Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Is the main appeal of prebuilt NAS cases the aesthetics and the reduction of DIY concerns?
Because they seem to me like overpriced and underpowered computers. Most tech-oriented folks I know have more powerful PCs in a closet somewhere that they could easily convert into a NAS
Edit: some very thoughtful responses thanks y'all! I definitely see the appeal for people who just need something that doesn't need tinkering or care significantly about power draw and noise.
I am a tech oriented person, I work in IT, and a Syno ticks the boxes in many respects.
Low power draw. Power efficiency is very important to me, especially for something that runs 24/7. I don't know how efficient self-build options are these days, but 10 years ago I couldn't get close to the efficiency of a good NAS.
Set and forget. I maintain enough systems at work so I don't really want to spend all of my free time maintaining my own. A Syno "just works", it can run for months or years without a reboot (and when it does need one, it does it by itself overnight), and I can easily upgrade or swap a dead drive in a couple of minutes. When the entire NAS dies I can stick the drives in a new one and be up and running almost instantly.
Size and noise. I don't have a massive house, so I need something that can sit on a shelf and be unobtrusive. In our last house it was literally sat in the living room, spinning drives constantly, and nobody was bothered by it.
The Syno I have is plenty good enough to run a bunch of Docker containers and a few VMs for all of my self hosted stuff, and it just does the job efficiently, quietly, and without complaining or needing constant maintenance.
I don't like this creep towards requiring branded drives and memory, though I'm pretty sure it's not legal in the EU. Regardless there are ways around it.
Yeah I agree, I set up a synology as a little summer project and I didn't want to go out and source parts and put a nas Linux distro to do everything myself. Synology is newbie friendly and kind of holds your hand to do everything even dynamic dns. However, if I were to get another nas, I would be more comfortable setting it up myself.
We use DS223j's at work for our clients as backup targets.
Fast to set up and configure from a total beginner up to experienced IT personal.
And I set up NFS, Samba and ACLs in my own Debian NAS.
It aint so sleek and braindead-simple like a Syno does it.
One question in regards to your noise comment: What drives are you running? I have a synology with 2 toshiba mg08 16tb drives and those things are unbearably loud when reading or writing. A lot of that obviously comes down to the drives themselves but I also kind of blame the plastic chassis for probably resonating with the noise and not being better at soundproofing.
It's an 8 bay unit with six drives that are a mix of WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, all NAS grade drives, basically. The other two slots have SSDs for hosting the aforementioned containers and VMs.
The largest drives I have are 4TB though, so maybe the larger capacity ones are louder? I also ran the fan profile in whatever the quietest setting is.