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I am quite happy with my Synology DS920+. I mostly use it for backup and hosting Docker containers. I was surprised by how much software is produced by Synology

I am quite happy with my Synology DS920+. I mostly use it for backup and hosting Docker containers. I was surprised by how much software is produced by Synology itself and either comes included with the machine or is available as a package - LDAP, WebDAV, SQL, Plex, replication/cloning/backups, and a host of other services. One thing that surprised me was RAID - I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5. TL;DR Synology is pricey but full featured and very pleasant, understand your RAID configuration before you purchase disks. EDIT: Another thing I will say is that docker compose is not supported IIUC, so just watch out for that if your configuration depends on that (like mine initially did).

davidgerard 5y ago
I became very unhappy with Synology when I discovered that boot loading was signed, and I couldn't just put Debian on this box that was running a hugely overweight customised Ubuntu with background services that were difficult or impossible to switch off. The NAS is an underpowered DS216 (two 5.25" drives mirrored, 800MHz ARM, 256MB RAM) that I'd bought new, foolishly assuming the official OS would work just fine on it. More fool me, eh? I still have the device - but I am never buying another, and I actively disrecommend Synology going forward. My next NAS box will probably be an old Microserver running FreeNAS or some reasonable OS. The Synology's predecessor was a tiny Linux box that I had to install my desired services on by hand, so I know it's feasible.
danudey 5y ago
I also have a Synology and it kind of blows me away how much stuff is just... available. And whatever isn't available you can install via Docker pretty easily. One thing to watch out for is upgradability. My system has 4 GB of RAM, which is Not A Lot. There's an easily-accessible SODIMM slot that I can throw an 8 GB stick into, and an almost-completely-inaccessible SODIMM slot with the original 4 GB. If you're going to have slow disks you'll need lots of disk cache, and maxing out mine is looking to be a full afternoon project and not a quick in-and-out.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5. SHR1/2 is basically RAID 5/6 but with a mechanism for handling disks that have different sizes. Basically it breaks the disks up into partitions such that any "extra" space on other disks becomes part of another array which is only redundant within the disks that have that space. Anyways, SHR1 is 1 disk redundancy so you should see (disk_count * space_per_disk) - space_per_disk for an array where all the disks are the same size. SHR2 has 2 disk redundancy and I'm sure you can figure out the math for that. Are you not seeing the expected amount? For the record, I like synology. They keep updating old hardware for an incredibly long time. My parents have my old DS212j (release 11/2011) and it can run the latest DSM 6.
theweissy 5y ago
I've been happy with my Synology DS218+ as well. I use it to host some Docker containers for home automation and some other things, both with and without Docker compose (need to use the CLI to get compose working). The one thing that burned me recently is DSM version 7 removed support for any USB device that's not a mass storage device. This effectively kills a lot of what I love about the Synology. Next time I'll probably roll my own.

davidgerard 5y ago

I became very unhappy with Synology when I discovered that boot loading was signed, and I couldn't just put Debian on this box that was running a hugely overweight customised Ubuntu with background services that were difficult or impossible to switch off. The NAS is an underpowered DS216 (two 5.25" drives mirrored, 800MHz ARM, 256MB RAM) that I'd bought new, foolishly assuming the official OS would work just fine on it. More fool me, eh? I still have the device - but I am never buying another, and I actively disrecommend Synology going forward. My next NAS box will probably be an old Microserver running FreeNAS or some reasonable OS. The Synology's predecessor was a tiny Linux box that I had to install my desired services on by hand, so I know it's feasible.

danudey 5y ago

I also have a Synology and it kind of blows me away how much stuff is just... available. And whatever isn't available you can install via Docker pretty easily. One thing to watch out for is upgradability. My system has 4 GB of RAM, which is Not A Lot. There's an easily-accessible SODIMM slot that I can throw an 8 GB stick into, and an almost-completely-inaccessible SODIMM slot with the original 4 GB. If you're going to have slow disks you'll need lots of disk cache, and maxing out mine is looking to be a full afternoon project and not a quick in-and-out.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5. SHR1/2 is basically RAID 5/6 but with a mechanism for handling disks that have different sizes. Basically it breaks the disks up into partitions such that any "extra" space on other disks becomes part of another array which is only redundant within the disks that have that space. Anyways, SHR1 is 1 disk redundancy so you should see (disk_count * space_per_disk) - space_per_disk for an array where all the disks are the same size. SHR2 has 2 disk redundancy and I'm sure you can figure out the math for that. Are you not seeing the expected amount? For the record, I like synology. They keep updating old hardware for an incredibly long time. My parents have my old DS212j (release 11/2011) and it can run the latest DSM 6.

theweissy 5y ago

I've been happy with my Synology DS218+ as well. I use it to host some Docker containers for home automation and some other things, both with and without Docker compose (need to use the CLI to get compose working). The one thing that burned me recently is DSM version 7 removed support for any USB device that's not a mass storage device. This effectively kills a lot of what I love about the Synology. Next time I'll probably roll my own.