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You are right that Synology (or an equivalent appliance) is often best. It's more complicated for geeks and data hoarders once we've been using a Synology for a
by zerkten 5y ago
You are right that Synology (or an equivalent appliance) is often best. It's more complicated for geeks and data hoarders once we've been using a Synology for a while.
When people go down the Synology path they are often running apps and doing more than providing a big pool of storage. I'm finding that my needs have changed towards my NAS being only a pool of storage on my local network. It is there as the first tier of backups to speed up disaster recovery. I feel confident that I could move to a more DIY NAS solution because it would only be used for NAS storage.
It's not ideal, but an old desktop is now much better for my app needs, including Plex. Ideally, I'd have a single app box with the power consumption of 4-5 Raspberry Pi. I have only found a couple of ARM server solutions which are fairly old and ARM doesn't have standard sockets etc. because the focus seems to be on SoC instead of replicating what I'm used to with PCs and ATX mobos.
- solarkraft 5y agoI have used an ARM Synology NAS but found it highly inadequate for running services ... or anything but basic storage, really. Only the x86 models support running Linux containers, packaging an application for Synology didn't exactly seem easy to to and the UI is almost unusably sluggish and has super confusing UX (it emulates a desktop environment in the browser ... right, very cool). Running an own standard Linux-based NAS is more effort, but not terribly so. The additional flexibility may be worth it: It makes it quite painless to integrate with other data sources and sinks for backups and stuff and can run a lot of personal services (home automation, budgeting tool, IRC bouncer ...).
- tyingq 5y agoThere seemed to be change on their low-end stuff when the DS120j/220j came out. The processor and RAM finally seemed enough to not spin off into oblivion, if you avoided the software that catalogs image files. They are dual-core, 512MB RAM, where the previous DS110j was single core, 128MB RAM and the DS115j was single core, 256MB RAM. The previous models just ran way too close to CPU starvation or swapping hell.
- Helmut10001 5y agoStill happy after 4 years with my Odroid XU4/Cloudshell2 - now runs with Dual 16TB. But yes, it is only a storage backend (for Borg Backups), not much more.
- t-3 5y agoThe HD controller? (the main IC in the center of the front-panel board) in my Cloudshell 2 imploded recently, now I am stuck trying to figure out what to do. I really don't want to shell out for a whole new NAS, and the XU4 is still running great after repasting the heatsink... but it randomly loses the drives when there's too much activity (I tried libata.force=1.5G, but no luck).
- Helmut10001 5y agoLikely the USB-Cable from XU4 to HD controller - exchange it. Hardkernel confirmed that their cables were poor quality and resulted in many disconnects. Mine were gone after exchanging cables. I have to say my Odroid only runs once a week - started remotely through IPSEC for offsite backups. So it is not a 24/7 setup.
- t-3 5y agoIt's not the cable - the main IC in the board that the drives plug into "imploded" - there are cracks in package and it's sunken in. I was running it for ~4 years essentially 100% uptime, but took it down in early 2019 and didn't get it set back up until now.
- Helmut10001 5y agoYes, that makes sense. With the cable I was referring to the random drive disconnects, as I had those, too. About the imploded IC: Not much to do about it - either get a replacement board (well, they are not sold anymore). Or try to recover the Raid 1 disks (if this is what you are using) using an external usb-mount. I heard that the raid is formatted with standard mdadm, so perhaps possible to recover without the original IC. Would be interesting to follow up - please report if you recover your drives somehow.