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I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, n

by cm2187 1y ago

I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2). So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.

mapontosevenths 1y ago
My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement. It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.
- fortran77 1y ago
  You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute, memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s) to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run everything in containers under TruNAS directly. For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.
  - lpcvoid 1y ago
    Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well. Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology. [0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to provide a solution to users who are more interested in the verbs than the nouns. They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives. Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.
      - tracker1 1y ago
        Once you have the case, an hour or two is pretty reasonable... you can even have your boot device pre-imaged while waiting on the case to get delivered. Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying another Synology product.
      - abetancort 1y ago
        [dead]
  - volkl48 1y ago
    I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS. I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage. ----- As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years. It's hard to directly compare non-identical products. For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up. It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
    - cm2187 1y ago
      In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A common problem apparently.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        If you're worried the hard drives won't spin back up, I'd say you should instead spin them down regularly so you know that risk is basically zero. If you're worried the power supply will explode and surge into the drives when you turn it on, you should not be using that power supply at all. Any other risks to powering it down? And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.
  - qzw 1y ago
    Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure. In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
  - notnmeyer 1y ago
    they’re pretty clearly referring to _their_ use case and not everyone’s. i think people are mostly talking past each other about this. there isn’t one feature set that matters for everyone, so of course a synology is perfect for some and for others it can be replaced with “junk”.
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    ... and "it only takes an hour?" LOL, clearly an amateur. That's longer than it took me to build Dropbox. /s
  - whizzter 1y ago
    Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of missing out on a webgui or installing something like FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days. I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages. RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that? I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    There are several drive tray cases for ITX and mATX that you can choose from. As for a Web GUI, you can get TruNAS Scale running relatively easily and there are other friendly options as well... so yes.
- alsetmusic 1y ago
  I started with FreeNAS or whatever flavor of it existed well over a decade ago. It was enough hassle that I went Synology because the stuff I like tinkering with isn't the storage of my most important data. Everything I do with NUCs, Pis, VMs, etc is somewhat ephemeral in that it's all backed up multiple times and locations. I spent five hours debugging a strange behavior in my shell with some custom software this morning and submitted a bug report to a software vendor that was not the expected cause of the issue. I feel great about it. I used to feel great about my Synology NAS, too. Qnap, Ugreen, whatever else, we'll see when my current model is due for replacement. Synology will have to perform pretty much miracles before then for me to consider them again after three generations of their hardware that were all very satisfactory. What a major mistake. They weren't perfect, but they were perfect for my needs. Not anymore.
leokennis 1y ago
I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project". DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
- delecti 1y ago
  Yeah, the GP comment doesn't seem to be their target market. You nailed the appeal though. Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel? I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.
  - dymk 1y ago
    As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      I'd be far more weary of the application level services provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context, as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the applications get far less scrutiny. What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
- jghn 1y ago
  Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails. Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time. Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out. All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
pabs3 1y ago
Can you run a standard Linux distro on them? Is their OS custom or based on OpenWRT or something else?
- jdhawk 1y ago
  You cannot run a standard distro (easily) - their software (DSM) is linux based and they expose most of the stock services like Docker and libvirt
- MBCook 1y ago
  Why would you want to? That’s not what they’re for. The kind of person who wants to do that is squarely outside their market. And you’d be paying a real premium for nothing.
  - pabs3 1y ago
    I would never want to run a vendor OS on any device, they are either too proprietary or too untrustworthy or both.
- jauer 1y ago
  Trivially on their (and qnap's) amd64 systems at least. There are some quirks where they are more similar to an embedded system than a PC, but it's not a big deal. Things like console over UART (unless you add a UART) and fan control not working out of the box, so you set it to full speed in bios or mess with config. Debian has docs on installing on at least one model of their arm boxes: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology I run Debian on a few different models of qnap because their hardware occupies a niche of compact enclosure, low noise, and many drives.
- hadlock 1y ago
  Nope, the purpose of a Synology unit is to be about as complex as a toaster. Put it on the shelf, plug it in, make sure auto-updates are enabled, and forget about it until it sends you an email in 5-10 years that one or more drives is full/failing. I bought a synology almost 10 years ago and it's been purring away in a closet somewhere and never causing problems the entire time. If you want a device to tinker with, this is the wrong product for you.
turnsout 1y ago
Yeah, just put together a TrueNAS system. Mine has been running for 10 years. Drive replacements and upgrades are so easy with ZFS.
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  I have been running TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) for ~10 years now and never had issues. There is the risk that TrueNAS gets rug pulled and no longer is free for non commercial use, but so far it has been fine.
  - turnsout 1y ago
    The thing is, I'm still running FreeNAS 9, not even TrueNAS. If they rug pull, not only will there be forks, but the old versions should just continue to work!

by cm2187 1y ago

mapontosevenths 1y ago

My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement. It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.

fortran77 1y ago
You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
- rpdillon 1y ago
  I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute, memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s) to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run everything in containers under TruNAS directly. For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.
- lpcvoid 1y ago
  Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well. Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology. [0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to provide a solution to users who are more interested in the verbs than the nouns. They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives. Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Once you have the case, an hour or two is pretty reasonable... you can even have your boot device pre-imaged while waiting on the case to get delivered. Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying another Synology product.
    - abetancort 1y ago
      [dead]
- volkl48 1y ago
  I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS. I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage. ----- As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years. It's hard to directly compare non-identical products. For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up. It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
  - cm2187 1y ago
    In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A common problem apparently.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      If you're worried the hard drives won't spin back up, I'd say you should instead spin them down regularly so you know that risk is basically zero. If you're worried the power supply will explode and surge into the drives when you turn it on, you should not be using that power supply at all. Any other risks to powering it down? And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.
- qzw 1y ago
  Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure. In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
- notnmeyer 1y ago
  they’re pretty clearly referring to _their_ use case and not everyone’s. i think people are mostly talking past each other about this. there isn’t one feature set that matters for everyone, so of course a synology is perfect for some and for others it can be replaced with “junk”.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  ... and "it only takes an hour?" LOL, clearly an amateur. That's longer than it took me to build Dropbox. /s
- whizzter 1y ago
  Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of missing out on a webgui or installing something like FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days. I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages. RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that? I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
- tracker1 1y ago
  There are several drive tray cases for ITX and mATX that you can choose from. As for a Web GUI, you can get TruNAS Scale running relatively easily and there are other friendly options as well... so yes.
alsetmusic 1y ago
I started with FreeNAS or whatever flavor of it existed well over a decade ago. It was enough hassle that I went Synology because the stuff I like tinkering with isn't the storage of my most important data. Everything I do with NUCs, Pis, VMs, etc is somewhat ephemeral in that it's all backed up multiple times and locations. I spent five hours debugging a strange behavior in my shell with some custom software this morning and submitted a bug report to a software vendor that was not the expected cause of the issue. I feel great about it. I used to feel great about my Synology NAS, too. Qnap, Ugreen, whatever else, we'll see when my current model is due for replacement. Synology will have to perform pretty much miracles before then for me to consider them again after three generations of their hardware that were all very satisfactory. What a major mistake. They weren't perfect, but they were perfect for my needs. Not anymore.

leokennis 1y ago

I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project". DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.

delecti 1y ago
Yeah, the GP comment doesn't seem to be their target market. You nailed the appeal though. Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel? I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.
- dymk 1y ago
  As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    I'd be far more weary of the application level services provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context, as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the applications get far less scrutiny. What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
jghn 1y ago
Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails. Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time. Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out. All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.

pabs3 1y ago

Can you run a standard Linux distro on them? Is their OS custom or based on OpenWRT or something else?

jdhawk 1y ago
You cannot run a standard distro (easily) - their software (DSM) is linux based and they expose most of the stock services like Docker and libvirt
MBCook 1y ago
Why would you want to? That’s not what they’re for. The kind of person who wants to do that is squarely outside their market. And you’d be paying a real premium for nothing.
- pabs3 1y ago
  I would never want to run a vendor OS on any device, they are either too proprietary or too untrustworthy or both.
jauer 1y ago
Trivially on their (and qnap's) amd64 systems at least. There are some quirks where they are more similar to an embedded system than a PC, but it's not a big deal. Things like console over UART (unless you add a UART) and fan control not working out of the box, so you set it to full speed in bios or mess with config. Debian has docs on installing on at least one model of their arm boxes: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology I run Debian on a few different models of qnap because their hardware occupies a niche of compact enclosure, low noise, and many drives.
hadlock 1y ago
Nope, the purpose of a Synology unit is to be about as complex as a toaster. Put it on the shelf, plug it in, make sure auto-updates are enabled, and forget about it until it sends you an email in 5-10 years that one or more drives is full/failing. I bought a synology almost 10 years ago and it's been purring away in a closet somewhere and never causing problems the entire time. If you want a device to tinker with, this is the wrong product for you.

turnsout 1y ago

Yeah, just put together a TrueNAS system. Mine has been running for 10 years. Drive replacements and upgrades are so easy with ZFS.

__turbobrew__ 1y ago
I have been running TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) for ~10 years now and never had issues. There is the risk that TrueNAS gets rug pulled and no longer is free for non commercial use, but so far it has been fine.
- turnsout 1y ago
  The thing is, I'm still running FreeNAS 9, not even TrueNAS. If they rug pull, not only will there be forks, but the old versions should just continue to work!