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Comment by apetrovic | Hacker News Reader

What are "competitive options"? It's a genuine question. Before Synology, I had some DIY server in a Fractal Design case, and noise and, to be honest, bulk were a problem. Also, maintenance of the server wasn't funny.

I switched to Synology about six years ago (918+). The box is small, quiet, and easy to put in the rack together with the network gear. I started with 4TB drives, gradually switched to 8TB over time (drive by drive). I don't use much of their apps (mostly download station, backup, and their version of Docker to run Syncthing, plus Tailscale). But the box acts like an appliance - I basically don't need to maintain it at all; it just works.

I don't like all this stuff with vendor lock-in, so when the time comes for replacing the box, what are alternatives on par with the experience and quality I currently have with Synology?

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The problem is that a lot of competitors don't necessarily have great software. For example QNAP on the hardware side is supposed to be good, you have more bang for the bucks in term of performance but they had several major CVEs that really call into question their security practices. I have a friend who is running Unraid on QNAP and is happy though.

The new Chinese NAS's due to hit the market look extremely promising.

- Minisforum N5 Pro NAS

- AOOSTAR WTR MAX

Good compute power as they know users will be running Docker and other services on them, using the NAS as a mini server.

OS agnostic allowing users to install TrueNas, Unraid, favourite Linus distro of choice.

The Minisforum and AOOSTAR look to be adding all the features power users and enthusiasts are asking for.

If you just want a NAS as a NAS and nothing else, the new Ubiquiti NAS looks great value as well.

Unraid is brilliant if you're interested in BYO hardware. It can be setup with mix and match drives, supports docker and virtual machines. Realistically it's a bit more work than Synology to get up and running, but once it is, the only thing you really need to do is update the software from time to time

I've heard things about Unraid not being that performant due to the design of the disk array solution.

you can run ZFS without the Unraid disk array in unraid these days

Doesn't that get rid of one of the biggest benefit of Unraid where you can mix and match drives, just like in a Synology hybrid RAID?

I think this is just the tradeoff you need to make. I’m not aware of a solution where you can mix-and-match drives but also get the write performance of a traditional RAID array.

that is true, but you can make one fast pool using zfs and one slower one using unraids disk array, if you want to, or just use the zfs part as a cache for performance

You can add a cache SSD to keep hot data to reduce access times, and why do you need that much of a throughput to begin with?

I don't mind the idea of BYO hardware, especially if it's an old server with hotswap drive and hotswap power built in.

Increasingly, with the time I have towards the things that interest me, I just want storage and a bit of compute to be like a home appliance, reasonably set and forget it and leave my messing around on a USFF computer.

I have an old Helios4 board. Too bad they don't make them anymore - it's tiny, has ECC, and was purpose built to be a NAS.

Marvell CN913x in QNAP TS435XeU NAS is the SoC successor to Armada A388 on Helios4. Still available, building on Linux support for Armada.

Kind of surprising, I went the other way. I started out with ReadyNAS 15 years ago and after that product faded due to lack of support I no longer wanted to be tied down to a manufacturer. I built a custom solution using a U-Nas chassis. Found FreeNAS back in the day and have stuck with it ever since. Maintenance is fairly minimal.

If you heavily rely on apps/services. I've just gone to self managed docker environments for things like that. A very simple script runs updates.

I over-purchased a NAS and ended up with QNAP, even thought Synology provided more power (lower electricity use) to performance ratio.

In hindsight buying a QNAP that was more than the Synology equivalent felt like a good idea but I didn't really get into it quickly enough.

I also got burned by Western Digital's scandal of selling WD Red drives that really weren't that got them caught in a class action lawsuit. Can't see myself buying them again.

Apart from the form factor, my custom built machine with Unraid pretty much works like what you describe. Soon two years of use without major issues.

I have WD MyCloud NAS. It has Transmission to pirate movies and Twonky DLNA server to send them to my TVs. Not much, but honest work.

Some Intel N100/N105 board from Aliexpress with Fedora or Debian on top should be fine & much more flexible if you decided you want more than just a file server.

Or throw on TrueNAS or UnRAID if you want a GUI

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