Synology NAS or is their an alternative

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sx_turbo

sx_turbo

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Hi all,

Talking to. Guy at work and he mentioned he has a server, the chap in question isn't a tech guy perse so I asked him about it, he said he had a Synology NAS setup and it sounded amazingly easy way to store and access photos and videos. He says he just opens an app and adds content off his phone, when on his computer he transfers files to the Nas.

It sounded so easy thought I might look at getting one,.till I saw the price of them.

I'm not really clued up on Nas setups, I've heard of them mentioned but stayed clear of it, but now my curiosity has peeked,

Is there other Nas setups that allow as easy an access as the Synology setup?
 
The three major makes are Synology, QNAP and Asustor. Synology arguably has the best OS but the oldest hardware designs; Asustor is the opposite and QNAP somewhere in between. I'm an Asustor fan and I'd recommend looking at the Nimbustor 2 Gen 2 AS5402T. There are cheaper 2-bay models but they don't have M.2 slots as well and most have non-expandable RAM. If these aren't priorities for you then the Drivestor range may suit you.
 
I have a DS920+ (4 bay Synology) so I could get some drive redundancy goodness as I have historically bad luck with HDD's. Set up is really easy.

I think the only your friend is possibly missing in their setup is if they made the NAS a backup target In Windows you can have the copying of files with updates at regular intervals. This also an element of being able to walk back to old versions of files. There is undoubtedly a way to do that in Linux too and can be done with pretty much any NAS as the target.
 
Snapshot said:
The three major makes are Synology, QNAP and Asustor. Synology arguably has the best OS but the oldest hardware designs; Asustor is the opposite and QNAP somewhere in between. I'm an Asustor fan and I'd recommend looking at the Nimbustor 2 Gen 2 AS5402T. There are cheaper 2-bay models but they don't have M.2 slots as well and most have non-expandable RAM. If these aren't priorities for you then the Drivestor range may suit you.
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I'd agree with this Asustor your money goes on the hardware, Synology the ecosystem, QNAP bang on the middle.
I really like Asustor there's now than enough apps for most people.
 
I have had a 2 bay Synology NAS since 2015. The DSM operating system is excellent. I had no experience with NAS when I got it, however I was up and running in no time. I even experienced a drive failure (WD red) and was able to swap out the drive and the OS rebuilt the RAID array seamlessly with no downtime.
 
If you only need basic NAS go for the Realtek based Synology, I have one and it's still blazing fast with quad core. They're a lot cheaper than the Intel models. But you can't upgrade RAM nor sideload with Docker. But 2GB is fine.

I use it for music, video and data storage, and in the past used it as LMS server and it coped really well, very fast, only starting to run out of puff with very large music library. That's probably more fault with LMS (as it was never very efficient) not the NAS itself.
 
Thanks for the replies,

I'm tech savvy but not as tech savvy as I was in my youth, think it's just life ant time, so the easiest option to setup and use would be best.

It looks like I've got some research to do.

I was thinking of getting a 4 bay NAS, but that was for future upgradability more than anything, but maybe dropping to the 2 bay would be sufficient.
 
There is also Terrmaster and Ugreen as pre built nas options, both are a bit newer on entering the nas market but Ugreen is getting some good reviews from what I've seen, terramaster seems pretty solid for the price albeit less refined.

You do have another option if you have an old pc laying around.... truenas, unraid (paid) or hexos (paid) which are basically 'nas' oriented linux distros. I'm personally running an unraid server these days and have used synology in the past, I chose not to go synology and went self build due to the synology nas I wanted having stupid arbitrary restrictions on drives you could use (not sure if they've reversed that stance yet).
 
I really rate synology. My DS214 has been going strong over a decade now. Still gets software updates. I recently installed Synology Surveillance Station on it so it runs my security cams as well now.

Did run HomeAsisstant on it too, but moved that to a separate device (NUC) for convenience.
 
lsg1r said:
There is also Terrmaster and Ugreen as pre built nas options, both are a bit newer on entering the nas market but Ugreen is getting some good reviews from what I've seen, terramaster seems pretty solid for the price albeit less refined.

You do have another option if you have an old pc laying around.... truenas, unraid (paid) or hexos (paid) which are basically 'nas' oriented linux distros. I'm personally running an unraid server these days and have used synology in the past, I chose not to go synology and went self build due to the synology nas I wanted having stupid arbitrary restrictions on drives you could use (not sure if they've reversed that stance yet).
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I'm testing a Terramaster F8 SSD Plus at the moment. The hardware is great but the OS is not. I'm told the version 6 that it comes with is much better than earlier versions but it's taking some getting used to compared with Asustor's ADM and there are very few apps.
 
Snapshot said:
I'm testing a Terramaster F8 SSD Plus at the moment. The hardware is great but the OS is not. I'm told the version 6 that it comes with is much better than earlier versions but it's taking some getting used to compared with Asustor's ADM and there are very few apps.
Click to expand...
From what I've read you can just pull the usb out and run something like unraid/truenas on a lot of terramaster models. Looks like it can be done with the f8 ssd plus from a quick google.
 
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