Synology Drive for Storage

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mikkhail

n00b
Joined
Aug 23, 2012
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Hi Guys,

I made a post sometime back about a home lab setup, I am in the middle of purchasing two machines for an ESX cluster.

Instead of a Whitebox for a NAS, would a Synology drive work instead? or would I be better off with a Whitebox and build ZFS / Openfiler?

Thanks,
Michael
 
Like NetJunkie said easy to use.
It also depends on how much storage you need or plan to need.
Some of the Synology systems are pretty pricey and thats without the HD's.

If its just for learning it might be cheaper to do your own with a spare computer laying around.
 
I don't own a Synology, but do own a NAS device from a Synology competitor as well
as a "whitebox" FreeNAS system.

Either will work fine.
I only run NFS on both.

Benefits of a dedicated NAS:
- set it up and forget about it
- things go wrong ... you have a support option
- usually quieter, cooler, less power draw (depending on parts used compared to the whitebox build of course)

Benefits of a Whitebox NAS:
- build it with the hardware you want/need
- likely to be cheaper to start off with and upgrade when desired


My "whitebox" NAS is a Dell PowerEdge T110 with
8 x 2.5" drives on a PERC H700 + 4 x 3.5" drives on motherboard SATA.
1 x dual port Intel Gb NIC

Populated with 8 x 2.5" drives, It cost ~$200 more than my 6-bay dedicated NAS device _empty_ !

I can easily increase the number of NICs in it or upgrade to 10Gb NICs
I can add a second controller (which I initally had 2 H700's for 16 drives)
I can increase memory to 16GB for better caching

... just things to think about ... ultimately it will come down to your use plans.
 
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