I personally think that in 2025, you should treat the NAS as a purely storage product and buy your hardware from that perspective. TrueNAS or UniFi’s new NAS product fulfill that goal. From there, supplement your NAS with a Mac Mini or other mini-PC for storage-adjacent tasks.
Synology’s whole business model (arguably QNAP’s too) depends on you wanting more drive bays than 2 and wanting to host apps and similar services. The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier.
But the fundamental suggestion I make is to consider a NAS a storage-only product. If you push it to be an app and VM server too, you’re dependent on these relatively closed ecosystems and subject to the whims of the ecosystem owner. Synology choosing to lock out drives is just one example. Their poor encryption support (arbitrary limitations on file filenames or strange full-disk encryption choices) is another. If you dive into any system like Synology long enough, you’ll find warts that ultimately you wouldn’t face if you just used more specialized software than what the NAS world provides.
> The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier.
Yeah, but then you have a PowerEdge with all the noise and heat that goes along with it. I have an old Synology 918 sitting on my desk that is so quiet I didn't notice when the AC adapter failed. I noticed only because my (docker-app-based) cloud backups failed and alerted me.
Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world.
> Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world.
I would recommend a mini-ITX NAS enclosure or a prebuilt system from a vendor that makes TrueNAS boxes. iXSystems does sell prebuilt objects but they’re still pricey.
This is what I need to research, I don't understand why we need NAS hardware at all, aren't the controllers and drivers in an average box running Linux enough for the same software raid that Synology does?
You don't - similarly you don't need a Mac Book to run OS X (technically at least); You buy the full-flag NAS or MacBook because it's a bundled supportable quantity that reduces your cognitive load in exchange for money. Synology for an SMB or home lab is pretty good stuff and you don't spend (as much) of your time editing smb.conf, or configuring the core backup services or whatever. Some clickops and you're done - and you can do a lot - under the hood it's still Linux (or at least mine is), you can SSH in and do damage -- the hardware isn't "special", it's not necessarily substantially better than another system that could handle a similar number of drives in any measurable way.
I have a synology because I got tired of running RAID on my personal linux machines (had a drobo before that for the same reasons) - but as things like drive locking occur and arguably better OSS platforms available, I'm not sure I'd make the same decision today.
I perceive the main benefit to the NAS hardware to be ease-of-management in terms of RAID via a software stack, and of course, physical hardware slots for holding lots of disks. You can easily build a NAS with pure Linux/FreeBSD and a case with disks inside.
Synology’s whole business model (arguably QNAP’s too) depends on you wanting more drive bays than 2 and wanting to host apps and similar services. The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier.
But the fundamental suggestion I make is to consider a NAS a storage-only product. If you push it to be an app and VM server too, you’re dependent on these relatively closed ecosystems and subject to the whims of the ecosystem owner. Synology choosing to lock out drives is just one example. Their poor encryption support (arbitrary limitations on file filenames or strange full-disk encryption choices) is another. If you dive into any system like Synology long enough, you’ll find warts that ultimately you wouldn’t face if you just used more specialized software than what the NAS world provides.