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Comment by fennecbutt | Hacker News Reader

I have a ds920 4 bay from synology.

It's a pretty decent product, their browser OS for it is incredibly good and useful, the performance is pretty good and I've stuck extra ram in it, ssd for caching reads/writes (altho I have it disabled for writes).

But after what they've done recently I don't know if I'd use em again.

I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.

I definitely learnt that with 3d printing, used to spend so much time fiddling with printer and never really printing until I got a bambu - then the focus was just on printing as much as I wanted, not much having to muck about calibrating each time.

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UGREEN isn't really build your own. The hardware is similar to Synology (but I think slightly better made, and definitely with much higher specs). But unlike Synology it's easy to install your own OS. I used Fedora, but a lot of people are using TrueNAS which is almost as turn-key as the Synology software.

For reference I own 2 x Synology, 1 x UGREEN and 1 x QNAP; and will likely replace the other machines with more UGREEN in future as long as they don't do anything stupid.

>I know everyone jusy says "build your own!!!11" I used to be like that too I love tech. But sometimes we just want a tool that just plugs in and works, so we can reach our final goal faster.

Same here. I have a couple of boxes running Proxmox in my homelab and I like to tinker, but I also have a DS918+ ticking away with my most important files as I just want something simple that works and is reliable

Half of the "build your own" stuff I've had over the years has at some point broken in some weird and exotic way, requiring a bit more manual upkeep and tweaking than I'd like from a box that is mostly just an SMB share

> a box that is mostly just an SMB share

...and supposedly keeps your files, safe - at least that what keeps me from tinkering too much with such a solution.

Sure, having backups still is necessary, yet, a NAS to me is a means to an end..

I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.

Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.

> just plugs in and works as a tech guy installing TrueNAS likely isn't a barrier for you, and will almost definitely 'just work' more reliably

there are plenty "barebones" NAS offerings that have the nice formfactor but you bring your own HDDs and OS

What are the specifics of the SSDs you chose? I understand you have to go for specific types/models to make sure they don't melt down too quickly.

I used seagate ironwolf hdds (which have been reliable but s little noisy). And honestly for the cache ssd I just chucked in an old m.2 Samsung 980 pro or something I had lying around from years ago.

I don't need crazy performance or to fine tune the setup or anything, like I said it's mostly just to plug and play.

TrueNAS has solved that for me, by making my computer into a NAS appliance. It's great.

"build your own" just means buy a desktop PC and install an O/S

It's not common for a desktop PC to have 4-6 drive bays these days

And besides the OS you need to install and maintain the apps, like backup software, photo management software, etc.

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