Synology’s telegraphed moves toward a contained ecosystem and seemingly vertical integration are certain to rankle some of its biggest fans, who likely enjoy doing their own system building, shopping, and assembly for the perfect amount of storage. “Pro-sumers,” homelab enthusiasts, and those with just a lot of stuff to store at home, or in a small business, previously had a good reason to buy one Synology device every so many years, then stick into them whatever drives they happened to have or acquired at their desired prices. Synology’s stated needs for efficient support of drive arrays may be more defensible at the enterprise level, but as it gets closer to the home level, it suggests a different kind of optimization.
It’s like they don’t understand their demographic.
They absolutely do. But it’s a symptom of capitalism. They must seek higher and higher profits each year. And this is one of their ideas to seek higher profits…
Growth imperative. Greed will never be satiated.
The worst is that it will probably increase profit or a quarter or too while running the brand to the ground.
That’s capitalism, baby! /s
That would be my exit sign
Mine too. Already priced a new build half the price just the data migration I’m not looking forward too.
That’s a massive shot in the foot.
As a Synology owner, I already had enough - they have arbitrarily cut customer support to sanctioned jurisdictions, leaving me without the support they promised and I expected when paying for a device.
Next one will definitely be built from the ground up.
They are probably betting they will make more money from businesses. I.e., actual pros, vs prosumer.
I do like my Synology NAS I bought 10 yrs ago, but these days there are more and better alternatives for people who dont really need to pay for the support and stability.
The enshittification/rent seeking continues. Nothing is sacred.
If I had known how bad it’d get I would’ve chosen a different field to work in. Sure, I can avoid it in my private life but on the job it’s like I’m in some kind of hostage situation.
“Oh hi there customer! You know our product your users are accustomed to will only come as a subscription from now on and it’ll also be really bad and force full screen ads. We’ll push two updates per day because our unpaid interns are so agile. Bugs? Oh, no, we call those ‘micro disruptions’. They’re a feature but don’t cost extra! How much the license costs? Well, how much do you have? Yes, it’ll be that much.”
I get why they do this sort of thing but it didn’t stop us re-adding video station and h265 support back into our Synos.
Someone already made a script to overwrite the existing compatible drive checker so someone will write a new script to fix the new one.
Oh, snap, bringing me the magic I need, but didn’t know to look for.
I’ve been refusing to update because of video station. Looks like I’m saving your comment for later.
The real shame is they didn’t open source the app on decom.
Lmao what is Synology smoking. I have used their hardware in the past, now I’m so glad that I chose a Nextcloud setup for my home storage solution.
Also why does the nonsense reasoning for these limitations always include “security”. That’s a rhetorical question btw, I know they are just making shit up.
This comment by Frodo Douchebaggins in the Ars Technica comments sums up my newfound disrespect for Synology pretty well:
Suck a turd, you enshittifying sons of bitches.
I own a Synology NAS. It’ll be the first and last one I buy. When I need an upgrade I’ll go back to building my own again.
I was thinking of buying a Synology system. I was actually looking at prices this past week.
That being said, I’ve got an old 2019 desktop running Windows that is coming to the end of its support, that I was considering making a Linux machine.
How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?
How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?
It really depends on what you want out of it. I personally installed ProxMox on an old gaming machine (DDR3 RAM old lol) and have an Open Media Vault virtual machine running on it with access to my ZFS mirrored pair of storage drives.
Enabling Samba support in Open Media Vault gives you a nice little NAS. I believe it’s okay to install bare metal if you really want to also.
It also has a nice Docker interface, so although I should probably not bundle services together so tightly, it runs things like Jellyfin for media, Paperless NGX for document storage, and NextCloud AIO for a convenient (if slightly resource-hungry) interface.
ProxMox lets me do fun things though, like back up the VMs, spin up virtual machines for PiHole ad blocking and Klipper for controlling my 3D printer.
My most important data gets synced to a subscription to a service called iDrive as my offsite. Pretty affordable for 5TB and my own encryption keys. :)
I want to stress that I’m not an IT professional or anything either. If you’re reasonably comfortable with Linux and understand some basic networking, I’d say at least getting Proxmox and/or Open Media Vault up and running so you can access it on your home network isn’t too hard.
Outside of that, and if you want HTTPS and stuff? There’s lots of guides but I would recommend using TailScale instead of opening any ports to the web.
Sorry if this post was meandering but hope it gave you a little bit to go on! :)
It’s not too complicated but you don’t get some things for free like with Synology. It require work to setup scripts for offsite backup for example whereas Synology has a backup app with a UI.
For storage, I used to run ZFS in a raidZ2 configuration. If you do this then I suggest having a cron job running a script that can alert you if the pool is unhealthy. This is again something that Synology does for free.
You could also look up trueNAS core and see if that’s something that fits for you.
Really depends on what you want out of the system, what you can spend and how much time you want to spend on it.
My old z390 itx system has a 16x PCIE to 4x m.2 card - leveraging an m.2 to 5x SATA adaptor with the built in SATA adaptors has given it plenty of space.
Considering I can grab m.2 to 6 SATA adaptors and fill the remainder of the slots that’s a decent chunk of drives from a single PCIE x16 slot.
Software is another kettle of fish and a good way to timesink, I’d rather not give too much of my personal experience as there are so many ways to skin that cat.
I have mini-ITX board in a mini case. 4 bays, 16 GB RAM of DDR3-L and a slow but very low TDP CPU. This thing is very low power but it’s on 24/7.
Runs home assistant with zigbee, rtl433 and whatever it detects over the network. A few older game servers (minecraft, minetest/luanti, quake 2), miniDLNA, … Arch Linux, so rolling release and always up to date with the latest versions.
Served me greatly and I haven’t upgraded because it still does what I want and I can’t find any modern CPU with a TDP this low.
I’ve heard good things about Qnap
but I also heard good things about Synology…
Also on my first and last I think.
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Critical Synology Vulnerability Let Attackers Remote Execute Arbitrary Code
Just build your own. It’s easy. Move on.
Well, I had been considering one, but I guess not
It sucks, because all things considered, they’re great little devices. I really like mine.
That’s what I’ve heard… Getting real tired of people building great products only for corpos to find a way to make it terrible for an extra buck
Def agree.
Died 1990s, born 2025 - welcome back Mac hard drive firmware lockdowns
i was considering these devices for my home media set up, now im just building my own NAS with some old parts i had laying around and using open source software.
fuck this shit.
This will not end well for them.
They should be careful, they’re just selling small form factor computers with removable drive bays. Standing up and unraid or a true Naz isn’t all that difficult. And then there’s plenty of competition out there ready and willing to eat their lunch.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You are paying for reasonably well polished software, which for non technical people makes them a very good choice.
They have one click module installs for a lot of the things that self hosted people would want to run. If you want Plex, a onedrive clone, photo sync on your phone, etc just click a button and they handle installing and most of the maintenance of running that software for you. Obviously these are available on other open source NAS appliances now too so this isn’t much of a differnentiator for them anymore, but they were one of the first to do this.
I use them for their NVR which there are open source alternatives for but they aren’t nearly as polished, user friendly, or feature rich.
Their backup solution is also reasonably good for some home labs and small business use cases. If you have a VMware lab at home for instance it can connect to your vCenter and it do incremental backups of your VMs. There is an agent for Windows machines as well so you can keep laptops/desktops backed up.
For businesses there are backup options for Office365/Google Workspace where it can keep backups of your email/calendar/onedrive/SharePoint/etc. So there are a lot of capabilities there that aren’t really well covered with open source tools right now.
I run my own built NAS for mass storage because anything over two drives is way too expensive from Synology and I specifically wanted ZFS, but the two drive units were priced low enough to buy just for the software. If you want a set and forget NAS they were a pretty good solution.
If their drives are reasonably priced maybe they will still be an okay choice for some people, but we all know the point of this is for them to make more money so that is unlikely. There are alternatives like Qnap, but unless you specifically need one of their software components either build it yourself or grab one of the open source NAS distros.
I see! Thanks so much for the thoughtful response definitely seems like there’s a use case for people who might be more creatives with a need for storage rather than self-hosting enthusiasts who want to mess around in a homelab.
The prices are still a bit eye watering but you pay for software support for sure.
1U form factor, 4 disks, using 7w whilst idle, decent enough CPU to run 1 Linux VM
I bought an RS822+ for as a veeam Linux repo.
I can’t make that myself, or I don’t know how.
It was stupid expensive and if it wasn’t the business paying I would have probably put a bunch of disks into an HP elite desk.
I think the biggest draw to Synology now is the ultra low power consumption. Yeah, you could totally repurpose an old PC, but it’s crazy to run 500W perpetually. The reason they use old Celeron processors is the low power draw. In time, hopefully, RISC V can produce some low cost systems that would slot in well for this use case.
Obviously everything depends on use case. I definitely am a tinkerer and prefer options. I’d never run a jellyfin server off a synology NAS cause… Well cause it can’t transcode very well. So efficiency is less of a concern than processing power.
I get now that my questions was a bit moot, obviously some people will pay a premium for a narrow use case if it brings reliability and ease of use.
Reliability. We’ve put them in small businesses and they do their job very well VS a frankenpc NAS.
I have 2 8-Bay devices at home and they are so good for what they are. Silent, low power, bit of fancy utility for those that like it but reliable and quality. They age very well.
I also use the surveillance station with my cameras which all connected ootb fine. (mix of brands)
