5 ms·

A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it. I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out

A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it. I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it. A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and don't want) a 19-inch rack at home. Ever. So what's the set-up-and-forget-until-it-gets-kicked-over option?

joshstrange 1y ago
This. I came to Synology after years of managing regular Linux (Debian) servers, then Unraid, and then Synology. Synology was the most expensive thing I’ve used but I also _never_ think about it. The same could not be said for previous setups. I want a stupid-easy NAS, plug-and-play, hotswapable bays. I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives. I have 2x12-bay Synology’s and I haven’t found an equivalent product yet (open to options).
- Marsymars 1y ago
  I have a similar lack of interest in opening up a tower to swap drives. QNAP has some nice JBOD enclosures. If you don't want any 2.5" drives their biggest enclosures are 8-bays, so you'd need an ATX tower with three available PCIe slots to run all the SFF cables for 3x8 drives. You would need to manage your own software stack with Unraid or w/e.
- nine_k 1y ago
  > I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives. How often do you actually do this? In 15 years of running my own NAS boxes, I so far had to do it once. I, of course, choose slow, middle of the range disks.
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    I never went more than 1, maybe 2, years without needing to open it up. To be fair, I was adding drives over time as I could afford them and I had a large range of drives of various ages that slowly died out or needed to be replaced with larger capacity drives. It’s partly the annoyance of being in a cramped space filled with drives but also the downtime. Family and friends use self-hosted software than runs on my main server and uses the NAS(es). Shutting down a NAS means shutting down the software. Yes, I can let them know ahead of time and “schedule downtime” but I dislike needing to do that unless I have to. It just makes the system feel less stable for them and I want to provide a great experience. With hotswap bays externally accessible I don’t have to stop anything. I’d actually be fine with UnRaid (I still run it as my “app” server) if there was a case with 12 or more 3.5” hotswap bays. I looked into large JBOD servers but between fan noise and rack mounted servers often being in a whole other class (one I have much less experience in compared to desktop tower builds) I’ve never been able to convince myself to get one. My Synology 12-bays are quiet and easy to work with so even at ~$1.5K they were a steal in terms of maintenance and upkeep (for me).
- MangoCoffee 1y ago
  agree. i have two synology NAS. i just set them up and forget it since i don't open for outside access. its a great backup for all your important files.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  They make hotswap bays that fit in 5.25" drive bays, and you can find NOS towers that have the necessary number of drive bays. There are also 3d-printale cases where you buy a SATA backplane and screw it in. It doesn't solve your software problem (though maybe TrueNAS might work?).
davkan 1y ago
If all you’re doing is an smb share i don’t see how a windows box is any more effort to maintain.
- dvdkon 1y ago
  For one, a Synology box won't get into the habit of restarting for ten minutes daily because Windows Update managed to break itself and keeps retrying the same update. But it's true that you could probably leave a desktop on "NAS duty" for years unattended without anything really major happening, especially if it's only accessible on a local network.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    It’s true that Synology boxes don’t spend anywhere near as much time taking security updates. That’s not always for good reasons, though.
plqbfbv 1y ago
So much this. I left another comment that touched on this. I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months. I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it. Synology still scores very high on this single metric.
- fooqux 1y ago
  I'm not sure I understand. Even a custom Arch install with samba, zfs, NFS, etc would be a "single setup, works forever" deal. It's not like what you configure is going to magically break if you don't look at it. And security could be an issue, but it's not like Synology is any better there with their old as dirt dependencies. Snark aside, TrueNas is probably your best bet. Maybe Unraid? Still, with all of these, it's not like they require constant attention to operate.
  - plqbfbv 1y ago
    A custom Arch install is what I have on my router. There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching). The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the next day on reboot. "But you should have read the changelog!", "But you should have tested the config files on updates!", "But you should have restarted the service!" ...: no, no I don't normally test every config file or restart every service after an upgrade, and I don't normally read Changelogs of all software installed on my machines. I shouldn't have to do that in 2025. `zfs` is out of kernel, I've dabbled with that for a while until I understood if you want your machine to reboot 100% of the times, you'd better stick with in-kernel filesystems, no matter how worse featureset they have. Sometimes stuff will just break on package upgrades without notice or warning, and you're left to pick up the pieces, normally in a hurry because your partner is screaming at you. Compare that with Synology, where I have never, ever needed to login to click "run updates" or put it in "maintenance mode" to fix it. It updates itself, it boots at the set time, it brings up all services, runs periodic scrubbing, informs me via mail, shuts down at the specified time. It has a 2x-SSD mirror for cache, and I don't need to care about the disk layout and configuration, and the cache configuration, ..... It's literally a set-and-forget auto-upgrading box that I can just use instead of maintain. I understand that Synology is not in good shape anymore, see my other top-comment :)
pjmlp 1y ago
There isn't many, as stupid as it may sound, I keep burning CD/DVD/BluRay and piling up external drives. Yes, it is a pain versus having a NAS, but at least I don't have to deal with this kind of stuff.
- TheCondor 1y ago
  I’m a fan of optical storage and its durability (with reasonable care.) But the problem is when you need to recover and have 20 Blu-ray Discs with important data scattered about, it takes days. Or when there is a specific piece of data you want/need and only have a vague idea of where it is/was in history. Maybe if those ultra capacity discs took hold but it looks like the era of optical is ending
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Same applies to NAS, how many hours have you spent clicking around shared folders on company NAS / cloud storage, to track down where a specific set of files are actually located? Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed.
    - procaryote 1y ago
      rgrep is easier on a nas though
    - vunderba 1y ago
      Sure, but clicking through a folder set on a single managed volume is orders of magnitude easier than rooting through a hundred blue ray DVDs, popping each one into your optical reader in the hopes that it is the correct one, and then having to search within that volume.
    - kalleboo 1y ago
      > Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed Synology indexes file contents similar to Spotlight on the Mac.
- postexitus 1y ago
numpad0 1y ago
`ssh://pi@raspberrypi.local:raspberry` with "while true; do ls /dev/ | grep ^sd | xargs mount; done" in rc.local, running outdated 10 years old Linux Kernel booting from ROM with write enable pin tied to ground, is all that's needed. There's probably sshfs for everything so protocol support for dozen things isn't a must. I mean, I have one for handling an HDD with busted power circuit that cause system resets at regular intervals(likely brush sparks from a power steering motor went back up through USB and killed it). It's almost wrong that there isn't a pre-made solution for this.
privatelypublic 1y ago
Depending on features: Starters: Fractal define - mid tower- 8 official 3.5" bays. With plenty of open space for more. Jonsbo cases are the most NAS-like. OS: Easy button: FreeNAS. Maybe the newer TrueNAS Core rework. As long as you don't need the latest and greatest in features, and at this point probably a bunch of unfixed security. Otherwise it's Truenas Scale- just avoid the docker/VM system. Its a complete cluster. I dearly wish Cockpit Project was up to par for this.
izacus 1y ago
There's really nothing that comes close to the hardware + software package Synology offers . I was looking for alternatives, but anything else didn't come close to Syno Photos+Drive+Surveillance+Active Backup package you get with the NAS. There's alternatives to each, sure, but they mostly need massively more powerful hardware to run pile of docker containers and end up being alpha quality.
turtlebits 1y ago
I switched to QNAP and it's been fine.
- noAnswer 1y ago
  I find QNAP more annoying to configure. Even their enterprise server rack stuff has Multimedia shares on by default.
- Krasnol 1y ago
  I wished I'd have spend some time looking them up before I bought 2 new drives for my old Synology. The new QNAP is so much better. I'd have switched just for the UI already..
procaryote 1y ago
lots of things will autoinstall security updates nowadays. Debian and unattended upgrades might need a tweak if you want it to actually reboot by itself, but I think the option is there
tshaddox 1y ago
That's right. I bought a DS1019+ in 2019 and it's been running constantly for 6 years (except for a handful of power outages and house moves). The power adapter did fail last year and I had to buy a dodgy (albeit well-reviewed) third-party replacement.
- malnourish 1y ago
  Similar story. My dodgy, well received PSU died fast and took a couple drives with it. That wasn't fun. Bought an official replacement
hiq 1y ago
> A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. A Debian stable mostly does except on upgrades, and that's rare and painless enough. Even with a Synology you still need to make sure you have proper monitoring in case the hard drives start failing.
jmuguy 1y ago
A lot of commenters don't seem to understand how much of a pain in the ass rolling your own NAS is. And then dealing with drive failures and expanding the storage pool, which is dead simple with Synology, but is completely hair raising (if not impossible) with other solutions.
doublerabbit 1y ago
UnRaid. I'm currently evaluating it on my old 2014 motherboard. The WebUI is responsive, it can be a bit brickish around the edges requiring you dive in to the logs if something doesn't work; turned out to be bad ram on my host refusing KVM to boot. Once it's up and working it sails. GPU-PassThru in a Windows VM is proving incredibly smooth especially with using Moonshine on FreeBSD. The docker ecosystem is a nice addition and the community seems fair. I can too throw all my old SSD drives without limitation (granted the basic licenses only allows six) is nifty in saving dust. It being based off Slackware is pleasing. It is closed source but so is Synology and for $100 for a fully unlocked feature-rich NAS/OS - totally. https://unraid.net/community/apps https://unraid.net/community/apps

joshstrange 1y ago

This. I came to Synology after years of managing regular Linux (Debian) servers, then Unraid, and then Synology. Synology was the most expensive thing I’ve used but I also _never_ think about it. The same could not be said for previous setups. I want a stupid-easy NAS, plug-and-play, hotswapable bays. I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives. I have 2x12-bay Synology’s and I haven’t found an equivalent product yet (open to options).

Marsymars 1y ago
I have a similar lack of interest in opening up a tower to swap drives. QNAP has some nice JBOD enclosures. If you don't want any 2.5" drives their biggest enclosures are 8-bays, so you'd need an ATX tower with three available PCIe slots to run all the SFF cables for 3x8 drives. You would need to manage your own software stack with Unraid or w/e.
nine_k 1y ago
> I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives. How often do you actually do this? In 15 years of running my own NAS boxes, I so far had to do it once. I, of course, choose slow, middle of the range disks.
- joshstrange 1y ago
  I never went more than 1, maybe 2, years without needing to open it up. To be fair, I was adding drives over time as I could afford them and I had a large range of drives of various ages that slowly died out or needed to be replaced with larger capacity drives. It’s partly the annoyance of being in a cramped space filled with drives but also the downtime. Family and friends use self-hosted software than runs on my main server and uses the NAS(es). Shutting down a NAS means shutting down the software. Yes, I can let them know ahead of time and “schedule downtime” but I dislike needing to do that unless I have to. It just makes the system feel less stable for them and I want to provide a great experience. With hotswap bays externally accessible I don’t have to stop anything. I’d actually be fine with UnRaid (I still run it as my “app” server) if there was a case with 12 or more 3.5” hotswap bays. I looked into large JBOD servers but between fan noise and rack mounted servers often being in a whole other class (one I have much less experience in compared to desktop tower builds) I’ve never been able to convince myself to get one. My Synology 12-bays are quiet and easy to work with so even at ~$1.5K they were a steal in terms of maintenance and upkeep (for me).
MangoCoffee 1y ago
agree. i have two synology NAS. i just set them up and forget it since i don't open for outside access. its a great backup for all your important files.
aidenn0 1y ago
They make hotswap bays that fit in 5.25" drive bays, and you can find NOS towers that have the necessary number of drive bays. There are also 3d-printale cases where you buy a SATA backplane and screw it in. It doesn't solve your software problem (though maybe TrueNAS might work?).

davkan 1y ago

If all you’re doing is an smb share i don’t see how a windows box is any more effort to maintain.

dvdkon 1y ago
For one, a Synology box won't get into the habit of restarting for ten minutes daily because Windows Update managed to break itself and keeps retrying the same update. But it's true that you could probably leave a desktop on "NAS duty" for years unattended without anything really major happening, especially if it's only accessible on a local network.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  It’s true that Synology boxes don’t spend anywhere near as much time taking security updates. That’s not always for good reasons, though.

plqbfbv 1y ago

So much this. I left another comment that touched on this. I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months. I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it. Synology still scores very high on this single metric.

fooqux 1y ago
I'm not sure I understand. Even a custom Arch install with samba, zfs, NFS, etc would be a "single setup, works forever" deal. It's not like what you configure is going to magically break if you don't look at it. And security could be an issue, but it's not like Synology is any better there with their old as dirt dependencies. Snark aside, TrueNas is probably your best bet. Maybe Unraid? Still, with all of these, it's not like they require constant attention to operate.
- plqbfbv 1y ago
  A custom Arch install is what I have on my router. There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching). The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the next day on reboot. "But you should have read the changelog!", "But you should have tested the config files on updates!", "But you should have restarted the service!" ...: no, no I don't normally test every config file or restart every service after an upgrade, and I don't normally read Changelogs of all software installed on my machines. I shouldn't have to do that in 2025. `zfs` is out of kernel, I've dabbled with that for a while until I understood if you want your machine to reboot 100% of the times, you'd better stick with in-kernel filesystems, no matter how worse featureset they have. Sometimes stuff will just break on package upgrades without notice or warning, and you're left to pick up the pieces, normally in a hurry because your partner is screaming at you. Compare that with Synology, where I have never, ever needed to login to click "run updates" or put it in "maintenance mode" to fix it. It updates itself, it boots at the set time, it brings up all services, runs periodic scrubbing, informs me via mail, shuts down at the specified time. It has a 2x-SSD mirror for cache, and I don't need to care about the disk layout and configuration, and the cache configuration, ..... It's literally a set-and-forget auto-upgrading box that I can just use instead of maintain. I understand that Synology is not in good shape anymore, see my other top-comment :)

pjmlp 1y ago

There isn't many, as stupid as it may sound, I keep burning CD/DVD/BluRay and piling up external drives. Yes, it is a pain versus having a NAS, but at least I don't have to deal with this kind of stuff.

TheCondor 1y ago
I’m a fan of optical storage and its durability (with reasonable care.) But the problem is when you need to recover and have 20 Blu-ray Discs with important data scattered about, it takes days. Or when there is a specific piece of data you want/need and only have a vague idea of where it is/was in history. Maybe if those ultra capacity discs took hold but it looks like the era of optical is ending
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Same applies to NAS, how many hours have you spent clicking around shared folders on company NAS / cloud storage, to track down where a specific set of files are actually located? Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    rgrep is easier on a nas though
  - vunderba 1y ago
    Sure, but clicking through a folder set on a single managed volume is orders of magnitude easier than rooting through a hundred blue ray DVDs, popping each one into your optical reader in the hopes that it is the correct one, and then having to search within that volume.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    > Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed Synology indexes file contents similar to Spotlight on the Mac.
postexitus 1y ago

numpad0 1y ago

`ssh://pi@raspberrypi.local:raspberry` with "while true; do ls /dev/ | grep ^sd | xargs mount; done" in rc.local, running outdated 10 years old Linux Kernel booting from ROM with write enable pin tied to ground, is all that's needed. There's probably sshfs for everything so protocol support for dozen things isn't a must. I mean, I have one for handling an HDD with busted power circuit that cause system resets at regular intervals(likely brush sparks from a power steering motor went back up through USB and killed it). It's almost wrong that there isn't a pre-made solution for this.

privatelypublic 1y ago

Depending on features: Starters: Fractal define - mid tower- 8 official 3.5" bays. With plenty of open space for more. Jonsbo cases are the most NAS-like. OS: Easy button: FreeNAS. Maybe the newer TrueNAS Core rework. As long as you don't need the latest and greatest in features, and at this point probably a bunch of unfixed security. Otherwise it's Truenas Scale- just avoid the docker/VM system. Its a complete cluster. I dearly wish Cockpit Project was up to par for this.

izacus 1y ago

There's really nothing that comes close to the hardware + software package Synology offers . I was looking for alternatives, but anything else didn't come close to Syno Photos+Drive+Surveillance+Active Backup package you get with the NAS. There's alternatives to each, sure, but they mostly need massively more powerful hardware to run pile of docker containers and end up being alpha quality.

turtlebits 1y ago

I switched to QNAP and it's been fine.

noAnswer 1y ago
I find QNAP more annoying to configure. Even their enterprise server rack stuff has Multimedia shares on by default.
Krasnol 1y ago
I wished I'd have spend some time looking them up before I bought 2 new drives for my old Synology. The new QNAP is so much better. I'd have switched just for the UI already..

procaryote 1y ago

lots of things will autoinstall security updates nowadays. Debian and unattended upgrades might need a tweak if you want it to actually reboot by itself, but I think the option is there

tshaddox 1y ago

That's right. I bought a DS1019+ in 2019 and it's been running constantly for 6 years (except for a handful of power outages and house moves). The power adapter did fail last year and I had to buy a dodgy (albeit well-reviewed) third-party replacement.

malnourish 1y ago
Similar story. My dodgy, well received PSU died fast and took a couple drives with it. That wasn't fun. Bought an official replacement

hiq 1y ago

> A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. A Debian stable mostly does except on upgrades, and that's rare and painless enough. Even with a Synology you still need to make sure you have proper monitoring in case the hard drives start failing.

jmuguy 1y ago

A lot of commenters don't seem to understand how much of a pain in the ass rolling your own NAS is. And then dealing with drive failures and expanding the storage pool, which is dead simple with Synology, but is completely hair raising (if not impossible) with other solutions.

doublerabbit 1y ago

UnRaid. I'm currently evaluating it on my old 2014 motherboard. The WebUI is responsive, it can be a bit brickish around the edges requiring you dive in to the logs if something doesn't work; turned out to be bad ram on my host refusing KVM to boot. Once it's up and working it sails. GPU-PassThru in a Windows VM is proving incredibly smooth especially with using Moonshine on FreeBSD. The docker ecosystem is a nice addition and the community seems fair. I can too throw all my old SSD drives without limitation (granted the basic licenses only allows six) is nifty in saving dust. It being based off Slackware is pleasing. It is closed source but so is Synology and for $100 for a fully unlocked feature-rich NAS/OS - totally. https://unraid.net/community/apps https://unraid.net/community/apps