Synology or Rasp PI 4 for home NAS?

Curio · 15 Feb 2021 at 18:52

Looking to get a basic NAS setup for the tens of thousands of photos we have. Currently have some stuff in the cloud and a couple of external drives I manually backup to once in a while. Can't make up my mind between the entry level Synology or building one (for less than half the price) using a Raspberry Pi 4 and a couple of USB 3.0 drives I already have. Speed isn't too vital, and it won't be streaming media or anything like that. Main goal is to be reliable, easy to access from multiple devices, and low maintenance. The Pi sounds like a fun little project, but I don't want to be nursing it constantly.

Anybody used either / both and have any thoughts? Cheers!

iamtheoneneo · 16 Feb 2021 at 17:43

Synology. You get one power cut and the pi will often need to be rewritten. Iv given up with them as an always on device.

Undesirable · 18 Feb 2021 at 11:01

I have a QNAP NAS and a separate external RAID enclosure that integrates with it (QNAP TR-002). A previous model NAS went bad (not the HDDs) and the OS wouldn't boot / migrate to the new NAS that I replaced it with. Nightmare getting the data back, and a lot of Linux commands. Long story short, the external RAID enclosure was a lot more convenient than the actual NAS when it came to getting back up and running after a failure, even though I was using RAID-1.

deshepherd · 18 Feb 2021 at 14:01

Alternative halfway house is to get a microserver, stick disks in that, install your favourite variety of Linux and start adding the packages you need for your NAS requirements ... though from quick scan looks like HP microservers are a bit more expensive now than when I got one!