5 ms·

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

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.

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.