Thoughts on Synology vs real server?

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t4keheart

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I need a NAS. I've been considering 3 options, synology, real rack-mount server, or home-built. I'll put a budget on this of ~$500.

Synology:
I've always had cheap NAS/DAS devices but this time if I buy a pre-built NAS it's synology or nothing. I was looking at the 718+ because of the ability to upgrade... which costs $400. I already have 2 4TB drives to go with it if I go this route.

Dell PowerEdge (2012):
I noticed that on amazon you can pick up ~8-year old dell poweredge servers with dual xeon processors & 32 gb of RAM for around $2-300. To me, this looks like a steal! these were once very capable enterprise grade servers, which would probably still be overkill for a home network.

Home Built:
Finally there's the option of building a home-server from scratch which is probably the least attractive and will end up costing me the most money, as I know I won't be able to settle for low-end parts. i was considering something like a raspberry pi with a bunch of disks attached to it but I have not heard good things about this.

The question:
The primary purpose of this device is going to be for storage and a media server. I am a software dev and sys admin so I'm sure I would like to be able to run a plex server, have a LAMP test bed, maybe host some websites and run some VMs (if I don't get the synology) etc. Just a basic home server for somebody who is techy to do what they will with.

So which would you choose and why? I'm not all the way acquainted with the features included with the synology, but I know people love them and swear by them. I'm sorta leaning towards the poweredge but then again, that's 8 year old hardware.

Any input?
 
Dell Poweredge servers are awesome, but be prepared to run into compability issues. Once you get everything figured out though they can be a real work horse. I have a few AMD based ones. They're.. finky to say the least.

Home built, IMHO, is the way to go when building a NAS. You know all the hardware for the system, can easily upgrade individual components without doing a lot of research to find out if x is compatible with x server running x bios so on and so forth.
I run a Engineering Sample Xeon that's 10c, 20 thread in my NAS. It has 48GB DDR3 and around 22TB of storage across 8 (might be 9) drives in a Fractal Design case. I run VMs, Plex Media Server, FTP server and use it for storage of (personal files, photos, as well as my plex library. Run out of room? Just swap one of the smaller HDDs with a larger on, move data to the larger drive and move on.
 
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Synology units are nice and super easy. However if you are planning on something like plex and transcoding a intel chip with newer quick sync will get you a ton of transcoding streams going. If you are doing vms then maybe 3xxx ryzen will help there. I am not a fan of old Dell servers for the reasons mentioned above, but if you have space and can get them quiet might be worth it.
 
Huh, thanks for the input. I've deployed a few dell servers in my day and never really noticed any issues when doing so- but that was always with brand new equipment in enterprise networks getting esxi or something deployed immediately, probably an entirely different situation than what I'd be dealing with at home. I think I'm leaning towards the synology, pretty inexpensive and will accomplish what I'm after with the least amount of fuss.
 
I put together a home build NAS over the holidays. I grabbed a used mini-itx i5 (4570) + MB combo, along with 16GB of memory, stuck it in a used Fractal Design Node 302 (which looks like is now the 304) case and i was set. Cost me around $250, $100 for the MB/Processor, $70 for the case, and $70 for the memory, but i already had an extra power supply lying around. I also grabbed a 12TB HDD, but i bought one of the WD External Drives when it was on sale for 179 and shucked it. Stuck FreeNAS on it and it has been running 24/7 since then with no issues.
I especially like having the expansion slot for if 5/10GBe gear becomes more affordable, since i could see the NAS being the primary device that i could see having much benefit. I do not think that the Synology is exactly upgradeable in that regard.
 
I agree, the more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards a home-built solution. The synology's seem nice in regards to a plug-and-play solution that allow you to do some additional things, it would be even better to simply have a full-on home built "server" so that I can do exactly what I want to do without worrying about 'apps' from thei synology package manager/app store.

In addition to a NAS/file server, I would like to use it as a seed box, LAMP server, plex server, and whatever else. Will probably just throw ubuntu server on a relatively cheap build with a bunch of storage to accomplish what I'm after.

Thank you for the suggestions.
 
t4keheart said:
I agree, the more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards a home-built solution. The synology's seem nice in regards to a plug-and-play solution that allow you to do some additional things, it would be even better to simply have a full-on home built "server" so that I can do exactly what I want to do without worrying about 'apps' from thei synology package manager/app store.

In addition to a NAS/file server, I would like to use it as a seed box, LAMP server, plex server, and whatever else. Will probably just throw ubuntu server on a relatively cheap build with a bunch of storage to accomplish what I'm after.

Thank you for the suggestions.
Click to expand...
FYI,
FreeNAS has a plugin for Plex, as well as the ability to create "Jails", which you could use for any of the functionalities that are needed that do not have a plugin.
 
Yeah I've heard a lot about FreeNAS... maybe I'll have a look at that as an alternative to ubuntu server.
Thanks for the tip.
 
Depending on how quickly you think your media needs will grow the one drawback to freenas/zfs in general is that you either have to replace all of the drives of your vdev with larger capacity or make a new vdev (usually with equivalent space/drive count).

Synology/qnap units will allow you to increase your storage one drive at a time rather than having to backup/restore the data or add a bunch of disks. Draw back to this is they are pricey units if you get ones capable of transcoding (you could also consider a cheap nas unit and a compute node separately and just using the NAS as media data access solely).

Similarly to freenas not sure if you've looked into unraid but its a solid option, it does have a license cost, but will it allow you to mix and match drive sizes as well as add drives one at a time to increase storage.
unraid is what I'm using personally and it was the best of both worlds for my use case of heavy media and backup, my plex and all other applications run as a docker container in unraid.
 
Honestly, this is such a hard decision.... I have a Synology DS 1513+ with 5x WD Red 3 TB drives, giving me just under 11 TB of space after RAID.

I started this thinking I was going to be generating a bunch of video and photos etc. that was going to fill it, realistically, no.... I ended up using what was leftover on mine as an NVR for my Hikvision security cameras and honestly, I'm pretty happy with that...

I also have played around with setting up an NFS share to use as a VMWare data strore which honestly worked fairly well except for the odd time where I had to remove and re-add it from ESXi on my ESXi host. For my usage, this wasn't really a big deal... If you have plans to run VMs, you could easily carve out some space on the volume and present an iSCSI LUN and you might have better luck. For me that wasn't necessary and was more of a pain than it was worth since I already had a volume configured. Regardless... it is pretty cool that it is an option if you want to take advantage...

My Synology DS1513+ has been a fairly hands off device once I turned on auto update and enabled RAID consistency checks on a scheduled basis. It sends me updates telling me everything is OK regularly. I also connected it via USB to my APC UPS and it sends me an e-mail when there is a power failure and coordinates shutting down gracefully once the UPS is about to go dead. That was achieved basically by plugging the UPS into the NAS as far as I recall (it has been running for 5 years now). Also, as I mentioned, I am using this as an NVR, this enabled me to run an NTP server (seamlessly without extra configuration as it is installed when you setup surveillance station) as well as maintain a separate network for my Hikvision POE cameras. The NAS provides an additional network connection (actually 4x but I really only need 2x), an NTP server and a DHCP server. So now when I plug my POE camera switch into the NAS, all my cameras get IP addresses, show up in Surveilance Station and get their NTP time from the NAS, while being isolated from the internet. Remote access to Surveillance station is handled via Synology's quick connect system, so no need to forward ports on my router... Honestly I'm pretty satisfied with this solution so far...

Personally I would highly recommend against old enterprise server hardware because it is not power efficient, is usually noisy and you don't get any support when you buy it (BIOS, drivers, software, hardware warranty etc.).

If you don't like what you see with Synology and want to build something from scratch using unraid or freenass or a combination of things using ESXi, HYPERV, linux KVM etc. cool. Decide how much you want to invest into the solution both from an up front configuration point of view and and ongoing maintenance point of view....

Personally, I like hands off (mostly) approach the Synology NAS offers and that does what I need at home. Sometimes I experiment with things in a VMs and I might use ESXi on another machine and use the copious amount of storage on my NAS via NFS and that is enough for me, maybe not for you, you'll have to decide on that for yourself. I think Synology NAS units are generally worth it once you get up to the 5 bay DS units, those lower end units are questionable IMHO unless you literally want a file share to copy stuff to. If I was buying today, I'd be looking at the DS 1019+. That gets you a decent CPU, RAM and network adapters and drive bays for a flexible, power efficient (24/7 operation, keep in mind) solution.

My friend has been a long time data center guy and has gotten some old but nice, decommissioned hardware over the years and was using it for a home server / NAS. He actually found that by turning off his one storage server, he saved $150/month on electricity costs... Don't forget about what it costs you to run whatever you choose to buy for your home server 24/7.... It will add up over time.... My synology NAS uses < 50 watts most of time with all 5x drive bays populated... These old servers can draw upwards of 600 watts.... I'm not saying all hardware you may buy is like this, but enterprise hardware (especially the old stuff you are finding for $200-$300) isn't designed with power efficiency in mind.
 
I have a DS212j that is still getting updates and still working fine. It's kinda slow these days and I've unconfigured/uninstalled more and more services as each new major version of DSM gets heavier and heavier to keep it running well. Still works great though.
 
kinda old post but.. my ds412+ is still running well. One or two users transcoding is fine. Much more than that it gets iffy.

I've since dropped that and went straight to smb browsing with VLC on my fire stick. it just works and no messing around with plex, kodi or whatever.

Ease of use is just awesome.

building your own though is a great geek factor though :)
 
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