I know this topic has been done ad nauseam but I’m stuck in a decision loop that looks something like this…
“…OK screw it, I’m going to stop talking about it just get a [non-enterprise/non-rack] Synology/QNAP NAS. I rent an apartment and they have a much smaller footprint and low power draw out of the box. Damn, it really costs that much for 4 bays with entry level hardware? NIC and RAM upgrade costs how much??? What if Synology abandons that model? Where’s the fun in this solution anyway…”
“…OK I’m going to look at going DIY instead. It’s more interesting, more customisable, virtually unlimited support, can be cheaper. Man that case is big and ugly… hey that ITX case looks alright. Wow consumer ITX boards are expensive, rather limited, and look like they will suck power too. Woah OK enterprise ITX mainboards are not in my budget. Hmm that aliexpress NAS board looks alright, but could be a dice roll. Do I really have time for this anyway? OK screw it I’m getting a Synology…”
And so on… I get all the pro’s and con’s of each, and that’s part of the issue!
Ultimately homelabbing is a hobby, and if I wasn’t such a nerd I would have bought a turnkey solution already or just paid Big Tech for the solutions I require.
On the other hand, the storage is a critical part of the infrastructure and could suck the fun out of the hobby. Maybe it’s best to pay for a solution created by people smarter than me (and paid for their time), so I can spend time on fun things that aren’t mission critical.
So I want to hear from fellow nerds, which path did you chose and do you regret it?
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I’m kinda both.
I have a QNAP at home that served me well for 8 years, a big QNAP (forgot model number) in my lab at work with a dozen or so 3.5”, 4x 2.5”, and expansion for pcie. I find expansion and growth difficult. Like my old QNAP can’t do 10gbe and is stuck with an Atom cpu and a few GB of ram.
It’s expensive especially compared to buying something like a 28c/256GB ram Dell R730, an HBA, and a EMC disk shelf that I now use at home for TrueNAS. For ~$600, I have up to 16 2.5” and 15 3.5” bays, 4x 10gbe, more ram than I know what to do with, and much more capability. Porting my ancient WD Red 5400rpm from my old QNAP into this NAS I’m getting ~400MBps because of the cache and its bananas.
I went Turnkey(ish) - No regrets.
Aquired a used WD MyCloud EX4100 with no drives for relatively cheap. Slapped 4 x 4TB drives in it and haven’t looked back since.
I have root ssh access to it so I can tinker a bit like installing zerotier to have access to my files wherever I am.
Having a specialized appliance for file storage is really nice and keeps things simple. I’ve built many storage servers over the years, and it was…refreshing to let someone else do the work for once.
I’ve built multiple DIY NASes both virtual and physical. No regrets.
I have some COTS NASes too, they do their job well. I only use them as a NAS - as in just storage. All of my COTS NASes are all secondhand, some of them are over 10 years old, still works ok, a bit slow for bit transfers but for $100 AUD for a 4 bay with 1T drives included or one of them, I’m not complaining lol
DIY, only regret was the case I used. Silverstone CS351. Just don’t. Its a massive pain to work in, and getting to the lower internal two HDD bays requires tearing the whole thing apart. I picked it because it would hold everything I was using without mods. Its just a pain to work on.
I work in IT, I did both. Started with TrueNAS but ultimately went with Synology. Main reason being, I just want my NAS to work and be simple/reliable. I dont want to have to tweak it, fix bugs with work arounds or search forums for obscure ways to fix issues.
My data is important and my time is just as important. If I didnt work in IT it might be different, but spending all day fixing and working on computer shit just to come home and continue doing it, no thanks. Same reason why mechanics always have the shittiest cars.
Synology is like the iPhone of NAS, its just works. Its more expensive, doesnt have all the bells and whistles, but what it does do, it does very well.
Over the last couple of years I’ve gone from a HP Microserver to a DIY Frankenbox in a Fractal Define to a Supermicro CSE-846. No regrets at all. I can now fit all the disks I could possibly want.
I had a QNAP. It was terrible and slow. Would not recommend. Now I have a DIY TrueNAS, would 100% recommend.
i went diy NAS, no regrets, then went with a qnap nas to save on the power bill, also no regrets - the only thing i used either of them for is a network fileshare, though, so there’s that
DIY all the way. I am currently running openmediavault 6 on an old G5930 CPU in a Coolermaster CM690 case with 5 x 6TB drives. It’s been rock solid for a few years now. This is for storage only. I have a separate DL380 G7 currently running my self hosted stuff. Most of the storage is used for media with my critical files being backed up on 2 remote locations as well.
I spend a lot of time myself going through this same thing. Was looking at QNAP and Synology and then potentially a DIY using Jonosbo case.
In the end I ended up going with the DIY solution, but using an old computer (i7 4790k with 32GB ram). The case has enough room for 8 hard drives. Currently only have 2 1TB hard drives running in zfs mirror. Going to be adding 3 8TB HDD in a mirror in the next few days.
I have been running Truenas Scale, and I don’t regret it. So far it has been doing exactly what I need. I run about 10 VM’s off my desktop/workstation. All storage for them is on the NAS which is handed off to it via NFS. And then some SMB shares for myself and the family.
I have been running Truenas for about a month now and don’t have any regrets. I use it purely as a NAS. No VM’s are hosted on it.
After a couple of years of DIY nas I got a Synology because I had kids and the risk of being the cause of data loss became unacceptable. So now I DIY compute (VMs, k8s) instead 😜
No regrets though, I learnt a bunch along the way and stopped before I lost anything irreplaceable (mostly)
Well my day job is managing Linux systems so it was no brainer, I run other workload on the NAS too, not just file shares, and doing that on off the shelf NAS would just be a PITA.
Wow consumer ITX boards are expensive, rather limited, and look like they will suck power too.
The what now?
A NAS is *way* too easy for even a novice to build to justify buying it as an appliance. Set up a software RAID and filesystem with LVM+XFS or ZFS or bcacheFS. Install the NFS server userspace utilities. Use the in-kernel NFS server. Add a line or two of configuration to /etc/exports.
Done. That’s what, fifteen minutes of work tops?
No survey choice to only see the results without voting? I don’t have a NAS but want to see what people voted. I guess I just vote for a random choice?
Haha sorry! I realised that after I submitted and had to vote randomly myself to see the results…
Synology DS1821+. I had a go at making a hyperconverged setup with an HPE DL380p G8, loud and power hungry. Also HPE are dicks with their hardware, can’t boot off the array when in passthrough mode.
Got a SuperMicro machine to try the same thing, again, loud and hungry.
The Synology is quiet and sips power. While it has no hope in hell of doing ZFS and the interface is proprietary as hell, SHR2 and BTRFS just works for me. I have a large network accessible space for “linux isos” and iSCSI for Proxmox.
I need to get rid of those 2 servers…