Synology’s telegraphed moves toward a contained ecosystem and seemingly vertical integration are certain to rankle some of its biggest fans, who likely enjoy doing their own system building, shopping, and assembly for the perfect amount of storage. “Pro-sumers,” homelab enthusiasts, and those with just a lot of stuff to store at home, or in a small business, previously had a good reason to buy one Synology device every so many years, then stick into them whatever drives they happened to have or acquired at their desired prices. Synology’s stated needs for efficient support of drive arrays may be more defensible at the enterprise level, but as it gets closer to the home level, it suggests a different kind of optimization.
I own a Synology NAS. It’ll be the first and last one I buy. When I need an upgrade I’ll go back to building my own again.
I was thinking of buying a Synology system. I was actually looking at prices this past week.
That being said, I’ve got an old 2019 desktop running Windows that is coming to the end of its support, that I was considering making a Linux machine.
How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?
How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?
It really depends on what you want out of it. I personally installed ProxMox on an old gaming machine (DDR3 RAM old lol) and have an Open Media Vault virtual machine running on it with access to my ZFS mirrored pair of storage drives.
Enabling Samba support in Open Media Vault gives you a nice little NAS. I believe it’s okay to install bare metal if you really want to also.
It also has a nice Docker interface, so although I should probably not bundle services together so tightly, it runs things like Jellyfin for media, Paperless NGX for document storage, and NextCloud AIO for a convenient (if slightly resource-hungry) interface.
ProxMox lets me do fun things though, like back up the VMs, spin up virtual machines for PiHole ad blocking and Klipper for controlling my 3D printer.
My most important data gets synced to a subscription to a service called iDrive as my offsite. Pretty affordable for 5TB and my own encryption keys. :)
I want to stress that I’m not an IT professional or anything either. If you’re reasonably comfortable with Linux and understand some basic networking, I’d say at least getting Proxmox and/or Open Media Vault up and running so you can access it on your home network isn’t too hard.
Outside of that, and if you want HTTPS and stuff? There’s lots of guides but I would recommend using TailScale instead of opening any ports to the web.
Sorry if this post was meandering but hope it gave you a little bit to go on! :)
Really depends on what you want out of the system, what you can spend and how much time you want to spend on it.
My old z390 itx system has a 16x PCIE to 4x m.2 card - leveraging an m.2 to 5x SATA adaptor with the built in SATA adaptors has given it plenty of space.
Considering I can grab m.2 to 6 SATA adaptors and fill the remainder of the slots that’s a decent chunk of drives from a single PCIE x16 slot.
Software is another kettle of fish and a good way to timesink, I’d rather not give too much of my personal experience as there are so many ways to skin that cat.
I have mini-ITX board in a mini case. 4 bays, 16 GB RAM of DDR3-L and a slow but very low TDP CPU. This thing is very low power but it’s on 24/7.
Runs home assistant with zigbee, rtl433 and whatever it detects over the network. A few older game servers (minecraft, minetest/luanti, quake 2), miniDLNA, … Arch Linux, so rolling release and always up to date with the latest versions.
Served me greatly and I haven’t upgraded because it still does what I want and I can’t find any modern CPU with a TDP this low.
It’s not too complicated but you don’t get some things for free like with Synology. It require work to setup scripts for offsite backup for example whereas Synology has a backup app with a UI.
For storage, I used to run ZFS in a raidZ2 configuration. If you do this then I suggest having a cron job running a script that can alert you if the pool is unhealthy. This is again something that Synology does for free.
You could also look up trueNAS core and see if that’s something that fits for you.
I’ve heard good things about Qnap
but I also heard good things about Synology…
Also on my first and last I think.
Well, I had been considering one, but I guess not
It sucks, because all things considered, they’re great little devices. I really like mine.
That’s what I’ve heard… Getting real tired of people building great products only for corpos to find a way to make it terrible for an extra buck
Def agree.
Damn it I already own own one. I guess I funded this cunt corporate move
Me too. Invested in my setup last year :(
Such a silly move. Like shooting yourself in the foot to sell more bullets
I had Synology for a second but built my own server, went UnRAID, and never looked back.
This is the way.
Started messing around with docker containers on a small Synology box a few years ago, dumped Synology with a quickness in favor of just building an Ubuntu-based NAS. I’m running TrueNAS Scale bare metal now and getting ready to dump it to go back to another roll-my-own Linux + ZFS setup, possibly using Cockpit and the ZFS extensions from 45 drives.
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Yeah I expected that this would happen. They already did this with RAM. They just rebrand RAM, sell it for a way higher price and add a check. When they brought their own branded HDDs, I knew they will pull of the same scam.
Building an own server isn’t that more expensive and you don’t have to deal with the whole lockout with Synology. For example I had quite the issue to access hardware. I wasn’t able to get Home Assistant running on my NAS. The issue was my Zigbee USB Stick. I got it running to the point where I was able to send commands (e.g. turn on or off lights) but the status didn’t came back. I threw it on my Pi3 (now Pi5) and zero issues.
The next NAS is self build. Probably Proxmox as base, with truenas or so as main server and the rest depends on what I might need.
I have a synology I bought 3rd party ram (not synology) and it works fine. Same with drives just bought some seagate drives. Probably going to upgrade from a 4 bay to a 12 and I don’t see compatibility of ram being an issue. I just don’t feel like building a whole racked system I just want to plug and play and forget. As of now tho only thing I lose is warranty cause I’m using not “certified” ram and drives.
For me at least I never considered a synology nas it seemed like the apple of home servers. Especially when I enjoy building machines anyway there was no point. Although I can definitely see the appeal for some people.
I wonder if there are more open solutions that don’t require building a machine from scratch.
This is why I chose an ASUS nuc + external bay-storage for my home networking needs, felt like synology NAS would be a limiting factor.
So you built your own NAS, then. NAS is just an acronym, “Network Attached Storage”. Not a singular line of products.
That said - I also feel the same way about Synology and the other “all-in-one NAS” brands. Expensive for what they are, which is essentially an incredibly cheap PC with a built in toaster. I built my NAS out of a 2014 Mac Mini (running OMV) and a Sabrent USB-C 4-bay drive dock, and even full of WD Reds, that entire rig is literally half the price of a DS920+. And more powerful.
Why would anyone even use Synology?
Just buy a pc with big hard drives
My personal reasons for buying a synology were ease of use, reliability and power usage.
I had previously played around with TrueNAS in a VM using an external USB HDD Enclosure for storage and I just wanted something reliable. With TrueNAS I often ran into issues with user permissions one way or another and the Synology software is incredibly easy to use and foolproof.
Without technical know-how or experience in general using NAS, Synology is a good first-time option. All apps are ready for immediate use. And don’t forget the majority of computer users don’t even know what a NAS is and they simply want to store files for remote access.
I’m not saying that they won’t do this, but so far their actual actions have ended up pretty decent. I’ve had 3 Synology devices over the last 12(?) years, and while they are not perfect, they have been very good at delivering what they promised over the long haul. All of them still work fine. Even the old guy delivers.
Guess I am going to be taking my “pro-sumer” dollars elsewhere.
Plllbbbbbb @ Synology - I just got one of these and added 2x 4TB ssds this week. I’ll eventually add 2x more but for now I’m set: https://www.gmktec.com/products/intel-twin-lake-n150-dual-system-4-bay-nas-mini-pc-nucbox-g9
Fingers crossed that it doesn’t blow up or crap out.
Are we overreacting? Hasn’t Synology always had a list of “certified” drives for their NAS’, which end up being the same HDDs we would tend to use anyway?
I can understand that they don’t want people using any garbage storage drives, which could increase failure and make Synology NAS’ look unreliable.
Unless something has changed, this is how they’ve always done it, just like how every laptop manufacturer will say which RAM and storage works best (for reliability and performance) on their machines.
They’re disabling features
Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.
What you might lose from using non-Synology-approved hard drives could include pool creation and support for any issues. De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives, Synology’s press release suggests.
Yes, but is this them being assholes, or them wanting to make sure that users aren’t making their system unreliable? I think there would be a huge distinction there.
For example, say a user wanted to create a cache drive using an SSD. But because the user doesn’t know better, they buy the cheapest crap they can find, install it, and set up caching. But because they’re using cheap shit, the drive is slow and the user reports poor performance, system hangups, and other instability.
Wouldn’t it be in Synology’s best interest to say “here’s a list of drives we know will give you the best experience.”?
Now, Synology has already done that, but users are ignoring it and continue to use poor storage drives expecting to use pretty sophisticated features. What now? Well, Synology disables those features.
For example:
De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives
Um, yeah. That makes sense. If a shitty hard drive can’t reliably get firmware updates through the NAS, why on earth would they want to keep that option enabled? Same with lifespan analysis. If a crappy drive isn’t using modern standards and protocols for measuring and logging errors and performance data, Synology really can’t “enable” this to work, can they?
That’s what I think is happening. Although, this could be just greed, too. I don’t think there’s any real problem for most users, unless they say that we can’t use fairly common, high-quality NAS drives from Seagate or WD and must use their own branded drives. I’d have a huge problem with that.
I think it’s a mix of the two. There are legitimate reasons, and commercial reasons
Synology does not manufacture its own hard drives but instead certifies and rebrands drives from Toshiba and Seagate, leaving out only Western Digital among the world’s largest manufacturers.
