I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project".
DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.
Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.
Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.
Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.
All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.
> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading.
That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since.
I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.
I swapped my dead C2750 (Supermicro A1SAi-2750F) board for my cold-spare C3558 (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F) and was right back running again. I guess if you're talking about an appliance it's a little different, but this was just my home firewall/router FreeBSD+PF+Jails machine.
And actually a good reminder for me to eBay up another cold spare, because I totally forgot to.
Same here. Still rocking a DS415+ from 2015. Had to solder a 100ohm resistor to work around the Intel Atom C2000 flaw. Has had a new set of spinning rust in that time too. It's also connected to UPS so will power down if there's an extended outage. Stuck on DSM 7.1 but it does the job.
As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.
I'd be far more weary of the application level services provided by Synology than of the kernel in this context, as long as the vendor backports the various fixes and you update the kernel you should in theory be fine. But the applications get far less scrutiny.
What you really never ever should do is expose your NAS to the internet, even if vendors seem to push for this. Of course you'd still be vulnerable to a local compromised application on another machine that is on the same network as the NAS. It's all trade-offs. My own solution to all this was quite simple but highly dependent on how I use the NAS: when not in use it is off and it is only connected to my own machine running linux, not to the wifi or the house network.
It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM. It really is something special. It's worth a small premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the concerns as everyone else here and will be considering other options.
I find that Linux NAS and router project require essentially no babysitting. You do have to do some initial setup work, but once it's done, there's no maintenance (other than replacing failed hardware) for years and years.
I just lost a bunch of files on mine due to their Drive software. I was setting up a folder to sync and just clicking the folder in their file explorer when setting it up isn’t enough to actually select it, so the sync went one level higher than it should have. That decided to wipe out the folders on that level instead of trying to sync them back to my computer, for whatever reason.
Also for whatever reason when you use Drive files don’t go into the regular recycle bin. They go into the Drive recycle bin…but only if you have file backups (whatever they call them, where it saves copies of files if they’re changed) enabled. I didn’t, for that folder.
DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.