The Synology End Game | Hacker News Reader

The Synology End Game

lowendbox.com

457 pointsamacbride355 comments

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
  - ...

They claim it's OK because they've backported all security fixes to their versions. I don't believe them. The (theoretical) huge effort needed for doing that would allow them to grow a way better product.

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?

Ah, 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?

The drive bays also have individual locks, but neither would prevent a thief who knows what they are doing.

Not on all of the models.

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

Except for the demo implementation that Synology uses (PyKMIP), all the KMIP compatible servers I've found have licenses in the tens of thousands a year. So if anybody has any suggestions to substitute PyKMIP...

  0: https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/Which_models_support_encrypted_volumes

I remembered wrong. I’m fairly certain that Synology, at some point, allowed you to store the encryption vault on an external (USB) drive, but apparently not anymore.

You didn't remember wrong, I have mine stored on an external drive. I am using DS 6.x though

My disk station uploaded 54gb to synology servers the other day before I had my router block outbound. Trash product.

Why can’t the user enter the encryption passphrase in DSM, which is actually the default in LUKS and allowed in TrueNAS etc?

The DSM itself lives in an unencrypted partition or volume. Applications with data in encrypted volumes will be inaccessible until the volumes are unlocked.

As usual, there is an easy workaround. You can run a KMIP server in a docker container and set up an external keystore. Once synology allows you to proceed with volume encryption, you can discard the KMIP server if you want and use the recovery keys.

You can move out the key from the device using KMIP. I have an implementation that uses a Go-based service to store it in Nitrohsm. I'll clean it up and post a release announcement on Reddit...

That'd be great, as the PyKMIP implementation wasn't very intuitive... (Nor Synology docs...)

Synology actually uses PyKMIP under the hood. They basically use it as a key-value storage for the encryption key, nothing advanced.

I went down the rabbit hole and implemented the KMIP client and server, that pass the tests from OASIS.

Sidenote: please, somebody nuke the OASIS from orbit. To be sure.

> but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen?

Not to defend Synology, but popping a drive out of the NAS so that it won't be noticed (or noticed much later) is a much easier way to steal data than carrying off the whole NAS. I assume they're guarding against the kind of scenario where an employee steals steals drives rather than ski-masked thieves breaching the office and making off with the NAS.

But a single drive in a RAID is worth almost nothing.

I understand Synology’s design approach. In enterprise environments, physical security - especially when systems are housed in ISO 27001–certified data centers—is relatively straightforward to achieve.

The primary value of disk/volume encryption is actually for scenarios like end-of-life replacement, RMA, failure and disposal - even if someone later reconstructs the disk sectors, the bits remain unreadable. This is one layer of defense in depth, not a substitute for physical security.

Synology also supports KMIP, which I see addressing two situations:

1. Data center key governance and media mobility - Multiple hosts (including spares) can use KMIP for centralized key management, improving the mobility of drives within the data center and reducing the operational cost of moving drives between machines. When decommissioning hardware, keys can be revoked directly in KMIP with an audit trail.

2. Edge/branch sites with weaker physical controls - By using KMIP, keys are kept in the more secure data center rather than on the edge device itself. The edge hardware stores no keys, so if an entire machine is stolen, it cannot be unlocked, preserving confidentiality.

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.

> 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.

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.

There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them

https://forum.doozan.com/list.php

People seem very attracted to Synology because it requires very little thought & effort.

FWIW the new Ugreen NAS run Debian. I don't know a ton about it, but it's be great if they could stay a little more up to date. This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus.

I'm attracted to them because you can find them secondhand on ebay for very cheap, and their power draw / performance ratio is quite decent compared to other systems.

I will say that the Ugreen NAS seems to offer more performance for less watts, so it's definitely something I will keep an eye on in the future if it pops up on Ebay.

> This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus.

It's not. My Synology is running Linux kernel v4, and I opted to use their "SHR" RAID configuration and can confirm that it's some weird BTRFS variant that is likely deadlocked due to the kernel.

The encrypted volumes I've made also look very much like the EcryptFS files I've been seeing on other setups.

I'm currently in the process of mainlining it to kernel v6 to reap the better power and idle / hibernation rewards, as well as just using a standard Ext4 FS with updates

> It's not. My Synology is running Linux kernel v4, and I opted to use their "SHR" RAID configuration and can confirm that it's some weird BTRFS variant that is likely deadlocked due to the kernel.

SHR is mostly MD-RAID and LVM, and works with ext4 too.

I have a Ugreen, just got the latest update runs on kernel 6.12

If you want to run Debian instead of DSM, you have a much wider choice of NAS hardware than just Synology.

You could activate the sshd service and log in to the NAS.

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.

And given they're using very old versions of everything, it just sounds like dysfunction and/or moribund development.

I don't know if this is the reason, but supposedly their btrfs fork contains a custom integration with mdraid/lvm so that when btrfs detects a bad block, it signals lvm to do a repair. This is their solution to avoid using btrfs raid5/6 which is still marked unstable.

> 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?

You regret switching them from Synology to Trueness? Am I misunderstanding your final note?

It's confusing me after the preceding displeasure wrt Synology

"This" in the last paragraph refers to the rest of the comment, not to the preceding sentence.

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...

> 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 :)

I have a DS 923+. These extremely old softwares you mentioned were always weird to me but everything worked fine so far. What I'm not happy about is the vendor lock in, and the abysmal virtualization / transcoding performance. I want a NAS that comes with a similar ease of use as the DSM, but can double down as a __very lightweight__ virtualization platform for my local test deployments and as a media PC that I can rely on. What would you suggest?

I'd suggest separate systems for NAS and media serving.

I've a Ryzen Embedded system with lost of RAM as my NAS box and a small Intel N-series based system as my Plex server that pulls media off the NAS box.

Yeah but these days you can easily have one system with 10 - 20 cores so you should be able to handle both workloads very well.

You can, but for media serving and transcoding you ideally want Intel Quick Sync, and it's simpler to have separate systems for your Quick Sync system and your "many cores" system.

Both of the CPUs you mention are low-power I don't think this a problem for slightly meatier processors unless you need the GPU or Quick Sync for multiple purposes?

Sure, you can get a meaty recent-gen Intel processor and get Quick Sync and plenty of cores, it just gives you awkward dependencies - you then a) can't get a non-Intel-based system without losing Quick Sync even if they're better value/performance/performance-per-watt and b) you can't upgrade your transcoding CPU without doing a whole new build of your meaty system, which is high-cost if you've got an especially meaty system.

(You might want to upgrade your transcoding box to a newer generation processor that supports, say, AV1 encoding.)

And FWIW my Ryzen Embedded system isn't especially low-power by design, it was just the most accessible way of getting ECC memory for me.

What does Quick Sync do? I'm new to this.

It decodes and encodes video streams with very low power draw and CPU load, so you can transcode media in realtime if your player device doesn't support the media format in question or you have bandwidth limits out-of-home.

Can do the same with various GPUs, but Quick Sync tends to be the lowest-power and most well-supported at the software level.

Truenas scale?

How about miniPC + USB x bay enclosure? I'm thinking about it. Have 4 Synology NAS mostly as long offline storage. No problems with them in this role so far.

They also have this weird full disk encryption that doesn't validate that the boot partition is compromised, allowing exploits like this: https://forums.spacerex.co/t/bounty-first-person-to-share-ho...

This breaks both the 'store key locally' and the KMIP setup.

And for their file-based encryption you cannot change the password. You need to create a new folder with a new password and copy all files over.

At a customer I ended up having to help one department running two Synology boxes as a side project. I came in with low expectations, and still was thoroughly disappointed.

- one device died, was EOL at that point, and newer ones no longer can read the disks - stupid limits for array size. Depending on your setup adding disks can mean "copy everything off, delete arrays, and then create new ones". Also, want one 200TB array with your disks? Depending on model size you'll have to do multiple arrays instead with a bit to way lower capacity - syncing a share to another instance is broken, with pretty much no useful debug information. Already the setup is stupid (doesn't let you select which array it goes on the target machine), and then seems to change access permissions of the sync user on the target box (i.e., you can do one sync, after that you'll need to reset the access permissions). I wanted to avoid doing my own sync script, but seems I'll have to do that in the end - stupid disk compatibility warnings (which currently you can disable when you have SSH access) - wireguard only via third party addons. It's 2025. I didn't even check before if those things can do wireguard - it didn't occur to me that a device sold nowadays might not be able to do that.

While debugging I also noticed that pretty much every software component is from the stone age.

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.

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.

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…

When times are tough, accept less growth (or sometimes none) so that when times get good again or someone builds a competitor, all your customers don't leave you.

The real big brain move is to be your own competitor, so you extract value from customers either way. If they don't switch, you get to extract value via planned obsolescence and plain old extortion. If they do switch to avoid the extortion, you at least get to keep the price of their new NAS, and you weren't likely to get the extortion money anyway.

America has thousands of food brands but they're all owned by about 6 companies.

This is more about EBITDA.

Serving the needs of customers (practically the quality of the product) sits down in the list of importance. Sales strategy, marketing, PR, organizational culture, company values, ..., basically the self-serving measures come all before that.

This is depressing, but feels accurate. How do we collectively get out of this mess?

Don’t give them money.

Capitalism. It’s why we can’t have nice things.

Capitalism is the reason we have so many nice things. :)

this... it's the only reason technology has advanced so quickly

I think there's actually no point in being profitable, it always seems to lead to even more greed, power and corruption.

Better to have a heart, care more about your customers, don't put profits first, but still make enough to keep the lights on.

I think that would make everyone happier anyways.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our organization joined this trend some years ago. The original founders (did ca. 30-35 years ago) passed 60 and cashing out. Sold the company to an investor. Small fish, <100 employee, but in a niche of engineering app development with long time clients, very long time clients. Since then, we are a self declared sales oriented organization, company meetings are about success stories of billing more for the same service, monthly cash-flow analysis (target vs. actual), new marketing materials disseminated broadly, sales campaign, organizational culture, teamwork, HR. Every other has a technical development footnote, all AI (fits right in like designer bags at a pig farm). No QA, none.

From Wikipedia, the Synology founders are still involved in the company’s leadership.

Sounds like they're only missing an epiphany about offshoring the engineering!

Since engineering is a "cost center", that must be decreased, it is a potential scenario, yes.

The other is to fuck engineering. Sell what we currently have, until we can, as expensive as we can, and do not spend on engineering. That is only taking away the money! Can put on some AI glitter to dazzle, but that's it. No one knows what AI is in this narrow field anyway, we can position ourself as revolutionary inventors for anything weird or new. Some will eat up this s*t for sure. Short term is paramount!

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®.

What are the current options? I've been looking but I haven't found any. I have a DS923+ and it works fine, but I can already see what you are talking about.

I've purchased 3 QNAP NAS products over the course of a decade or so, and remain happy to recommend them. Their reputation was damaged by a raft of ransomware attacks in 2021 and 2022, but since then they've been better about improving overall system security and forcing basic security hygiene on users (who often don't know any better).

TrueNAS Community Edition?

I just got a Ugreen 2800 to replace a homemade NAS, I had a Synology for a few years but it got slower and slower as the software changed so I ditched it maybe 10 years ago?

One of the things that sold me on the Ugreen was that it is basically just a garden-variety N100 box, upgradeable RAM, supports SATA and M.2, etc.

According to this installing your own OS doesn't invalidate the warranty so if I decide their software is lousy I can install Debian https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Ugreen

I built two intel atom nas machines before switching to synology.

One has no linux or windows video drivers (Intel’s fault — no transcoding), and caught fire (not intel’s fault).

The other was one of the ones where the clock signal is basically a doomsday countdown timer. I had to swap it out for a warranty board for some other reason.

So, there’s no way I’d consider an N100. Other options?

In the years between the Synology and the Ugreen I've been running a mac mini from ebay which has slower copy speeds (i had to use drives connected via usb or thunderbolt) but has been very reliable and low-power.

There are a few previous-generation units still available on the market. This article reminded me that I'd meant to track down a DS1522+ before it's too late, and I found a couple on Amazon and other sites.

I bought a hexOS license when it when on sale. TrueNAS for people that don’t want to be a storage professional.

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).

I have a similar lack of interest in opening up a tower to swap drives. QNAP has some nice JBOD enclosures. If you don't want any 2.5" drives their biggest enclosures are 8-bays, so you'd need an ATX tower with three available PCIe slots to run all the SFF cables for 3x8 drives. You would need to manage your own software stack with Unraid or w/e.

> I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives.

How often do you actually do this? In 15 years of running my own NAS boxes, I so far had to do it once. I, of course, choose slow, middle of the range disks.

I never went more than 1, maybe 2, years without needing to open it up. To be fair, I was adding drives over time as I could afford them and I had a large range of drives of various ages that slowly died out or needed to be replaced with larger capacity drives.

It’s partly the annoyance of being in a cramped space filled with drives but also the downtime. Family and friends use self-hosted software than runs on my main server and uses the NAS(es). Shutting down a NAS means shutting down the software. Yes, I can let them know ahead of time and “schedule downtime” but I dislike needing to do that unless I have to. It just makes the system feel less stable for them and I want to provide a great experience.

With hotswap bays externally accessible I don’t have to stop anything. I’d actually be fine with UnRaid (I still run it as my “app” server) if there was a case with 12 or more 3.5” hotswap bays.

I looked into large JBOD servers but between fan noise and rack mounted servers often being in a whole other class (one I have much less experience in compared to desktop tower builds) I’ve never been able to convince myself to get one.

My Synology 12-bays are quiet and easy to work with so even at ~$1.5K they were a steal in terms of maintenance and upkeep (for me).

agree. i have two synology NAS. i just set them up and forget it since i don't open for outside access.

its a great backup for all your important files.

They make hotswap bays that fit in 5.25" drive bays, and you can find NOS towers that have the necessary number of drive bays.

There are also 3d-printale cases where you buy a SATA backplane and screw it in.

It doesn't solve your software problem (though maybe TrueNAS might work?).

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.

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.

A custom Arch install is what I have on my router.

There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching).

The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the next day on reboot. "But you should have read the changelog!", "But you should have tested the config files on updates!", "But you should have restarted the service!" ...: no, no I don't normally test every config file or restart every service after an upgrade, and I don't normally read Changelogs of all software installed on my machines. I shouldn't have to do that in 2025.

`zfs` is out of kernel, I've dabbled with that for a while until I understood if you want your machine to reboot 100% of the times, you'd better stick with in-kernel filesystems, no matter how worse featureset they have.

Sometimes stuff will just break on package upgrades without notice or warning, and you're left to pick up the pieces, normally in a hurry because your partner is screaming at you.

Compare that with Synology, where I have never, ever needed to login to click "run updates" or put it in "maintenance mode" to fix it. It updates itself, it boots at the set time, it brings up all services, runs periodic scrubbing, informs me via mail, shuts down at the specified time. It has a 2x-SSD mirror for cache, and I don't need to care about the disk layout and configuration, and the cache configuration, .....

It's literally a set-and-forget auto-upgrading box that I can just use instead of maintain.

I understand that Synology is not in good shape anymore, see my other top-comment :)

Turns out building zfs into the kernel is very easy, if you happen to be building the kernel for some other reason already.

What I get from this is to stay very far away from Arch if I want to update regularly and not fuss with it. But that's not an indictment of distros designed to be stable.

And your experience of Arch with automatic updates is very different from their semi-suggestion of Arch with no updates.

As for ZFS, I don't use it for root, in part so that even when I mess with things I know it'll boot fine. But that only applies to root.

Most of the other commenters do not seem to understand the difference between "low maintenance", "low maintenance by someone very skilled in the art", and "no maintenance".

Things that maintain themselves are amazing and I want more of them in my life. Anything that requires shell commands is out out out. That is for younger people.

I do that for one thing: Home Assistant, because it's something that I want to customize to provide the best experience for the whole household.

Everything else, I agree and Synology has delivered enough (such a lifetime of 10+ years with full updates) that I am not really happy to try my chances with something else unless the hardware dies.

You're being pretty vague so it's hard to respond to. But if someone suggests some version of Linux and then leaving it alone, that's no maintenance.

In my experience, unattended Linux installs tend to rot pretty badly. They're fine for a while, then either some update goes badly wrong (usually of the "well, we expected you to go from v4 to v5, but we never tested v2 to v5" variety, far down some dependency chain) and requires heroic skills to recover; or the system just point-blank refuses to update after a while, again requiring heroic skills to recover. FreeBSD has been better for me once running, but requires more work for initial setup.

So, no, my experience is that unattended Linux is not really suitable. Your experience may vary.

What I want is something that's more like an appliance than a project. You do not look at your toaster every day and wonder if it needs to perform updates. Or your washing machine. (If you do, please, seek help.) These are appliances. I want an appliance that serves me bits, lots of them, and lets me use multiple machines without caring too much which one has which file. My Synology has, to date, been excellent at that role.

> either some update goes badly wrong [...] or the system just point-blank refuses to update

You don't understand, in that post I'm talking about purposefully not updating. At all. Updates can't go wrong if they don't happen. If it refuses to update then you win.

> What I want is something that's more like an appliance

Yeah, you get it! Set it up and then leave it alone.

And don't expose it to the internet.

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.

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.

rgrep is easier on a nas though

Sure, but clicking through a folder set on a single managed volume is orders of magnitude easier than rooting through a hundred blue ray DVDs, popping each one into your optical reader in the hopes that it is the correct one, and then having to search within that volume.

> Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed

Synology indexes file contents similar to Spotlight on the Mac.

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.

sure, but NAS and cloud doesn't fail at the same time. Also NAS provide some redundancy in-house as well. Whereas BluRay is a single copy - even if you burn multiple copies, they degrade at the same rate.

That would be true if I would have done all copies on the same day, and never duplicated disks.

You basically imply that you have a NAS that you regularly take backups to BluRay?

`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.

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.

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.

I switched to QNAP and it's been fine.

I find QNAP more annoying to configure. Even their enterprise server rack stuff has Multimedia shares on by default.

I wished I'd have spend some time looking them up before I bought 2 new drives for my old Synology. The new QNAP is so much better. I'd have switched just for the UI already..

lots of things will autoinstall security updates nowadays.

Debian and unattended upgrades might need a tweak if you want it to actually reboot by itself, but I think the option is there

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

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

> A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself.

A Debian stable mostly does except on upgrades, and that's rare and painless enough. Even with a Synology you still need to make sure you have proper monitoring in case the hard drives start failing.

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

UnRaid. I'm currently evaluating it on my old 2014 motherboard.

The WebUI is responsive, it can be a bit brickish around the edges requiring you dive in to the logs if something doesn't work; turned out to be bad ram on my host refusing KVM to boot. Once it's up and working it sails.

GPU-PassThru in a Windows VM is proving incredibly smooth especially with using Moonshine on FreeBSD.

The docker ecosystem is a nice addition and the community seems fair. I can too throw all my old SSD drives without limitation (granted the basic licenses only allows six) is nifty in saving dust.

It being based off Slackware is pleasing. It is closed source but so is Synology and for $100 for a fully unlocked feature-rich NAS/OS - totally.

https://unraid.net/community/apps

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...

yup, thats why I alwys end up with microatx board, it just works, it draws power but does the job I need

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.

If you care that much about power why are you using 8 tiny 2TB HDDs instead of 1 or 2 big HDDs?

You don't need a NAS for 16TB, you just need a RasPi with a 16TB USB HDD connected to it and a second one for backups that you keep mostly offline.

Because TCO is less with these cheap old drives and I can have RAID5 instead of just RAID1 or no RAID at all.

But you're right. In a few years it will become advantageous to switch to a couple of larger HDDs. I could probably do it right now, but I don't yet trust these new drives as much as I trust the old ones, especially since the refurbished scandal.

In a RAID6 with 8 drives, you can allow one disk to go offline and remain able to write, or two disks offline and remain able to still read 100% of data. You lose 2 of 8 = 25% capacity on redundancy.

With a mirror of 2 disks, if one disk dies, you can still read; if two disks die, you're toast. And you lose 1 of 2 = 50% of capacity on redundancy.

A quite different balance.

> 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).

If you look at some industrial boards (e.g. from ASRock) they're DC-powered. I haven't actually measured the power draw on mine - I'll try to remember to do so next time I power cycle it.

OK, let's assume we're in California and electricity is like $0.50 / kWh.

An extra 10W being consumed around the clock would cost 24 h/d * 365.25 d * 0.50 $/kWh 0.01 kW = $43.83. Indeed, saving 10W would save enough in 10 years to buy a whole new NAS! (Sans the disks.)

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.

Thank you.

To save some clicks:

https://nas.ugreen.com/ https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro

Thanks for the links.

What do you guys think about security concerns around minisform and ugreen being Chinese companies?

You couldn't pay me to put them on my network. From just a few days ago:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-used-three-priva...

Regardless of source:

- your NAS should not be allowed to talk to the outside world

- you should wipe any pre-installed software and install your own OS

Like I said, I'm still waiting for 10+ SATA bays...

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...

> It adopts the enterprise-level PRO 8845HS processor instead of the ordinary consumer-grade 8845hs, which enables this computer to run stably even when it remains powered on for an extended period without being shut down.

Well that's certainly a claim.

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.

Which DAS? I looked at that as an option but didn't narrow down a top pick for Thunderbolt JBOD DAS units.

And how much power does the DAS consume?

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.

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...

I've done the calculations just now:

10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more.

The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the electricity is a very significant portion of TCO. In fact, it's more than half, because I bought everything second-hand.

Your setup is a tiny niche of a niche. Nobody using a NAS is using tiny 2TB HDDs in 2025 when 20+TB drives are so available.

I feel like you are making your setup more complicated than is even worth and searching for a weird solution when all you need is a RasPi with a big 16+TB USB HDD connected to it.

> 10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro.

€2.30 per month. Which is almost nothing.

> Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices.

That is €11 a month over 20 years. So the extra 10 watts is still next to nothing even taking into account your exaggerated time frames, which I am dubious as to whether this is real.

I am certainly not going to worry about €11 a month.

You've picked incredibly long time ranges and you still have small numbers.

3k over 20 years is literally nothing.

It's lost change in the couch compared to almost any other financial decision you could make.

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.

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.

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.

You need to understand that you are a very unusual case. Most people can't get 25 Gbps for a connection, it's 1 Gpbs at best. Most people, even most technical people, are not running a 25 Gbps home network. You have specific needs for speed and that's fine, but they are not commonplace and most people will be served just fine with SATA drives.

I agree with you, but we're talking about a device that I'd consider keeping for 10+ years. Actually I have some Synology NAS lost somewhere that I occasionally use, and while I don't trust exposing it to the internet (never have), it still serves files fine. With this expectation it's not absurd to get a NAS that still handles a bit more than the current speeds.

Just to add a datapoint: I could also get a 25Gpbs connection in Switzerland. Actually checking that, I'm realizing that I could upgrade without paying more (maybe just a setup fee, less than 50USD).

I'm also with Init7 :)

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.

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...

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.

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:

https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-mu

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2822.html

That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.

Really?

6.1 Electrical Characteristics

The maximum power requirements for the LSI SAS 9200-8i HBA under normal operation are as follows:

 PCIe 12.0 V = 0.74 A

 Power

— Nominal = 7.92 W

— Worst Case = 13.20 W

Seems like it uses just a little more than 1 large capacity HDD.

It's 2-3 times more than the drives. All 8 HDDs consume 4W in sleep, and they sleep more than 80% of the time (all night, all day while I'm at work, they only start 2-3 hours in the evening).

I am pretty sure the card is not using 8+ watts when all the drives on it are idle...

I can't believe people are worrying about something less than 10 watts.

10 watts in constant use for a whole year is like $12 at the average electricity cost in the US.

I don't even let my HDDs sleep, the constant spin up and spin down and temperature cycle associated with puts way more wear and tear on them and would cause them to fail quicker and that is way more expensive to replace.

I have 20 HDDs connected to one of these SAS2 controllers in my home server.

A few watts more or less is so far down any sane list of concerns when selecting a NAS solution, I can't believe it's dominating the discussion here.

Depends on what electricity costs in your place. It can be anywhere from 10 ct/kWh to 45 ct/kWh and that makes a huge difference at the end of the month.

A huge difference, or between a (10W x (8,760 hours/12) x 10¢/kWh =) 73¢ and $3.29 difference per month?

It's nice to be rich and not care, isn't it...

I calculated that over the entire lifetime of my current system, the energy will cost me more than the system itself, all 10 HDDs included, and it's only 50 W or so.

The rich people I know got that way by being very selective regarding what they care about.

You're most probably right, but this discussion started with my statement that there are no low power NAS boards.

The need for low power NAS boards is an entirely different matter. And so are advices on how to get rich.

> It's nice to be rich and not care, isn't it...

There are pci boards that let you hook up 4 sata ports to the pci3 on a raspberry pi 5. The drives will be a large part of the power draw, so if you want low power, going for 2 drives is probably better. That probably gets you into the 20-30 watt range

for 10+ sata ports you might as well get an x86 motherboard as it's going to draw lots of power anyway

Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time

> Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time

I do. Read my other comments.

Yeah, it looks like you have somewhat niche requirements and would need to build your own hardware and software.

To run 10+ sata drives you'll either need to take a lot of care they're not spinning up at the same time, or getting used in parallel, or you'll need to dimension your power supply to cope. A beefy power supply will have a higher idle draw making the focus on getting the whole system idle down to 5w pretty hard

rpi sux for longevity - be prepared to mirror and replace the SD card often

I've never had this be an issue. If it were an issue, you could probably put just /boot on the sd card and run the system off one of the real disks

> I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU,

Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient.

> no video, no audio

Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much.

> lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports This eats power, conflicting with the rest of your requests.

> 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.

No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.

> Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient.

They are, but the motherboard is not, or at least not as much as an ARM board.

> Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much.

And it would boot... how? AFAIK, no UEFI system is capable of booting headless and very very few BIOS systems were.

> No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.

I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.

> I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.

The N100 on its own can go quite low - my N305 system idles around 5W. (But laptop, so zero SATA ports.)

Second-hand Supermicro boards with 6, 8, even 12 SATA ports, 8-16 GB of ECC RAM, a preinstalled CPU, and often a passive radiator are pretty accessible or eBay or suchlike. Of course they are old, but if they did not break after 5-7 years in a server rack, most likely they're not going to break for 10 more years in a less demanding environment at home.

Not low power. Electricity over 10 years would cost 10 times more than the board.

https://jackharvest.com/ has some DIY options.

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.

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 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?

No, it would likely be extremely illegal for anyone in the US to do so

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.

How’s the UNAS? I’m firmly in the UI ecosystem for networking and security and looked at it earlier this year (I think they released the offering only in the past 12-24 months). But my synology 1221 is fairly new so I have at least 5 (probably more) years left of useful life in it.

UI isn’t without their own faults but allowing their unifios to run on grey boxes has improved my opinion of them further.

That’s what I’m running and it’s been great so far have 7x16gb in raid 5 since reading is the main use case

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'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 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.

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.

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?

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-...

true, but I'm also not a fan of backplanes, so I just deal with it.

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.

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.

https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Home_server/Case_guide

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

If I were starting from scratch I would look into those aliexpress motherboards that run laptop cpus.

Should save a lot on power and have plenty of muscle for anything you throw at them if you're willing to gamble on the hardware quality.

Jonsbo N4 works really well for me. One downside is that the space for PCI cards provides only about half a standard height, so GPU choice is very limited. Low profile Arc A310 fits like a glove but is pretty hard to find these days

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 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 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’m surprised that I haven’t noticed this before. When I click on it it still isn’t obvious that this is what it does. It’s more than slightly embarrassing.

Thank you.

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

It's been a good run. My first Synology NAS was a DS-409+. I'm on my third one now, but am actively looking for alternatives. They had excellent support, and maybe still do, but the BS with requiring "their" hard drives is ridiculous. They are not a hard drive manufacturer, so this is a pure profit play.

I've put some work into customizing my Synology NAS(s), and they're doing a lot for me right now, so it will be painful to transition, but I'm going to bite the bullet and do it anyway, because they've become irredeemable.

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 have to imagine one can find a case that allows tons of drives and is still powered by something modest.

I found it almost impossible to find a case which has a fair number of bays (at least 6), is meant for an human environment (i.e. it is not ugly or meant for a rack) and doesn't cost a lot.

So I am now working on hanging an ikea skadis on the wall and attaching everything to it. The big panel has just the right space for everything (10 disks, mobo, extra sata controller, PSU), it is ridiculously cheap, I had fun designing the parts and 3d printing them (though there are many available for free on the web) and it gives easy access to the disks and can be a topic of discussion when friends come over. Not sure it will work properly though :-) (issues may arise with vibrations, temperatures etc).

As an alternative to make it completely visible, I though about doing the opposite, hiding inside regular furniture. You can easily find metal frames meant for an "open chassis" to properly arrange motherboard, disks etc, so it is doable. The easiest would be using a regular cupboard, but I would love to use an ottoman and be able sit on top of it, a la cray-1. I "only" need to solve the issue of hiding the cable, and giving proper ventilation.

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.

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'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'm in a similar situation. Any thoughts, recommendations, warnings about QNAP or Asustor?

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 back up to Synology, but always recover from ZFS.

Synology DSM has all kinds of limitations and is slow. Your encryption cannot be like this, you cannot store data in your NVMes, the number of versions must be limited to that, you cannot search snapshots, Hyperbackup explorer provides just one button: Recover (compare that with restic or Borg!), encryption in HB is opaque, ABB is limited to specific kernel versions, information out of SMART is limited, cannot upgrade drives’ firmware, search options are too limited and search is bad, OpenVPN is old and has compatibility issues with newer systems, … I can go on and on!

You cannot compare that with a backup system with ZFS, restic/borg, syncthing and rclone, in the same class!

ZFS is why I bought a QNAP NAS. As far as I can tell, no Synology device supports ZFS, but lots of QNAP devices do.

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

That could work. The only thing I have noticed with my laptop+ enclosure based setup is that the disks go to "sleep", probably due to power management, so if it has been a while since I accessed the contents, I need to click on the mount point in the explorer window for the disks to start spinning and the files to be available again. I don't want to deal with that so I was thinking that a box with slots for multiple internal disks will not have such issues. I can try to tinker with USB power settings but that could be a time sink/brittle solution.

>What I can’t live with is the new policy, implemented this year, where you must buy your drives from Synology.

Used to do the same thing at EMC back in the 90s-early 2000s with Symmetrix. The cover story was that the EMc-branded drives, which were marked up like 1000x had “special firmware”.

The reality was that it was to prevent procurement guys from putting a BOM spreadsheet in front of the sales rep and saying “why are you charging me $2M for $100k of parts I can buy at Fry’s?

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.

Mine lasted a good 7y+ before it showed the yellow light of death. I also managed to fix it with the resistor soldering =)

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.

Anyone know of something equivalent to the HL-8 from 45homelab but more affordable? The price ($700) is obscene for a barebones chassis that is just a backplane w/o cpu/mobo/ram/psu: https://store.45homelab.com/configure/hl8

The Unifi UNAS Pro looks pretty cool (and my entire rack is Unifi) but I want more control over the OS and would prefer to run TrueNAS: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/unas-pro

I am shopping to replace a DS918+ that has been in service for almost 8 years. Honestly it's been rock solid without a single hiccup - even upgraded the entire pool disk-by-disk a few years back without problems. But I was already losing interest in Synology's OS and after their recent shift to locking down drive options that is the nail in the coffin so I wanna build my own.

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!

That's why I love and miss Drobo. Storage that "just worked" :(

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.

> Yeah but the "I want a nas but I don't know anything about computers" crowd is microscopic.

This is still a very "nerdy" take on the market. Though correct I dont think your seeing the other segments that are out there:

The "I want more storage im sick of paying rent every month" crowed is growing.

The designer/editor/youtuber who doesn't want to be their own IT department is growing.

similar post 4 months ago:

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move (servethehome.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706

I got an i5 tower almost 10 years ago from

https://ithacareuse.org/

for use as a home server, it has a ZFS RAID 1 where I replaced the drives once and I guess I should again soon if I care about the warrantee. I did have a challenging upgrade because Ubuntu made a /boot partition that was too small to reliably update the kernel but I had a spare SSD sitting around which let me just install the OS on the new SSD and swap it in without any risk. It runs the ubiquiti controller, plex, and a few other services. It is not a powerful server by any means but it is massively overpowered for what it does which is better than being underpowered. I messed around with appliances in the 2000s and they inevitably left a bad taste in my mouth. They had 10% of the power of a real computer but cost 70% as much or they used an i3 and you couldn’t install a GPU —- penny wise and pound foolish.

The thing with synology is they do the basic stuff but they also do two things I haven't found a viable, open source alternative for: 1. o365 backup. There used to be corso, which looked promising but still needed ag ui frontend to be viable, but the entire team got bought by someone and abandoned the project.

2. agent based full machine backup. I can install the agent on a machine (but especially a windows machine) and it just backs up on my schedule and works, plus is easy to convert the resulting backup image to a vm to load on the synology or my proxmox cluster. There are lots of moderately to very expensive proprietary solutions that do this, but I am unaware of any decent opensource options.

Are you guys aware of anything that solves these two use cases well and is opensource?

How ugly customer-hating synology is: Synology DSM os measures free space in percent. So when on your multi terabyte volume 200GB free remaining, you would receive notifications until it’s about 100GB free and then you will not receive notifications even it it runs out of space completely.

You can set the free disk space threshold percentage but it will accept number no lower than 5%. This is obviously a rudiment from old times, 20 years ago when volumes were 1-10GB, not TB.

I asked them to change threshold from percent to GB, over multiple times over few years - not going to.

I asked them to allow change threshold to lower value than 5% - not interested.

Not only you can’t know when disk drive runs out of space, but excessive notifications when there’s still lot of free space desensitises, so when actual disk failure happens you would ignore notification.

Years ago (2015?) I bought a DS416j. Paid maybe $400 at the time. It was the simplest plug-n-play NAS could I could find. I didn't even know it had a GUI! (I was being very lazy with my searching). Two 2tb HDDs. Eventually I started running home assistant (no docker). 2023 I was getting annoyed with performance. Two 2tb SSDs added (4 slots) which helped. 2025 I've moved home assistant to a dedicated $70 thin client.

As a dedicated personal backup for my family it's been perfect. The latest vendor lock in has me reconsidering how I'll upgrade when the time comes. Until this post I was considering a $1000 unit and transferring my SSD drives before buying more storage.

Sounds like it's time to build a proper storage+computer rack.

I got a Synology on friends' recommendations in 2018 and have always regretted not getting a secondhand Microserver Gen 8 instead.

Next household samba box will probably be something with an N150 and unfeasible amounts of M.2.

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.

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.

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...

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/151605-mnt-user-is-gone/

Looks like we killed that site. Some header loads sloowly, but I get 'too many connections' instead of any article text.

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.

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...

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?

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.

QNAP DOESN'T RESPOND TO RESEARCHERS THAT FIND ZERO DAYS IN THEIR CODE. that should tell you all you need to know

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.

borg is one that pops up all the time, maybe i need to look into that more deeply. I like rsync, but it's creating huge backups. thanks for the suggestions and help, much appreciated.

I was on my 3rd Synology over the last 12 years or so. They were solid and something I didn't have to pay attention to.

But the drive lock-in tipped me over the edge when I needed to expand space. I'm getting burned out with all of these corporate products gradually taking away your control (Synology, Sonos, Harmony, etc.).

Even though it takes more time and attention, I ended up building my own NAS with ZFS on Debian using the old desktops I use for VMs. I did enjoy the learning experience, but I can't see it's that reasonable a use of time.

> can't see it's that reasonable a use of time

That totally depends on if you enjoyed yourself and maybe learned something or not. Totally up to you!

Definitely. Should have phrased it as "cant's see it's that reasonable a use of time _for most people_".

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.

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

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)

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).

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.

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

I just bought the ubiquity nas just want as close to a dumb shared disk as possible. Streaming is a nuc talking to the the nas

I'm not seeing anything saying that you can't use third-party drives. Am I missing a blog post from Synology somewhere?

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requ...

Thank you!

I just recently grabbed an old Supermicro chassis off eBay and have been getting things slowly set up recently. So long Synology, and thanks for all the fish.

(I'm just going to run a stock Linux distro rather than anything particularly fancy, personally. Good enough for me. Maybe this is finally an excuse to run copyparty somewhere.)

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).

Does UGreen support ECC memory? As far as I've read online, it's crucial for Truenas.

In part that’s an interesting question. Some of the processors on the Ugreen line are Xeons, so they should support ECC, but I’m not sure the MB does.

But you don’t really need ECC for ZFS. That’s a kind of myth that has been debunked several times. Sure, it’s always good, but ZFS works just fine without it.

(I’m on my phone so it’s dificult to find a good source for the claim, but if you search a bit, you’ll find some good blog posts talking about it).

Well, that's the thing. I've also found some posts saying it's a myth and you'd be fine, but the ratio of posts recommending ECC to posts debunking the myth is like 10:1.

The important key point is that you will not lose anything by using ZFS without ECC compared to using any other file system without ECC. The myth is that you specifically need ECC if you’ll be using ZFS, not that ECC is a really good idea for any file system.

https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...

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!

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

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.

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.

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 can just install TrueNAS and be happy, though. I'm not afraid of configuring things.

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.

Yeah, that was the state mine was in, it didn't save me.

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.

We tried bunch of NAS solutions in the past, and most recent switch is Ubiquiti NAS, so far so good…

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.

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!

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.

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?

Had a Synology as my first NAS but switched to a custom diy box with intel i3 and unraid and never looked back.

Once it’s running its just a breeze.

I’d love to swap my ds920 for any Apple Mx macmini, preferably with more ram

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

[2] https://www.lucidlink.com/

[3] https://shade.inc

I do video postproduction and am trying to archive/backup 100-250GB of large files per month. Ended up very slowly rsyncing to Synology NAS, confirming checksums with another script, using Synology onboard stuff to backup to AWS, and dealing with all the totally random hard drive noise.

If I want to work on one of these old projects, I have to download it locally so 4K editing works.

Meanwhile my old projects back when I used different software are impossible to open.

I have spent days setting up all this junk, HATE the Synology UI, and regret it all.

What’s the better solution? Just a bunch of RAIDs that I connect to with USB??

If you can afford it, https://shade.inc/ or https://www.lucidlink.com/ are magic. Rather than downloading that 4K file entirely before you start, it will download chunks as you need them while editing. Avoids the NAS entirely, though you may want separate backups.

If you're local to your equipment (and can afford it), 10G local network with UNAS Pro. Search YouTube for "unas pro video editing" and there are various people discussing their setups. In this setup, your connection to the NAS is fast enough that file transfer speeds aren't such a problem, and the NAS software is nicer to deal with.

And, I know less about it, but you might want to investigate: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagiccloudbac...

Finally, check https://www.reddit.com/r/editors/. Lots of good threads there.

i have maybe $15K in Synology gear. it's getting old and should be replaced with something with better efficiency

the replacement will NOT be from Synology

I’m really hoping that unifi comes up with an awesome NAS. As I love their products and think they could come up with something great easily as they are in a similar position in the space.

time and time again people fall for proprietary lock-in to the point where it's hard to exert any sympathy.

I’ve been thinking more and more with synology’s recent changes that it would open up the market for some new entrants that are like the system76 of NAS that are:

- low power cpu (arm?)

- uses latest kernel and flavor of Linux distributions

- makes own modular hardware in smallish form factor

- basic support package with slower SLAs to more professional SLAs for enterprises, I would happily pay per month to prevent enshitification if I had guaranteed support and even more so if it bundled some zero trust encrypted cloud storage.

It's probably different if you're at a company that actually does what they should and keeps up with all the service contracts and whatnot. I wouldn't know because I always end up at the other type of company.

But I will never buy a NAS or SAN from a company that uses custom firmware on drives. Some dipshit beancounter will come along, "save" some money by not renewing the service contract, and then I'm off hunting for replacement drives on eBay.

Looks like another instance of Fuck You software. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071169

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