Synology NAS

[ubercal]

Hi Guys,

I'am looking to buy a Synology NAS for my homelab (Shared storage for virtualization) ....

Anyway i noticed that Synology has a list of "compatible" HDD/SSDs .For SATA SSDs the only supported drives are Synology specific (They "dont" support 3rd part vendors unlike there HDD drives .Now the prices for these SATA SSDs are crazy expensive .So the the question is , has anybody successfully installed a non Synology SATA SSD into one of the units , and were there any issues ?

A 2TB 2.5" SATA SSD costs +- 14k.

 

[Exaelea]

Supported Sata SSD shouldnt matter one bit in this day and age, its not like the NAS is from pre-2000 where mechanical drives had slightly different sector, or was it partition, alignments causing issues on modern ssd's used on ancient machines.

Check the specs on the SSD. They should be well over 10 000TBW if they are charging that price, if not, avoid it and get other high endurance ssd drives.

No point going for a ssd nas if the thing dies in a year due to low endurance.

edit: the IOPS also matters if you want performance, but the high endurance ssd's usually have decent iops anyway

 

[SauRoNZA]

It's just a marketing punt to sell their own rebranded crap.

You can put any drive in there.

 

[ubercal]

Supported Sata SSD shouldnt matter one bit in this day and age, its not like the NAS is from pre-2000 where mechanical drives had slightly different sector, or was it partition, alignments causing issues on modern ssd's used on ancient machines.

Check the specs on the SSD. They should be well over 10 000TBW if they are charging that price, if not, avoid it and get other high endurance ssd drives.

No point going for a ssd nas if the thing dies in a year due to low endurance.

edit: the IOPS also matters if you want performance, but the high endurance ssd's usually have decent iops anyway

All the SATA SSDs for this specific NAS are "enterprise" which explains the high cost. Wish i could just put a decent consumer drive like the Samsung EVO in there , which costs around R2500.Looks like the NAS firmware is what prevents the non compatible SSDs from being detected.

 

[RaptorSA]

As others have said... it's just marketing crap.

I looked into it extensively since I was also considering buying one for the longest time but luckily I ended up not wasting my money on something like this, at R10-14K they're a ripoff if you take the piddly hardware performance you get into account, even though I know you're supposedly paying for the Synology software convenience.

I just added an external USB 3.1 2X 3.5 Inch drive dock to a 1Liter i5 8500T intel micro PC I had lying around and set up a ZFS mirror inside Proxmox (two old Seagate 3TB Green consumer drives I had laying around and haven't touched in years), then made it a Samba share on the network... it works like a champ and there's endless stuff I can now do (and is busy doing) with that Hypervisor cluster.

Some people install Truenas or Freenas inside Proxmox to do the pooling and sharing but I find that to be unnecessary and it adds additional abstraction layers, unless of course there's a good reason you need it.

A similar Micro PC combined with the drive docks is way more powerful and almost half the cost of Synology NAS. Some of these Micro PC's have dual NVME slots so I'm sure you'll be able to set up a caching on one if you wanted to. I don't bother with mine.

Also, the drives easily saturate my 1Gpbs network connection over USB 3.1 so no need for faster SATA interfaces to the drives unless my entire network gets upgraded, which is not going to happen anytime soon (I did look into that). Was a blast to set up too. Just a few LLM prompts and a youtube video here and there and you're golden.

If I need more storage in future I'm just doing to add more USB docks or I'll get some decent sized 2nd hand NAS drives so I can stick to mirroring, it's still going to be way cheaper than buying and populating a consumer NAS.













Full system power consumption (without monitor) during copying from the NAS is 30-40Watts.

 

[XL1000]

I run two HP Microservers at the office with OMV Open Media Vault and they have run with WD Red drives for 5 years now without a single failure and I purchased the HDDs used. They only get turned off during the rainy season and other than that they work fine. I use Zerotier for users to connect remotely and Rsync for backup tasks. I backup to USB HDDs but the servers are configured in RAID for mirroring. Vey cheap to find an HP Gen 8 Microserver for around R3500 with a Xeon processor and 16GB RAM. Having said that, I will be moving everyone to a Unifi NAS the moment they become available commercially here in SA, as all my networks are Unifi, and connecting between sites is a breeze.

PS, I have a Synology 218J Two Bay NAS you could have for next to nothing if you are keen to try it.

 

[Hemps]

Diy Nas will be cheaper, not sure what presence Synology support has in SA.

Hexos - coming soon, supposed to be easier version of Truenas.
Openmedia Vault.
Rockstor.
Linux with cockpit-project installed.
Synology Arc on github is what I have used for years.

 

[ubercal]

Ok so i went ahead and splashed out on the NAS. Dont have the time anymore to muck around building a DIY NAS .Core focus is to run esxi , and want fast iscsi access.I will be running a 3 x intel nuc mini pcs in a cluster.Have purchased a 10Gb addon NIC for the NAS.The NAS will provide plenty of scability as ive only purchase 1 x 2TB SATA SSD for now , and i can still add a further 3 drives .Also you can purchase additional Ram modules and or NVME ssd drives for caching.So plenty of room for improved performance.

 

[ubercal]

I run two HP Microservers at the office with OMV Open Media Vault and they have run with WD Red drives for 5 years now without a single failure and I purchased the HDDs used. They only get turned off during the rainy season and other than that they work fine. I use Zerotier for users to connect remotely and Rsync for backup tasks. I backup to USB HDDs but the servers are configured in RAID for mirroring. Vey cheap to find an HP Gen 8 Microserver for around R3500 with a Xeon processor and 16GB RAM. Having said that, I will be moving everyone to a Unifi NAS the moment they become available commercially here in SA, as all my networks are Unifi, and connecting between sites is a breeze.

PS, I have a Synology 218J Two Bay NAS you could have for next to nothing if you are keen to try it.

Thanks for the offer , went ahead and purchased the Synology DS923+ .

​

 

[Hemps]

You wont be dissapointed by DSM 7, very stable and reliable.
If you want snaphots of your data remember to choose btrfs instead of ext4