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?
tecleandor · 1h ago
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.
Shank · 38m ago
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?
tecleandor · 36m ago
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
dansmith1919 · 10m ago
> 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?
kace91 · 32m ago
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.
lostlogin · 3m ago
> 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.
jraph · 23m ago
Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?
mrb · 1m ago
[delayed]
codeflo · 1h ago
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.
atlasduo · 1h ago
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.
fx1994 · 1h ago
this hits so hard
deadbabe · 1h ago
It’s not a lot of money left on the table though, the lion’s share of it has already been taken.
bartread · 1h ago
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.
quantummagic · 52m ago
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.
wulfstan · 36s ago
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.
M95D · 1h ago
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.
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.
M95D · 24m ago
I think we have different definitions of what "low power" means.
justincormack · 18m ago
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.
_zoltan_ · 7m ago
SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.
extraisland · 36m ago
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.
M95D · 25m ago
15W with or without the PCIe SATA? And it's still 10W too much.
interstice · 7m ago
Why 5W?
FredFS456 · 41m ago
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.
fx1994 · 59m ago
yup, thats why I alwys end up with microatx board, it just works, it draws power but does the job I need
iamshs · 39m ago
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.
mjg59 · 1h ago
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.
charles_f · 34m ago
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?
mjg59 · 32m ago
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.)
CPLX · 38m ago
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?
tianshuo · 35m ago
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.
buibuibui · 1h ago
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).
conradfr · 39m ago
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.
rcarmo · 19m ago
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.
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.
Hamuko · 1h ago
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.
fragmede · 34m ago
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.
Shank · 44m ago
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.
theshrike79 · 1h ago
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 =)
mbirth · 56m ago
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.
plqbfbv · 8m ago
Mine lasted a good 7y+ before it showed the yellow light of death. I also managed to fix it with the resistor soldering =)
nness · 1h ago
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.
bayindirh · 1h ago
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?
PlaneSploit · 1h ago
Xpenology exists remember (running Synology OS with no Synology hardware)
b3lvedere · 26m ago
It's a pain to set up and keep it up to date though.
amiga386 · 1h ago
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?
glic3rinu · 1h ago
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.
alias_neo · 59m ago
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.
zeroflow · 1h ago
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:
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.
No comments yet
mbirth · 1h ago
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.
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.
gsa · 1h ago
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.
rpcope1 · 59m ago
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.
LoLFactor · 1h ago
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.
celeryd · 1h ago
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.
walthamstow · 1h ago
Assume that's an Intel Mac Mini?
detaro · 1h ago
its not the smallest, but the Fractal Node 304 is nice IMHO.
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 :)
Kototama · 1h ago
You can use Synology Hyper Backup (or any cloud backup program) and an AWS S3 compatible provider, such as Backblaze.
AndrewDucker · 52m ago
I'm not seeing anything saying that you can't use third-party drives. Am I missing a blog post from Synology somewhere?
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!
omgmajk · 55m ago
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.
lmm · 1h ago
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.
It looks like Deadbolt also hit QNAP and Terramaster.
bayindirh · 2m ago
Also, it looks like only units which are accessible from the internet are hit, but isolated units did not get hit.
bayindirh · 46m ago
I can just install TrueNAS and be happy, though. I'm not afraid of configuring things.
ramon156 · 1h ago
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
bayindirh · 1h ago
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.
dvdkon · 1h ago
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.
bayindirh · 1h ago
Plus, 4 SSD slots and 16GB ECC RAM which is upgradeable to 64GB. That thing is a sleeper.
hum3hum3 · 1h ago
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 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?
mvdtnz · 1h ago
Why would you need to do anything? Why do you think you'd be impacted?
tern · 1h ago
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) 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
wraptile · 1h ago
time and time again people fall for proprietary lock-in to the point where it's hard to exert any sympathy.
khanan · 1h ago
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.
zer00eyz · 1h ago
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!
kotaKat · 58s ago
That's why I love and miss Drobo. Storage that "just worked" :(
DocTomoe · 2h ago
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.
gbtw · 1h ago
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.
actionfromafar · 1h ago
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
MarioMan · 1h ago
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.
zer00eyz · 1h ago
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.
brnt · 1h ago
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.
radicality · 1h ago
Have you already tried tinkering with the smb settings on both the local and nas config like here:
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.
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.
Looks like we killed that site. Some header loads sloowly, but I get 'too many connections' instead of any article text.
makeitdouble · 50m ago
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.
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?
On products you can buy TODAY, you find:
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.
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
But don't you love it when companies invent their own security instead of using battle-tested open-source systems?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 =)
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
No comments yet
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.
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.
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.
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!
It looks like Deadbolt also hit QNAP and Terramaster.
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.
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move (servethehome.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706
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
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
They must've had a massive brainfart in the management at that company.
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!
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.
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.
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.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102064 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101442 https://gist.github.com/jbfriedrich/49b186473486ac72c4fe194a...
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.
>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/
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.