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’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.
Damn it I already own own one. I guess I funded this cunt corporate move
Me too. Invested in my setup last year :(
That would be my exit sign
I get why they do this sort of thing but it didn’t stop us re-adding video station and h265 support back into our Synos.
Someone already made a script to overwrite the existing compatible drive checker so someone will write a new script to fix the new one.
Synology is like Ubiquity in the self-hosted community: sure it’s self-hosted, but it’s definitely not yours. End of the day you get to deal with their decisions.
Terramaster lets you run your own OS on their machine. That’s basically what a homelabber wants: a good chassis and components. I couldn’t see a reason to buy a Synology after Terramaster and Ugreen started ramping out their product lines which let you run whatever OS you wanted. Synology at this point is for people who either don’t know what they’re doing or want to remain hands-off with storage management (which is valid; you don’t want to do more work when you get home for work). Unfortunately, such customers are now out in the lurch, so TrueNAS or trust some other company to hold your data safe.
Lol! Not like uGreen put any roadblocks to running your own OS (like disabling the watch dog feature in the BIOS and some other setting to enable custom boot).
And you don’t have any fan control on their NAS. Either you estimate and configure correcrly or you need to schedule downtime.
Actual servers let you live tune (some of) the power settings. Synology supports changing the fan profile in the live OS.
The enshittification/rent seeking continues. Nothing is sacred.
If I had known how bad it’d get I would’ve chosen a different field to work in. Sure, I can avoid it in my private life but on the job it’s like I’m in some kind of hostage situation.
“Oh hi there customer! You know our product your users are accustomed to will only come as a subscription from now on and it’ll also be really bad and force full screen ads. We’ll push two updates per day because our unpaid interns are so agile. Bugs? Oh, no, we call those ‘micro disruptions’. They’re a feature but don’t cost extra! How much the license costs? Well, how much do you have? Yes, it’ll be that much.”
i was considering these devices for my home media set up, now im just building my own NAS with some old parts i had laying around and using open source software.
fuck this shit.
Remember, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with buying a used 7th gen Intel PC and filling that with [insert drive of choice]. An i7-7700T is still more powerful than even the newer Synology units.
Is the main appeal of prebuilt NAS cases the aesthetics and the reduction of DIY concerns?
Because they seem to me like overpriced and underpowered computers. Most tech-oriented folks I know have more powerful PCs in a closet somewhere that they could easily convert into a NAS
Edit: some very thoughtful responses thanks y’all! I definitely see the appeal for people who just need something that doesn’t need tinkering or care significantly about power draw and noise.
Reliability. We’ve put them in small businesses and they do their job very well VS a frankenpc NAS.
I have 2 8-Bay devices at home and they are so good for what they are. Silent, low power, bit of fancy utility for those that like it but reliable and quality. They age very well.
I also use the surveillance station with my cameras which all connected ootb fine. (mix of brands)
I think the biggest draw to Synology now is the ultra low power consumption. Yeah, you could totally repurpose an old PC, but it’s crazy to run 500W perpetually. The reason they use old Celeron processors is the low power draw. In time, hopefully, RISC V can produce some low cost systems that would slot in well for this use case.
Obviously everything depends on use case. I definitely am a tinkerer and prefer options. I’d never run a jellyfin server off a synology NAS cause… Well cause it can’t transcode very well. So efficiency is less of a concern than processing power.
I get now that my questions was a bit moot, obviously some people will pay a premium for a narrow use case if it brings reliability and ease of use.
You are paying for reasonably well polished software, which for non technical people makes them a very good choice.
They have one click module installs for a lot of the things that self hosted people would want to run. If you want Plex, a onedrive clone, photo sync on your phone, etc just click a button and they handle installing and most of the maintenance of running that software for you. Obviously these are available on other open source NAS appliances now too so this isn’t much of a differnentiator for them anymore, but they were one of the first to do this.
I use them for their NVR which there are open source alternatives for but they aren’t nearly as polished, user friendly, or feature rich.
Their backup solution is also reasonably good for some home labs and small business use cases. If you have a VMware lab at home for instance it can connect to your vCenter and it do incremental backups of your VMs. There is an agent for Windows machines as well so you can keep laptops/desktops backed up.
For businesses there are backup options for Office365/Google Workspace where it can keep backups of your email/calendar/onedrive/SharePoint/etc. So there are a lot of capabilities there that aren’t really well covered with open source tools right now.
I run my own built NAS for mass storage because anything over two drives is way too expensive from Synology and I specifically wanted ZFS, but the two drive units were priced low enough to buy just for the software. If you want a set and forget NAS they were a pretty good solution.
If their drives are reasonably priced maybe they will still be an okay choice for some people, but we all know the point of this is for them to make more money so that is unlikely. There are alternatives like Qnap, but unless you specifically need one of their software components either build it yourself or grab one of the open source NAS distros.
I see! Thanks so much for the thoughtful response definitely seems like there’s a use case for people who might be more creatives with a need for storage rather than self-hosting enthusiasts who want to mess around in a homelab.
The prices are still a bit eye watering but you pay for software support for sure.
I remember arguing with some nerd that this overpriced shit was not fucking worth it and my build based on old server parts I got from a local computer recycler was infinitely superior in every way
I wish I saved that post so I could reply with this link. I feel so validated. Never trust companies. It’s why I say you should never fuck with plex, even if it is a bit easier to deploy than Jellyfin.
Yeah… Never had a specific “server” certified hardware and always repurpose my hold hardware stuff. Never failed me !!
However, there are some functions specific to NAS’ like low power and other stuff people mention but I already forgot.
IMO all this NAS and certified server stuff is good for Enterprise shit and the like… But for homelabbing it’s probably overkill and way to much overpriced for the little gain…
Except maybe for the ease of use and plug and play function? Each one it’s own I guess !
There’s plenty of N100/N350 motherboards with 6 SATA ports on AliExpress, grab them while you can
Do you happen to know about a decent solution for 8 SATA ports on a mini-ITX board?
The only reason I even have “server” parts is because they were dirt cheap at the recycling center. Before I used this my rig was an old pc from a doctors office I worked at they were going to throw away from like 2009. It was awful spec wise but it did the job. My current build is overkill but I wanted to play with vms and local LLM stuff and the hardware was cheap, so why not?
low power is definitely something to consider though. That said there are some people that have made impressive builds out there. There are some low power builds on the unraid forums that use even less power than one of these things. It’s a bit more up front because it relies on some niche hardware but the power usage is so low it’s maybe worthwhile if you use it for years
I just fail to see the benefit of these. Ease of use for sure but assembling a pc is really not difficult and installing an OS is not hard either. And an os like unraid or truenas is pretty simple to use, they hold your hand a lot. Like I get that running Debian is something not everyone wants to do but then it’s like, just don’t do that then?
Frankly if you’re capable enough to configure the dockers you’d run on one of these, like plex or Jellyfin, I would think you could handle those things??
Oh yeah sorry ! For the ease of use part I ment the NAS stuff which already comes bundled with all the necessary software to keep things easy but less customizable !
Yeah if you get IT enterprise hardware for free it’s kinda similar to repurposing, sooo that’s a great deal and lucky you !!!
But I would never put 1$ myself into specific server stuff ! Except if one day I want to contribute to the self-hosted/opensource community and host something like newpipe that needs to be publicly available.Then yeah, proper hardware and software stuff is mandatory !
Sorry if my comment came by rude, that wasn’t my purpose !
No need to be sorry, I did not take it that way, we are best friends forever. More to clarify that there are a ton of old server parts out there for dirt cheap if you’re okay with saving e waste from the trash heap.
You are absolutely right that homelabs are totally fine on consumer grade hardware but check server parts too, you might be surprised at the deals you find, especially locally. My build was a 10th gen intel build and cpu/mobo/32gb ecc ram/heatsink missing fan was $125. That was several years ago though and now we got tarrrrriiifffsss
Hi. I’d like the word “pro-sumer” banned. In perpetuity.
Lmao what is Synology smoking. I have used their hardware in the past, now I’m so glad that I chose a Nextcloud setup for my home storage solution.
Also why does the nonsense reasoning for these limitations always include “security”. That’s a rhetorical question btw, I know they are just making shit up.
This comment by Frodo Douchebaggins in the Ars Technica comments sums up my newfound disrespect for Synology pretty well:
Suck a turd, you enshittifying sons of bitches.
This will not end well for them.
Welp, guess I definitely won’t be buying synology again in the future. I was planning to transition to a rackmounted NAS at some point and synology is overpriced in that category anyway but this puts the final nail in for me.
It’s a shame because I quite liked the simplicity of their UI.
The Unifi rackmount NAS looks pretty sweet imho.
That thing looks almost too good to be true for 500. What’s the drawback?
Not available in europe? (It actually is available, I just checked)
Loud as fuck?
Bad Software?
You have to sacrifice a goat to it every time a drive hits 829374930 revolutions of its third platter.
Only 7 bays and small rack size. It’s a NAS not like Synology + series.
Is that supposed to be a con? I don’t even use 4 bays currently and would be perfectly fine with a 4 rackmount NAS. 7 HDD bays sounds great to me
You asked the drawback on a thread about Synology.
Doesn’t look like it hooks into their unifi ecosystem which would be a big negative for me.
Edit: the pro does but what that even looks like idk
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.
