Spec me a Synology

demon8991

demon8991

demon8991

Soldato
Joined
7 Jan 2003
Posts
4,458
Location
Gold Coast, Australia
Hello I am after a 4 bay Synology for a friend.

The only criteria I have is that it has to run Plex Media Server.

Transcoding is a nice to have but not essential as most of the viewing will be done within the network which will be wired and wireless ac.

What is the best bang for buck?
 
Buy a HP Microserver, they were previously at £110 after cashback but have for some reason jumped to 360ish... But if you can get a Gen8 second hand or wait for the price to come back down get one of them and use xpenology.

Synology is too over priced for it's hardware. XPenology gives you synology's interface on a microserver.
 
Will there be any limitations with going down that route.

Is the software identical to that on a Synology? Will all the apps work?
 
It is identical, there is a thread on here purely about xpenology and microserver... I have both (decommissioned my Synology now) but there is no difference, any apps work on it. It's so much better spec'd for the money, probably even still at the current price but if you wait I am sure it will drop again or pick one up second hand.

There is also the forum/people who make it with great support etc. The only thing to be weary of is when updates come out you sometimes need to update the boot image (you need to boot it from USB which tricks it into thinking it is a Synology) then the software is installed on the hard drives within.

You can't register with Synologys DNS for external access, but you can use the other providers listed like no-ip.com :)

All in all, you basically have no loss at getting a microserver
 
I have two Gen8s and two DS413js.

Both Gen8s are running XPEnology.

The Gen8 is significantly faster than the DS413j for both reads and writes (with the same WD Red HDDs) as well as the CPU and RAM - so the web interface is much more responsive and updating things like Plex libraries etc is much quicker.

I'm able to run all of the Synology apps on the Gen8s running XPEnology. Everything works well (better than on the Synology devices themselves).

Even at full price, I'd be tempted to buy a Gen8 over a Synology... given the Synology devices are £250-300 for the low end 4-bays.

But... I recommend being patient... this happens once in a while and then the next month, they're back on discounted offer and cashback deal... at less than half the price of the cheapest 4-bay Synology - they're an absolute steal.

There was also a good offer on the Dell equivalent recently, which comes with the same CPU for a similar price to the Gen8 or an even better CPU for only about £180 after cashback. The units are a little bit bigger, but still small. The Gen8 is barely any bigger than the DS413j.
 
Just double checked the Dell.. it's the T20.

The one with the Xeon has gone up to £250 after cashback... but you can get the one with the Pentium chip for less than £100 after cashback!

Absolute bargain...
 
No, I have 4x 6TB in one of mine.

HP only rate them to 3TB, not 4...

The other has 4x 4TB...

All that rating means is that they only tested them with 3TB drives as those are the only HP enterprise HDDs that were on the market when the Gen8 was released... they don't tend to go back and re-test.
 
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