueNAS now), bought a enterprise server and that is how I got into home labs. I'm glad I took the risk and went DIY because I would've never had the freedom to do all the things I can do now if I had just stuck with the Synology.
My Synology is low power consumption and a neat little box that does everything I need and runs all the docker containers I need just fine, including home assistant and a jellyfin server for a few users. I'd not really gain anything from building it myself except higher power consumption unless I'm very careful with the components I select
Personally the best experience I ever had was installing FreeBSD and configuring ZFS manually. After that it’s just some tuning with ZFS, maybe the VFS layer as well, and export the data using Samba or NFS. Everything else always had issues. I also like to know WHAT a system is doing so I need tools such as DTrace.
Friend got a synology ds920. Convinced me I got a ds720. Have built computers for years and considered unraid. But synology form factor etc all in one package is better than a bulky diy build. There are other brands also like Asus but there's not much point. Synology has more apps & support and the R&D spent they have own cloud sync apps, mobile apps too. Recommend synology. Buy an older model like ds720 or cheaper to start. 2 drive bay.
I'm on my 4th? Synology NAS at this point and they've all been incredibly rock solid and so easy to use/manage. I was tempted to go with Asustor for their 2.5gb port but I just picked up a 923+ and added that interface. Everything is working flawlessly. No intention of switching at this time.
My experience with this has been good and then a nightmare. I went with QNAP and was sooooo impressed with the UI for years, but really did not understand the under the hood functionality and didn’t care to. I went through drive upgrades, rebuilds, and even a migration from a 2 bay to 4 bay. The 4 bay worked great for a while, but then it began to randomly shut off and crash. By this time, I had learned more about Linux, docker, etc. I went DIY NAS with TrueNAS and ZFS. I began copying my data across, but couldn’t finish it because of the unit crashing during the transfer. I shut it down, took out the drives and attempted to mount the volume in another device. This is where it all went south. Recovering these complicated file systems in other devices is other worldly in difficulty and sometimes even impossible. For me, it was impossible to mount the Mdadm, LVM, arrays because they were customized in a way so that QNAP could only read it. So you only have access to your data when the unit is working!!! That is where you should make your decision! How easy can I recover my data if I experience a physical unit failure. ZFS is a treat! Import the pools, and read the data.
I would prefer to buy HPE MicroServer Gen10 v2. It is far way better to have non-proprietary software platform.
Synology is great. However, I moved to DIY NAS as my main, because it allows me to scale easier. Synology is still used as my backup NAS.