Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff.
On products you can buy TODAY, you find:
- Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches
- A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem
- Kernel 4.4
- PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app)
- smbd 4.15
- PostgreSQL 11.11
- smbd 8.2p1
- Redis 6.2.8
- ...
And it's not only about security, but about features (well, some are security features too). We're missing new kernel features (network hardware offload, security, wireguard...), filesystem (btrfs features, performance and error patches...), file servers (new features and compatibility, as Parallel NFS or Multichannel CIFS/SMB), and so on...
I think they got stuck on 4.4 because of their btrfs fork, and now they're too deep on their own hole.
Also, their backend is a mess. A bunch of different apps developed on different ways that mostly don't talk to each other. They sometimes overlap with each other and have very essential features that don't work and don't plan to fix. Meanwhile, they're busy releasing AI stuff features for the "Office" app.
Edit note: For myself and some business stuff, I have a bunch of TrueNAS deployments, from a small Jonsbo box for my home, to a +16 disk rack server. This was for a client that wanted to migrate from another Synology they had on loan, and I didn't want to push a server on them, as they're a bit far away from me, and I wanted it to be serviceable by anyone. I regret it.
The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit (https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_...). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS (https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno...) to act as a key vault. Synology claims that volume encryption protects if you if the storage drives are stolen, but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen?
The filename limit comes from ecryptfs (https://www.ecryptfs.org/) which is what Synology uses for encrypted shared folders.
As for full disk encryption, you can select where to store the key, which may be on the NAS itself (rendering FDE more or less useless) or on a USB key or similar.
For full disk encryption you need DSM >= 7.2 and you can either, store it locally (useless) or in a KMIP server. [0]
As a KMIP server you use:
- Another Synology NAS with DSM >= 7.2
- A KMIP compatible key server
--
0: https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Which_models_support_encrypted_volumesAh, I forgot about that. I had to take the key out of the NAS too, to a different device. That made no sense at all. And almost all of the implementations of the key server you need cost thousands of dollars in licenses.
Edit: what they deploy on their NAS is an old version of a testing implementation of the KMIP protocol. PyKMIP: https://github.com/OpenKMIP/PyKMIP
maybe it has a kensington lock?
My main issue with their system is how closed it is.
I got an issue where mind would randomly start writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise. I’d stop all containers, leave it as close to idle as I could manage, still spiking.
There was no way I could learn what was causing it.
I would like to assume it was a disk maintenance process or something, but for all I know it could be mining bitcoin and I’d be none the wiser. It went on for some weeks then stopped.
Ever since they added the "universal search" thingy, their NAS do that anytime they reach a decently large video file. Even if you turn down search indexing, media indexing, media thumbnails, ... It still kills itself with no throttling processing those files.
May or may not be what you encountered, but had a customer caught by this and found out the hard way you can't stop it. My issue is not the processing, it's the throttling, it's so crazy how the entire NAS gets taken down for like ten minutes (and that was on a racked xeon model), no samba no nfs no nothing answering anymore.
That might be it, I use it for radarr/sonarr so there’s a good amount of large video files in there.
And yes, the lack of trotting is an issue, since you can’t even reach an administration panel. When it’s bad even ssh struggles.
You could activate the sshd service and log in to the NAS.
There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them
> writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise.
Mine is in the basement for this reason. When it’s still and quiet after midnight I can still hear it grinding away. God I hate the sound.
> A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem
But don't you love it when companies invent their own security instead of using battle-tested open-source systems?
> Multichannel CIFS/SMB)
My DS918+ has multichannel SMB and possibly also parallel NFS. It only works if you have multiple NICs connected.
Other than that, i completely agree. Their tech stack is horribly outdated, and while i understand their reasoning for not upgrading, there's a limit to how long you can do that. Their reasoning is that they know the software that's currently running, warts and all, and can better guarantee stability across millions of devices with fewer moving parts.
I think multichannel works, but pNFS doesn't. But I also think I had another different feature in mind, I was just reciting by memory :P :)
Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?
As I understand it, they forked years ago when btrfs was very much not ready to be used for production NAS storage. Their value prop was they took it and added lots of their own special patches that they claimed made it highly dependable.
Over time their advantage has eroded as upstream has caught up, to the point that it looks ridiculously out of date today.
You regret switching them from Synology to Trueness? Am I misunderstanding your final note?
It's confusing me after the preceding displeasure wrt Synology
I regret not pushing a bit more for deploying a custom storage solution with TrueNAS (or something similar) instead of Synology. All the TrueNAS devices I have are mine, not from my clients.
They already had one Synology device, they don't have any IT employees on site, and I'd need to take a flight to go to their offices, so I thought that using another Synology device would be better for maintenance. They (and I) were also worried about the noise: it's an small office, and they needed at least 8*3.5" drives, and most of the decent solutions I found for 8 or more drives were big and noisy. The Jonsbo N5 appeared a bit later, that looks like a good candidate today.
Now I found that all their applications are half done, they don't upgrade or fix them regularly, security-wise is a mess, and everything on the backend is super old...
"This" in the last paragraph refers to the rest of the comment, not to the preceding sentence.
The year is 2025. Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough anymore. If a company or product is beloved by customers then that means it doesn't squeeze them to the max. This is clearly money left on the table that someone will sooner or later extract. High-end brands are not exempt from this.
Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit.
Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on to the next company. Repeat until retirement.
I guess times have been tough for a long damn while then…
Is NAS a growth market at all anymore? My somewhat unexamined opinion is that most folks can and probably do just store everything in the cloud.
I would not be surprised to find out that Synology is seeing a smaller market year over year and becoming desperate to find new revenue per person who is shopping for a NAS today.
Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.
With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.
It’s not necessary a growth market, but you do get repeat customers (either as hardware ages or when we want to expand our storage).
I’m in the latter group but Synology has locked themselves out of the market with this choice.
Uploading terabytes of content to the consumer cloud just isn’t practical, financially.
My 10 year old NAS is a testament to how much money they have left on the table; they could 3x revenue and profits by simply breaking it every few years.
I extended the lifecycle of my 2013 vintage x64 QNAP (which lost support status around 2018 or 2019) by installing Ubuntu directly. The QNAP “firmware” was just an internal USB flash drive (DOM) that lived on a header that contained QNAP’s custom distro. There was a fully-featured standard UEFI that allows booting from the SATA devices.
I learned a lot in the process, but most important is that the special sauce NAS makers purport is usually years behind current versions.
The NAS finally bit the dust last year because of a design defect associated with Bay Trail systems that’s not limited to QNAP.
> Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough
Leaving products and commerce coupled is not considered good practice anymore. It's recommended in some places that you outsource so extremely to the point that your outsourced labor render services to receiving outsourced labor. And that's not considered insane.
It’s not a lot of money left on the table though, the lion’s share of it has already been taken.
Yes, but that doesn’t stop companies from putting a disproportionate amount of effort into squeezing it out, instead of directing that effort towards developing better products.
Everyone is grabbing what they can in hopes of riding out the coming collapse. Providing a good product is little benefit in the face of looming economic disaster, ie. "the great reset". The fall of the west will be a bumpy ride, good product or not.
this hits so hard
I have used Synology NASes for a good 15y now, and the one I'm on will likely be my last (DS920).
I have watched the software evolve from "quite good" to "very good" to "lets reimplement everything ourselves and close it off as much as possible".
It's sad because back in the day, at least for me, the brand was the perfect UX in many regards: small form factor and low power, price-accessible 4/5 bay NASes, a couple CPU tiers, upgradable hardware, regular software updates and a huge collection of software features.
For me they were the go-to choice for NAS because of the good web UI, the ease of setup and reliable operation that covered 99% of the prosumer usecases. They would just chug along forever, auto-updating themselves, never skipping a beat. Whenever I wanted to do special things with it via SSH I could, but the environment has become increasingly hostile to the point where I need to spend hours wondering how the heck the thing operates without bursting on fire.
I'm hoping that by the time I need to change my DS920 another good company like they were will have emerged, because building your own solution comes with operational maintenance and I want the thing to Just Work®.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
Are you sure they survive for the time period you intend them to? When I was a teenager, I though the DVDs and BluRays I burned would be forever - 15 years later I am very unhappy to find that some of them started to crack and flay - it's a pain to keep checking them. Nothing like the guarantees a NAS + Cloud backup could provide.
NAS also fail, and cloud backups can be taken away without notice.
Hence why multiple copies.
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
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.
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.
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.
If all you’re doing is an smb share i don’t see how a windows box is any more effort to maintain.
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.
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.
`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.
But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog:
There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports.
Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better.
[1] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-recyling-old-hardware-for...
Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay.
There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory.
What's wrong with this?
https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B...
And connect a card like this to the NVMe PCIe which you can connect 8 SATA HDDs to with SATA breakout cables.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276
If you need more than 8 HDDs you can get a SAS2 expander to connect to the SAS2 card and then you could easily connect 24 HDDs with a 6 port SAS2 expander and breakout cables.
Or if you put this small board and card into a server case that has a SAS2 backplane with expander built in, then you can just connect all the disks that way.
Another option, not ARM, but still low power and neat.
https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma
This has Thunderbolt 4 which you can connect to a PCIe slot like this:
https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html
They have a lot of neat stuff, you can get the tiny LattePanda Mu, and dock it in this:
That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no?
The closest thing available now would probably be a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, a motherboard with a Rockchip SoC and two M.2 slots, into which you could put their six-port SATA cards. No idea what that whole setup will draw, though.
EDIT: I have to complain about the article you linked. It's certainly true that one should account for power consumption, not just purchase cost, but some crucial mistakes make the article more harmful on the whole.
The author cites 84 W power consumption for an i5-4690, and 10 W for a J4125 CPU, but those figures are the TDP. For all we know, those CPUs could idle at around the same wattage, and from my experience they likely do.
Having done some measuring myself, I'd say the largest source of power draw in an idle NAS will be the PSU, motherboard, and disks. With any remotely recent Intel CPU, it idles so efficiently as to be negligible in a PC.
> That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no?
I have a Synology DS920+ 4-bay that averaged 20W total including 2 spinning drives with sleep disabled. I agonized about going with the closed product, and in many ways regret it. But at the time there was nothing I could find that came close, even without the drives. And that's before factoring my time administering the DIY option, or that it would be bigger and less ruggedized.
I went as far as finding the German low power motherboard forum spreadsheet and contemplating trying to source some of the years old SKUs there. You've gotta believe us when we say that before the n100s arrived, it was a wasteland for low power options.
In many ways it still is, although these n100 boards with many SATA are a sea change. Once you set out to define requirements, you pretty quickly get to every ZFS explainer saying that you are a fool to even attempt using less than 32 GB of ECC memory...
There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.
Add to that Aoostar. It's quite comparable to the Minisforum n5 Pro, a bit cheaper
- Max 48GB*2 DDR5 ECC
- 8 core PRO 8845HS
- 25W with nothing, doing nothing, realistically 50W
- 25G combined network
- 5 M.2 (3x2 and 2x1 lane) and 6 HDDs
- Oculink
https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-a...
Thanks for the links.
What do you guys think about security concerns around minisform and ugreen being Chinese companies?
Like I said, I'm still waiting for 10+ SATA bays...
Why don't you look at Topton's N100 boards with 6x SATA, 2.5Gb LAN, PCIe slot for extra SATA ports and Jonsbo N3 NAS case with it? For $300 you'd have a way better NAS than anything Synology offers.
I think we have different definitions of what "low power" means.
What do you want? The N100 is 6W in theory not sure if you can downclock it or how good the power control is. Problem below that is that is mostly mobile phone type CPUs and they dont have much IO. Drives in a NAS are going to consume a bit of power too so its not really clear how low you can go.
I want less power and more storage.
I want less than 10W idle for the whole system, maybe except HDDs, but even those will be in sleep much of the time. x86 boards are mostly ATX-powered and I don't think any ATX power source can go that low and still be efficient (not draw 20W while powering a 10W system).
And yes, mobile phone CPUs are good enough. I'm using a Turris Omnia now and Marvell 385 is OK, except I have to use an external DAS for hard drives which eats 10 times more than the Omnia with all drives sleeping.
If only the chinese didn't try to make good-for-everything-best-at-nothing ARM boards with lots of video outs, audio, discrete NIC and soldered wifi...
HDPlex GaN power supply?
1 HDD consumes around 5-7W idle, so with 8 HDDs you get to 40-60W on HDDs alone (all idle); adding 6W with N100 seems like insignificant fraction. The moment you actually use any HDD the consumption per HDD shots up to 8-10W whereas N100 shots up to 14W so you end up with 64-80W from HDDs and 14W from N100. Why would you like to squeeze component that is the least important (CPU) while retaining lots of SATA HDDs as that's your priority? Optimizing the wrong thing? If you wanted to lower power, the easiest way is to replace HDDs with 16TB SATA SSDs, each consuming 0.08-2W. Then CPU might be a bottleneck.
There is power management for HDDs, you know...
For my typical usage, the hard drives are probably more than 80% in sleep mode. If I had more SATA ports, I could probably add a frequent-access cache on a SSD and then they would be 99% sleeping.
The drives I have, ST2000DL003, consume 0.5W in sleep, according to the spec sheet. So all 8 of them would consume ~4W.
It's better now, been annoyed like you but the Rpi5 comes in a 16gb variant and has a PCI-E port that can be extended to 5x SATA or 2x M2. It's not blazing but probably an improvement over my old Celeron J1800 with 8gb of ram.
The Intel N100,etc series of machines seems popular with builders even if the RAM restrictions drives me nuts.
I think the major issue seems to be cases actually, there's tons of small cheap AMD machines from manufacturers like BeeLink that trounce most NUC setups for performance, but like the NUC's as soon as there's disc enclosures the price shoots away.
This sounds like a fun project to do. Maybe I will look into the technical feasibility of this.
I have some quad core celeron board integrated thing. It draws 15watts. I added a PCI-E sata which gave me 6 extra ports. I am sure you can buy better ones.
I used a Fractal Node Case that has 6 drive bays. Installed TrueNAS Scale on an SSD. Swapping drives is a pain as I have to take the computer apart. But that is infrequent. So it is fine.
15W with or without the PCIe SATA? And it's still 10W too much.
I think you are being a bit silly. I just plugged the numbers into an online cost calculator.
That is extra 10 watts, is less than £2 a month in the UK. Drives are about 5 watts idle and I have 6 of them.
The NAS costs me about £20/month. Which isn't too crazy IMO. The UK has some of the most expensive energy prices in Europe.
I will probably be upgrading the board to something better in a few years and see if I can put in a GPU for some AI bits and pieces.
If you still use HDD's they pull around 10w each, 15w for the board is not too bad. (My current quite old machine is something like 40-50w, disks being the big draw), still at 15W you'll get a fair bit more perf than with any Arm board.
Why 5W?
Electricity prices and not wanting to turn it on and off all the time.
The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks.
10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this.
In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day.
Over the entire lifetime of the device (5 years assumed) it's less than 50 USD in power costs.
I'll take basically any other quality of life improvement instead...
SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.
Not for a NAS. Speed is NVMe's benefit, but your network isn't fast enough to take advantage of it, which means you're paying through the nose for very low capacity. 24TB SATA drives are a way better deal for a NAS.
I run 25Gbps home from my ISP and to my desktop from my NAS I run also 25Gbps.
If you need a lot of (not so fast) storage, 3,5" drives are still by far the best TB per €. For a lot of NAS solutions (backups, video/movie/music storage etc.) their performance is completely fine.
Plus, we're most likely talking about Gigabit networking here, so unless your workload consists of very parallel random access, this is going to be the limiting factor anyway.
25 and 100 Gbps is commodity at this point. yes it's a bit of a pain to run fiber in the walls but worth it.
I'm not paying for 64TB of NVME... 4x16TB HDD's and 2 2TB NVME's for caching are more then enough ;)
I wish there was a filesystem which could put all hot data on the NVMe and all cold data on the backend pool easily.
can ZFS do this today?
NAS are usually for capacity, not speed.
yup, thats why I alwys end up with microatx board, it just works, it draws power but does the job I need
Low power and reliability is why I want to just use my Mac Mini M4 + DAS as storage solution among 15 people. I am not sold on it because Mac Mini has lots of life in it to be solely devoted to this use case.
I recently got one as a home server. It’s ludicrously power efficient and so powerful. But it’s a battle getting it to behave, with OS fights at every stage.
It took me a week of fighting to get it to reliably power up, connect to network shares and then start some containers.
How could this be hard?
I wouldn't be sold on it because macOS is a terrible server OS.
If it can't run linux, it's not going to make a good storage server on the software side of things.
Synology are bad at technical restrictions. That doesn't help most people, and it's not any sort of defense, but anything they strongly attempt to impose here is going to fail. It took me an evening to break the protection they imposed on another layer, and a chunk of that evening was me and a bottle of mezcal and just writing INSERT statements into sqlite, we are really not talking about extreme competence.
But! That doesn't matter, most users are never going to be able to do that themselves, and DMCA protections potentially prevent anyone sharing knowledge of how to do so without putting themselves at risk. The truth is that vendors can, under US law, threaten anyone who tells someone how to make the device they bought work properly with federal offences. Buy something else instead.
I don't really get the point of hacking a synology to break this kind of protection. I understand why you'd take one so that you get everything setup for you, but if you're gonna invest time jailbreaking and hacking it, wouldn't you be better off using an old PC with your own linux/software setup as a server?
Actually easier to remove the license restrictions around their RTSP backup software than it is to set up an equivalent thing myself
(Edit: I have a very particular set of skills. Having put some time into making this work with tools I could put together myself and failing, I found that my Synology had a tool that did it perfectly and refused to do so for the number of cameras I had. I fixed that.)
Are there instructions or a GitHub on how I can remove their restrictions on the number of cameras allowed for DSCam?
Is it clear what the actual restrictions are here? I have a couple of diskstations and like them and was about to buy another. How does this actually affect me as a practical matter?
It depends on the model you buy. On 2025 models forward, you cannot add unsupported disks to a storage pool. If you bring an existing pool forward from another machine, it will let you continue to use the old disks, but any replacement ones would need to be Synology-branded.
I ran my own NAS for over two decades in some old 4U I got for cheap, using whatever discarded consumer HW I got for free and I never got the point of Synology. Colleague who has one said it's compact. Well, this year I bought one of those gaming cube cases (with space for 10 drives, what do people do with them in gaming pcs? OK, only 8 spaces are actually drawers with grommets but physically you can fit 10) and retired my 4U.
Seriously, takes an hour to setup your own NAS and you can mix any drives, setup any encryption you want, seedbox etc. I totally understand convenience but this is not a email server you're setting up here, it's just a NAS.
I did something similar years ago. Couple of drives in an old beige tower case. Setup the sharing wand what not. Not exactly 'hard' but it was one thing. Time consuming. Once you have done it a few times the novelty wears off and its more of a chore to mess around with the thing. NAS boxes like that 'just work'. You plug some drives in, set it up, done. However, one comment in here puts it perfectly. The software on syno is wildly out of date. It has been for 15 years. Ease of use is now outweighed by something recent software wise. The syno guys are literally leaving nearm 20-30% perf uplift out. For 'reasons'. Those reasons are wearing very thin. It will mean I need a different backup solution for my computers. One that handles full disk incremental and stored windows and linux on the remote drive and not something I 'run once and awhile' and perferably open source.
20 years ago it was a chore but nowadays it's faster than baking a cake. 10 minutes prep time (configure os and add drives), 10 minutes bake time (installation) (or 10+ hours bake time if count building the array)
But let's assume you don't have a clue and have to follow some tutorial and do some reading and it takes you 2 hours. That's amortised across a decade. Especially now when easy distro upgrades are basically unattended so you can use the same setup for a decade and stay up to date.
I'm interested in starting out like this, I have a bunch of 2.5" SSD's I'm not using- do you have any tips on what cube to get? Are you concerned about power usage at all especially if this is always on?
Any of those cube gaming ones I think are great. I got a dual chamber one which makes shuffling drives and cabling easy. Can't remember the name but it was 90 pounds, way more than I paid for the old 4U, although inflation from the 90s probably means it was more expensive in real terms. Most of the power is used to spin rust so not sure it's worth worrying about the HW power use, just use whatever old pc you can get for free, ask colleagues and family, people throw out working PCs all the time, it's a NAS, not a rendering farm, if it boots it's good enough IMHO.
Found the name: Fractal node 804.
Great- thanks for this.
I recently moved all of my NAS needs to a UNAS Pro and just have an old Intel Bean Canyon NUC in the closet running apps on top of it. Portainer is a reasonable docker frontend, though not perfect -- but more importantly, the storage is just separated from the NAS entirely. As long as your NAS can serve files to a secondary server, you the sky is the limit with what you have actually accessing the files and doing things with.
The particularly jarring thing in this article is the SMB concurrency limits. Those effectively gate your scalability in terms of storage. Even more than forcing their own drives to be used, the concurrent user limit is a clear enterprise upsell: charge people to get a higher limit. The byproduct, of course, is that elaborate home lab connections or setups will also be hit by this.
For the last 20+ years I have always built my own home NAS. 6 to 8 drives. ZFS. Initially OpenSolaris, then FreeBSD, and nowadays Debian. I would hate to use a proprietary solution like Synology. I'm generally very happy with my builds, hardware-wise and software-wise. Surprisingly the most annoying thing of a custom build is that there aren't many choices of decent compact 8-drive NAS chassis (it's a small market after all). By compact, I mean micro-ATX or smaller. Because there is no standard placement of SATA ports on a motherboard, sometimes depending on the combination of motherboard and chassis, it's physically impossible to plug in all cables in the ports. Even when using a combination of straight and right-angle cables. Currently I'm using https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/MATX-ITX-mainboard-8-... (many Chinese companies sell similar clones) It's not as compact as an 8-drive Synology NAS chassis but it's compact enough for me.
Yes, a standard Linux computer is the way to go. I would argue most people do not need complicated redundant drive setups. A regular computer with a standard SSD works fine. Probably good to start out with a new one though and not reuse an old one from an old computer.
I actually like their software offerings like Synology Drive and Synology Moments. Their backup solution also seem to "just work" with Hyper Backup. I'm using a Mac und tried to use Nextcloud, but my conclusion with the Nextcloud Desktop Client is, that it is buggy as hell. Especially the VFS implementation. Synology Drive in opposite just works (for me).
I have a basic Synology DS<something> and like it (for the price). I also use their Android app to stream music and it's not stellar but works I guess.
I'm more shocked by the state of samba in macOS (without additional software). Having to go to the network and manually reconnect to the NAS share every time I come back home is ... poor.
It’s so poor.
To get my mini power up, connect SMB then start some containers I made a horrific Automator app, which runs a script and just tries, sleeps then tries again until my containers can boot and access their data. It’s disgusting. But it works.
I have a Synology but got my hands on a TerraMaster last year, and all things considered I may well get another TerraMaster if they stick to their current approach: boot Ubuntu off an easily removable USB stick and ship standard Intel hardware.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/12/26/2330 (includes all the steps I took to run Proxmox on it as well as an overview of their standard feature set and BIOS)
I kept beeing a fan of Synology mainly for their apps and ease of use.
I have bought a used DS920+ with 20GB or Ram - still a perfect combo of transcoding and docker. However since I started discovering the world of selfhosted apps, Synology has no unique selling point anymore. Their apps stalled in innovation and with this drama I would go for some dedicated linux hardware with docker and thats it. Most of the data fits on a simple 2Drive NAS today anyway.
Pretty much everything on my Synology DS920+ is running inside Docker. I think the only exception is Plex, which I've installed natively on the device – but even Plex needs to be downloaded directly from Plex because the one in the package center is outdated.
When I outgrow my DS920+, I'm probably gonna build a custom Unraid machine to replace it. Most of my needs from Synology are being able to run Docker containers and mix-and-match drives.
I graduated from Synology docker, to Docker compose and my world got better.
The weird quirks of Synology Docker are painful. Eg containers that won’t stop, or won’t start. It’s not easy to get into the containers (docker exec), recreating is tricky compared to copying and pasting docker-compose.yml.
Synology Docker aka Container Manager has support for Docker Compose under "Projects". It even explicitly gives you the option or either uploading a ready-made docker-compose.yml or to create a new one.
Personally, I mainly use the CLI to manage my Compose files even on Synology DSM.
I tried unRAID but ran into a bunch of bugs/issues/missing features and it's not open source so it's a dead end. It's a cool concept but I'd look elsewhere.
I got given a small Synology box by a brother-in-law, and have not been impressed by their OS or apps, so I just use rsync. It's OK, but as my needs are simple I'm thinking of using an RPi solution instead.
(What was amusing was that I kept finding it powered off, and spent quite a while trying to find why it could be shutting down. It turned out that, because I kept it on the floor under my desk, the Roomba would occasionally bump into it and hit the power button on the front)
Synology is actively downgrading their systems; it used to have video station and h265 hardware decoding on 7.2.1, but on 7.2.2+, Video Station is removed and so is h265 hw decoding.... and guess what, if you update, you can't downgrade.
When things aren’t ticking perfectly for Synology their software can be kind of weird. Sometimes after power failures, some disks get corrupted and… you simply can’t log in to the Synology UI during this time (unless you “synobootseq --set-boot-done”, why, of course) for an unspecified number of hours.
Their custom software has its quirks (eg scp doesn’t work unless you apply the -O flag, for “security” reasons), and the quirks change sometimes after updates.
The only NAS (or other appliance boxes) I will tolerate are just plain 'generic' PC's with a regular Linux distro on them (Debian in my preferred case).
On that very topic, do HNers have any case and/or motherboard recommendations for a homebrew NAS?
I have my NAS on a shelf in a mini-ITX case, but it only fits two 3.5" HDDs internally (as well as an SSD, but full-size HDDs are what matter for bulk data storage, the more the better)
Also, it takes a normal full-size ATX PSU because I was fed up a previous case that only had room for its own custom PSU, which kept failing under load. But I note there are now standardised small sizes like TFX12V and LFX12V, are there any efficient and reliable PSUs in these form factors?
Last year I bought a 4bay WTR PRO NAS with an N100. It idles at 13W, after some tuning (mostly putting drives to sleep after ~10min of inactivity). I briefly looked into TrueNAS/unraid, but I ended up installing plain Debian, with ZFS, pCloud for remote backups and running everything on plain docker (in my case samba, HASS, jellyfin, kodi, rutorrent and some custom apps of my own). All in all it took me about 8 hours to setup, and 0 issues since. 100% satisfied with my setup.
I've been using a CS381 for years which sadly now is EoL, don't know if they're replaced it, but it's an excellent case. Previously I was using a Fractal Node 304 but that was cumbersome for drive maintenance.
It has 8 hot-swappable SAS bays (also SATA compatible) and I run a Ryzen 9 3900X in 65W eco mode on an AsRock Rack X470 board which has another 8-12 SATA ports (can't remember the exact number, not used because I use an HBA for the bays), so connectivity for storage is high. There's 2 spaces for SATA SSDs on top of the drive bays and you could fit more in various spots if you tried, and 2 NVMe slots on the motherboard.
Also got a single-slot nvidia GPU in there and a 4-port Gb NIC to supplement the 3 existing Gb ports on the board itself (one is dual-purpose for IPMI), some models of the AsRock rack have dual 10G ports too.
It runs most of the time at around 90W which I think is exceptionally low for the performance available, and can go to about double that when the GPU is in use, still very reasonable.
I would say cases like the Fractal Node 304 or something like the HL4 / HL8 from 45homelab would be the best suited candidates.
Regarding mainboards - models from CWWK with lots of SATA ports have been trendy lately. But there are reports of problems. The other options are either using some obscure supermicro mainboards with lots of ports or using a HBA for expansion.
I want to mention a possible middle ground here: UGreen NAS Storage. All but the smallest model come the OS on a seperate M.2 drive. If you disable the watchdog in BIOS, you can use the models like a normal Server This would give you:
* 3x M.2 slots * 4, 6 or 8 SATA bays * N100 (4 bay), Pentium Gold 8505 (4 bay), i5-1235u (6 & 8 bay)
The M.2 slots are connected rather slow, but good enough for OS/app drives.
For example, my plan for the next NAS would be the 4-Slot N100 variant with TrueNAS. One M.2 SSD for boot, Two M.2 SSDs for Apps/Server duties in mirroring and the 4 drives in Raid-Z1.
I have the Jonsbo N1 on my Amazon “DIY NAS” list.
However, once my DS415+ dies, I’m currently more inclined to go with a TerraMaster F4-423 NAS and replace their OS with something else. I’ve read that this TerraMaster model is basically an Intel NUC with a SATA card. And their OS is on a flash drive plugged into an internal USB port - so, very easy to change/replace.
I’ve also read that UGREEN devices should be easy to replace the OS on. So, that’s another option I keep in mind.
If you're fine losing the NVMe slots to NVMe-SATA, I recently found this: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1737570-thinknas-6x-hdd-nas...
Requires a bit of tinkering but the idea of plugging a 1L-format computer to turn it into a multi-disk NAS is quite attractive.
I wanted a small form factor for my homebrew NAS and Jonsbo N3 is the case I ended up with a couple of years ago. I couldn't find anything smaller that would let me have at least 6 disks. The Asus ITX motherboard I bought second hand had only 4 SATA ports and I bought a m.2 sata adapter to get an additional 4 ports.
Find a generation or two old Supermicro motherboard, don't bother with the AMD ones as they're rare and seemed to have more issues. I also would stay away from fly by night Chinese vendors for a lot of reasons but people tolerate them I guess. No idea on the PSU.
I use samba on Debian Linux running on a Mac Mini. The data partition lives on an externally connected Samsung SSD. It's probably not what you want, but it sure is small.
Assume that's an Intel Mac Mini?
Don't know any by heart, but when I was researching for myself recently, this is what I did.
Go to your favorite computer parts retailer website. Go to the Computer Cases category. Filter by desired number of 3.5" bays. Pick from the lot.
its not the smallest, but the Fractal Node 304 is nice IMHO.
I'm using that case with with a 200mm fan front-panel mod[1]. Despite its size, it gets pretty cramped. It's just hard to keep it organized without a dedicated SATA backplane.
[1]: https://www.printables.com/model/866109-200mm-fan-front-for-...
I'm currently on the market for a NAS. Main use would be simple RAID storage for personal stuff: photos, etc. Also local backup. I'd been considering the Synology SS425+. I was aware of the restrictions on disk support.
Comments in this thread are making me think twice. So what's good? Ugreen? I'd appreciate recommendations.
I’ve been looking at a minisforum n5 pro for a while, but it’s got a lot of horsepower and wouldn’t just be a nas.
10g ports, latest amd, hopefully freebsd works okay on it…
Ugreen has no encryption support which is quite a pain for storing personal data :/
I'm in a similar situation. Any thoughts, recommendations, warnings about QNAP or Asustor?
What are the go-to Synology alternatives atm? Was going to get a Synology box for a small team but could not get what we wanted for a reasonable price from them. I won't be the one maintaining it, otherwise I would get a linux client for sure.
I had a 918+ that just... died. It started and then stopped, didn't POST.
Panicked, built a full-ass Fractal 804 case + Unraid setup to replace it.
Was looking around for That Guy who mails around a Synology box so I could get my data out and stumbled on a forum post(!) that said the external PSU just fails subtly sometimes. It gives enough power to start booting and then fails.
Bought a 3rd party PSU from Amazon and the Synology boots up.
Now the 918+ lives as an off site backup at my parents' house =)
My 415+ had the famous C2000 issue where the timing signal wouldn’t be sufficiently pulled down/up. This lead to freezes and ultimately to a non-booting device. And that happened like 3 months out of warranty. The only “support” Synology offered was in helping me selecting a new device to buy.
And they clearly knew how to fix it at this point as the support in other countries DID fix people’s devices. Luckily, the Internet did its thing and I was able to solder in the missing resistor myself.
But that was the moment where I’ve decided that the next device won’t be a Synology again.
Fyi it's not a missing resistor but a silicon defect in the Intel chip where a low-side mosfet on a clock line wears out after a certain number of boot cycles, causing the system to fail POST.
It is an easy fix (I had to do it too) but I agree Synology's poor support makes this the last of their products I'll use.
Mine lasted a good 7y+ before it showed the yellow light of death. I also managed to fix it with the resistor soldering =)
A s a technologist I think this is obviously a move in the wrong direction but let’s be real - Synology is going to be fine. The type of people who buy synology are the same people who buy Apple and are the same people who buy prebuilt gaming PCs, they’re actively trying to avoid knowing how it works so they can focus on the task to be done.
I have a DS1823 for what it’s worth, but I also have a home built NAS from ten years ago and a Ugreen running nixos. I explicitly use the Synology stock for things that just need to work
Used to love Synology and had a NAS from them, but it EOL'd and it was a shame since the hardware and drives were fine.
I went to TrueNas and have been extremely happy and never looked back.
For someone very comfortable with desktop Linux and NAS curious without much hardware skills, are there any good guides to get started? I use a HDD enclosure with two 2TB disks shoved in but the content availability is dependent on my laptop being on. I would rather have JellyFin running on my NAS/media server so that we can watch stuff on TV even when the laptop is off. Would be good to be able to access the network file system over NFS using WiFi to avoid being tethered to the desk.
Since you're comfortable with linux, you really don't need a tutorial. Just buy a cheap minipc or maybe a raspberry if you fancy it, install the distribution of your choice or something more complete like OMV7, plug your enclosure and you're done
It's a real shame too, I had purchased a DS723+ before the announcement and its a great little machine. The I can see why the Synology experience was such a draw for so long in the consumer space.
The recent HDD drama is death for Synology's consumer appeal, but I imagine they'll shape-out a mid-market/small-business segment for themselves.
They're probably "pulling a Rolex" i.e. Go big or go home move.
The thing is, the place they're moving a little dangerous. SOHO and SMB using 4-12 HDDs to serve a couple dozen people is a very small niche. Plus you can add professional photographers and videographers on top.
Then what? The upmarket is very, very crowded. Will they OEM their wares to big players as entry level devices?
They are going to get absolutely smoked upmarket. There's so much competition that has basically no downside comparitively.
And probably in that niche too, once people realize how cheap used hardware really is.
Orico has a 4/5 slot USB3-10gbps DAS box, which can daisy chain up to three boxes.
Get 6 boxes, daisy chain them as 2x3, connect to a powerful-ish NUC box. Install TrueNAS on it. Use the SATA port for the OS, leave the NVMe slot alone, add a 2-4 TB good SSD.
Set the SSD as a cache to that 30 disk zRAID2 or zRAID3 pool. You can have a kick-ass enthusiast level NAS box which will beat many Synology boxes with a big clue bat...
I have one too, 2013 I guess. I just use it as storage (samba-drive I guess) connected to my mini-computer (hp800) that runs hp800. I do occasional backups via rsync. It works. I also store some images etc. that I don't use there. But I only run a RAID, so I don't have the NAS backuped as well. I still have them in my old macbook backups. But not sure how to properly solve that dilemma of backing up a very large multiple TBs NAS, as I can't afford many more disks and another server to run just for that. If you have any a simple solution, I'm all ear :)
You can use Synology Hyper Backup (or any cloud backup program) and an AWS S3 compatible provider, such as Backblaze.
what would be an option to still do it locally? without sending it to the cloud? probably needs a good compression
You could have a big external USB drive and try a deduplicating backup software such as borg backup or restic.
Xpenology exists remember (running Synology OS with no Synology hardware)
It's a pain to set up and keep it up to date though.
Yeah I wouldn't recommend using it but it does exist. I would just use Fedora server. For the same reasons I wouldn't recommend Synology.
similar post 4 months ago:
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move (servethehome.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706
It is sad. I liked my Ds with ecc. It has been great but it complains about the non synology memory. So it sounds like it will be my last after about 20 years
Stupid question, but has anyone hacked/replaced the vanilla firmware on Synology boxes and got it running something more flexible? This is kind of a lazyweb request, but I have an old Synology box that I wouldn't mind resurrecting.
Answering my own question:
If you've got a QNAP, you can install Debian 10 on some of them <https://www.cyrius.com/debian/>
If you've got a Synology, it has been done on some older devices as well <https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology>
So all is not necessarily lost, and I have one of each so will need to do some experiments!
I'm looking for a NAS for a very long time (budget, size, network, etc.), but when I was ready to pull the trigger on a Synology, they did this, and I dodged a bullet.
Long story short, I'll be buying an ASUSTOR AS6804T, and if I don't like the software, I'll just install TrueNAS on it. It's not only officially supported, they have a full length video showing the process. They don't provide tech support, but eh.
Icing on the cake? The eMMC storing the original firmware sits on its own USB port, so you disable that port, and both disable and protect the firmware from being overwritten.
If you want to return to original firmware, enable the port, remove the TrueNAS SSD, and viola!
About a year ago I did the opposite, I bought an ASUSTOR and noticed the software was terrible, didn't want to fiddle too much with it because it was within return to store range still. Returned it and got a Synology. Then they released their updated plans a while later.
Asustor were pretty useless when mine stopped working, and had a pretty bad ransomware incident where they did a lot of blaming users for their own buggy software. I won't be buying from them again.
I looked up the ransomware attack out of curiosity: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/asusto...
It looks like Deadbolt also hit QNAP and Terramaster.
Also, it looks like only units which are accessible from the internet are hit, but isolated units did not get hit.
> only units which are accessible from the internet
Sort of. Accessible via Asustor's own software which they'd been promoting to users, which I'm pretty sure had some kind of hole punching / bridge node setup so that you could use it even if you were blocking all inbound connections to your NAS. Obviously if you completely disconnect it from the internet in both directions then you're safe (but also can't get updates etc.)
I plan to keep mine in an egress only state behind NAT (It can connect somewhere, but it's not reachable). Maybe, maybe I'll include it in my VPN setup.
I can just install TrueNAS and be happy, though. I'm not afraid of configuring things.
Does just getting an intel NUQ not suffice? i bought one for 180 and it works great. runnint ~16 apps + an MC server and no issues
That's not really comparable hardware. The AS6804T has four 3.5" HDD bays, Synology hardware generally offers two to eight bays. They're NASes, the NUC is just a mini computer with little to no built-in storage capacity. It's not about the apps here.
Plus, 4 SSD slots and 16GB ECC RAM which is upgradeable to 64GB. That thing is a sleeper.
I already have an infrastructure like that. Mine is running Debian Stable, a couple of containers for background jobs and a couple of daemons.
However, I need to backup a lot of things, and ensure that they don't bitrot. A decade old photography archive, meticulously ripped CD libraries, a full cloud storage backup, etc. etc. Plus I don't want to dig disks to get a single file which I don't want to put on somebody else's computer (i.e. cloud storage).
This needs a two tiered solution. Flash based hot-data area for the running daemons and a spinning array for backups. Both RAID (to be able to scrub and repair bitrot).
The problem is, I'm a sysadmin. I see & use big storage systems and know what they are capable of. I want the personally useful subset of this at home. Plus I want to make it accessible to other people at home, so their files will be safe, too.
This means at least TrueNAS and 4-6 disks to begin with.
I’d love to swap my ds920 for any Apple Mx macmini, preferably with more ram
We tried bunch of NAS solutions in the past, and most recent switch is Ubiquiti NAS, so far so good…
I'm not seeing anything saying that you can't use third-party drives. Am I missing a blog post from Synology somewhere?
Thank you!
I still have a Synology NAS running at my parent's place. My dad really wanted one. Now I don't know what to do. Can I just throw a new OS on it?
Why would you need to do anything? Why do you think you'd be impacted?
It's the circle of life:
1) Established players are all overpriced and focus on value extraction, not customer service
2) By actually helping your customers and providing good solutions at an affordable price, you can quickly grow to be a big player in the space
3) Now that we are a big player, we could be making big bugs by squeezing the customers who can't easily switch away
4) Established players are all overpriced and focus on value extraction, not customer service
time and time again people fall for proprietary lock-in to the point where it's hard to exert any sympathy.
I’ve bought an Ugreen NAS right when they came out. Installed TrueNAS and it’s been rock solid and with a lot of hardware features Synology doesn’t offer all this time.
There’s really not a lot of reasons to use Synology anymore (only thing I miss was the sync solution they had. It was indeed better than Syncthing and the likes).
I don't have any personal experience, but I passively follow video editor YouTube and everybody's talking about switching to a UNAS Pro[1], which integrates tightly with the UniFi gear people already love.
I'm happy to see it—looks great, it's priced insanely well, and I can see myself switching from Synology in the future.
In other news, I've been a fan of LucidLink[2] for awhile, which you can use to avoid needing a NAS for video editing workflows, and a very slick competitor finally came onto the scene[3]. LucidLink totally works, but their software is frustratingly idiosyncratic.
These services offer some kind of chunked file streaming magic that lets you progressively download pieces of video files as you need them.
I was somewhat surprised to discover, however, that there doesn't appear to be an open source project that provides this functionality.
Anybody know of anything? And I wonder if anyone's looked into it and knows how it works?
[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/unas-pro
Thing is, they used to be so good. I had a really tricky error, they had a tech help out during daytime, so guess he stayed up late to help us out and it was amazing customer support. They went FROM THAT, to me never touching their stuff again due to this (and the surveillance station-crap they pulled with yanking out codecs).
They must've had a massive brainfart in the management at that company.
Do you know why I tell my loved ones to get apple products?
Because I don't want to support them.
Your telling me that Synology is giving out apple levels of support in trade for vendor lock in. It sounds like the sort of thing I recommend to others because it wont be my problem.
Go ask a "car guy" who has a civic or something that is LS swapped what car you should get. He's not going to recommend anything he is going to buy... he's gonna tell you to go get a bog standard Toyota so it isnt his problem. Meanwhile he has the fun, project car that does cool things but he's always fiddling with.
Synology isn't for you any more... They want to be Toyota or apple or something not for nerds!
Yeah but the "I want a nas but I don't know anything about computers" crowd is microscopic. Choosing that for your customer base is stupid and shortsighted.
That's why I love and miss Drobo. Storage that "just worked" :(
Semi-OT:
I currently have a QNAP TS-451D2. I use it mainly with a MacBook Pro. Something in QNAPs Samba implementation makes it glacially slow in that configuration. While it still does AFP (and then becomes somewhat decent to use), it's only a question of time for apple to chop that protocol.
With QNAP having proven to be substandard and Synology going evil, what other options for a mid-range, local NAS for the tech guy who doesn't want to have another thing to tinker with do exist? I'm thinking 'appliance', not 'project'. Ideally, I want to just set it up once and then forget about it.
FWIW my qnap was also hammering my samba. After a few hours it would limit my transfers to 2Mb.
I fixed it by removing the virtual network switch that gets installed if you use the container services.
Truenas (linux) has been like that for me. Repurposed my last pc, added a pci-e sas/sata card, add 8 hdd's. Installed it 2 years ago and its been auto updating and i have been hardly having to deal with it, at most an hour a month to check the status and maybe add or remove some docker container stuff thats running on there.
An hour a month + some docker shenanigans I don't understand? Your sales pitch started out so good and then - anxiety spiking for me. :-D
I run TrueNAS Scale at home myself.
There’s no need to proactively check in on anything if you’ve set up email alerts. It’s pretty straightforward to give the NAS permission to send you emails in case a drive dies on you rather than failing silently.
Docker containers are just a nice bonus. You don’t need to use them if you don’t want to, but it is awfully convenient to run things like media encoders, torrent clients, download managers, etc. directly on your storage.
Depending on what you build and how you build it you're going to have a large range of experiences.
Do you need just disks in a raid? Look at it once a month to make sure nothing stupid has happened and go on with your life. Do you want to run a bunch of services (arr stack, home assistant, full on home lab type stuff) then yes it may require some more "work" depending on what your running and how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.
Did something similar, but just used Debian stable and Samba. Rock stable without intervention other than an occasional login to update. My fileshare needs are simple (single user), so that might be a reason to not choose this. The nice thing is that since it's Debian you _can_ do more if you wish, at any time.
Have you already tried tinkering with the smb settings on both the local and nas config like here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102064 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101442 https://gist.github.com/jbfriedrich/49b186473486ac72c4fe194a...
A Jonsbo case and Unraid: https://nascompares.com/2023/09/01/jonsbo-n2-nas-build-with-...
The Jonsbo cases are pretty compact and QNAP/Synology-ish.
As for Unraid: You pay for it, so you're the customer and can expect some kind of support. It's also pretty damn stable and supports casual "I'll just add this drive to get more space" usage compared to ZFS stuff.
>UnRAID
>It's also pretty damn stable
Not my experience. shfs crashes like crazy, tuning some things might alleviate it but it still fails. From the dozens of workarounds recommended, the only one that seems to help (for me and some others, not for everyone) is to disable NFS, which kinda defeats the point of a NAS for me.
Also while memtest is needed to rule out a memory issue, I found some tendency to disregard these issues as hardware related... if it's only shfs crashing and not the kernel nor any other app, chances are it's an shfs issue.
Currently I think they pin it on a libfuse bug.
https://forums.unraid.net/bug-reports/stable-releases/683-sh...
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/189449-shares-keep-disappear...
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/137653-share-disappeared-aga...
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/161179-unraid-unstable-freez...
I found this lesser-known case: Sagittarius 8-bay https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1d0z2l3/sagitt... 8 bay while remaining compact with good airflow around disks.
Looks like we killed that site. Some header loads sloowly, but I get 'too many connections' instead of any article text.
Would NFS be faster ?
It was years ago but for whatever reason SMB was slow on my Mac even when connecting to Linux boxes. I mapped my user ID to the Synology user and switched to straight NFS instead, per wise it was night and day.
It’s baffling how messed up it is on the Mac.
I get more reliable speeds and connections from an Ubuntu VM that’s running on the same Mac than I do from the Mac. How can this happen?