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?

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.

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.

> A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem

But don't you love it when companies invent their own security instead of using battle-tested open-source systems?

> Multichannel CIFS/SMB)

My DS918+ has multichannel SMB and possibly also parallel NFS. It only works if you have multiple NICs connected.

Other than that, i completely agree. Their tech stack is horribly outdated, and while i understand their reasoning for not upgrading, there's a limit to how long you can do that. Their reasoning is that they know the software that's currently running, warts and all, and can better guarantee stability across millions of devices with fewer moving parts.

Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?

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

It's confusing me after the preceding displeasure wrt Synology

I 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It’s not a lot of money left on the table though, the lion’s share of it has already been taken.

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.

This.

I came to Synology after years of managing regular Linux (Debian) servers, then Unraid, and then Synology.

Synology was the most expensive thing I’ve used but I also _never_ think about it. The same could not be said for previous setups.

I want a stupid-easy NAS, plug-and-play, hotswapable bays. I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives.

I have 2x12-bay Synology’s and I haven’t found an equivalent product yet (open to options).

So much this. I left another comment that touched on this.

I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months.

I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it.

Synology still scores very high on this single metric.

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.

> 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.

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.

I switched to QNAP and it's been fine.

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.

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.

If all you’re doing is an smb share i don’t see how a windows box is any more effort to maintain.

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

`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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

This sounds like a fun project to do. Maybe I will look into the technical feasibility of this.

SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.

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

> 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.

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 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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

Last year I bought a 4bay WTR PRO NAS with an N100. It idles at 13W, after some tuning (mostly putting drives to sleep after ~10min of inactivity). I briefly looked into TrueNAS/unraid, but I ended up installing plain Debian, with ZFS, pCloud for remote backups and running everything on plain docker (in my case samba, HASS, jellyfin, kodi, rutorrent and some custom apps of my own). All in all it took me about 8 hours to setup, and 0 issues since. 100% satisfied with my setup.

I've been using a CS381 for years which sadly now is EoL, don't know if they're replaced it, but it's an excellent case. Previously I was using a Fractal Node 304 but that was cumbersome for drive maintenance.

It has 8 hot-swappable SAS bays (also SATA compatible) and I run a Ryzen 9 3900X in 65W eco mode on an AsRock Rack X470 board which has another 8-12 SATA ports (can't remember the exact number, not used because I use an HBA for the bays), so connectivity for storage is high. There's 2 spaces for SATA SSDs on top of the drive bays and you could fit more in various spots if you tried, and 2 NVMe slots on the motherboard.

Also got a single-slot nvidia GPU in there and a 4-port Gb NIC to supplement the 3 existing Gb ports on the board itself (one is dual-purpose for IPMI), some models of the AsRock rack have dual 10G ports too.

It runs most of the time at around 90W which I think is exceptionally low for the performance available, and can go to about double that when the GPU is in use, still very reasonable.

I would say cases like the Fractal Node 304 or something like the HL4 / HL8 from 45homelab would be the best suited candidates.

Regarding mainboards - models from CWWK with lots of SATA ports have been trendy lately. But there are reports of problems. The other options are either using some obscure supermicro mainboards with lots of ports or using a HBA for expansion.

I want to mention a possible middle ground here: UGreen NAS Storage. All but the smallest model come the OS on a seperate M.2 drive. If you disable the watchdog in BIOS, you can use the models like a normal Server This would give you:

* 3x M.2 slots * 4, 6 or 8 SATA bays * N100 (4 bay), Pentium Gold 8505 (4 bay), i5-1235u (6 & 8 bay)

The M.2 slots are connected rather slow, but good enough for OS/app drives.

For example, my plan for the next NAS would be the 4-Slot N100 variant with TrueNAS. One M.2 SSD for boot, Two M.2 SSDs for Apps/Server duties in mirroring and the 4 drives in Raid-Z1.

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 have the Jonsbo N1 on my Amazon “DIY NAS” list.

However, once my DS415+ dies, I’m currently more inclined to go with a TerraMaster F4-423 NAS and replace their OS with something else. I’ve read that this TerraMaster model is basically an Intel NUC with a SATA card. And their OS is on a flash drive plugged into an internal USB port - so, very easy to change/replace.

I’ve also read that UGREEN devices should be easy to replace the OS on. So, that’s another option I keep in mind.

If you're fine losing the NVMe slots to NVMe-SATA, I recently found this: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1737570-thinknas-6x-hdd-nas...

Requires a bit of tinkering but the idea of plugging a 1L-format computer to turn it into a multi-disk NAS is quite attractive.

I wanted a small form factor for my homebrew NAS and Jonsbo N3 is the case I ended up with a couple of years ago. I couldn't find anything smaller that would let me have at least 6 disks. The Asus ITX motherboard I bought second hand had only 4 SATA ports and I bought a m.2 sata adapter to get an additional 4 ports.

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.

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.

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

Don't know any by heart, but when I was researching for myself recently, this is what I did.

Go to your favorite computer parts retailer website. Go to the Computer Cases category. Filter by desired number of 3.5" bays. Pick from the lot.

its not the smallest, but the Fractal Node 304 is nice IMHO.

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.

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.

I’ve been looking at a minisforum n5 pro for a while, but it’s got a lot of horsepower and wouldn’t just be a nas.

10g ports, latest amd, hopefully freebsd works okay on it…

Ugreen has no encryption support which is quite a pain for storing personal data :/

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

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?

> 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!

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

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.

You can use Synology Hyper Backup (or any cloud backup program) and an AWS S3 compatible provider, such as Backblaze.

It's a pain to set up and keep it up to date though.

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

About a year ago I did the opposite, I bought an ASUSTOR and noticed the software was terrible, didn't want to fiddle too much with it because it was within return to store range still. Returned it and got a Synology. Then they released their updated plans a while later.

Asustor were pretty useless when mine stopped working, and had a pretty bad ransomware incident where they did a lot of blaming users for their own buggy software. I won't be buying from them again.

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

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!

Why would you need to do anything? Why do you think you'd be impacted?

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??

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!

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.