Great hardware but when the software is a job to administer I have a hard time justifying builds like these.
My Synology NAS for example has 8 GB RAM and a J4150 processor. Runs about 15 containers, Wireguard and on top DSM (which is Synology's OS). Usually idles around 1-3%.
Software makes all the difference - DSM has been by far the biggest benefit and surprise to me and I would be deprived of time with anything else. I'm running TrueNas as a second backup server but it no way compares to DSM. Sometimes I don't want to trawl through logs and trial and error just to get a basic CRON setup to backup a file off another server, there's countless examples where DSM has just worked.
I really think Synology is missing a trick here, they clearly have software that is miles ahead of everything else and customizable should you need to. They should be more like Microsoft of the NAS world, making DSM run on non Synology platforms, or at least making it easier to do yourself. It's a great OS and it sells itself and can easily be a way to up sell stuff like Active backup for business.
> Xpenology is a bootloader for Synology’s operating system, called DSM (Disk Station Manager), and is used on their NAS devices. DSM is running on a custom Linux version developed by Synology ... Xpenology creates the possibility to run the Synology DSM on any x86 device like any PC or self-built NAS. So, you can benefit from the powerful multimedia- and cloud features of DSM without buying the hardware NAS from Synology. Many people prefer this because they can pick out their own (more powerful) processor and RAM to handle things like transcoding video.
My point about Synology being the MS of NAS is actually about this. Spend a little development time making DSM more portable but with a caveat of no support on non-Synology hw.
I think we'd still arrive at a weird place where we see people buying Asustor or other NAS hw just to run DSM even if it's not supported and but not a complete hack.
People buy convenience and DSM offers everything NAS related it really well.
I suppose they have internal plans to make DSM go the other way and lock out attempts like Xpenology. They aren't late either as other rival is still miles behind.
I suspect focusing on a set of hardware and making it work really well is part of what makes the OS so good. Hardware configs explode in a combinatorial fashion, making it impossible to test everything once you have more than a few options.
Agree, its a super nice UI and UX. First time I used them was around 2010 and it was already a joy to use. Would be kind of nice to have a Synology DSM front end to cloud IaaS.
I deeply appreciate Synology handling away all the Linux jank I would otherwise have to deal with myself. Easily worth the price tag of buying one of their NASes.
Specifically, I have a DS1520+ with five 16TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro HDDs in a RAID6 config (have another, sixth identical HDD as a cold spare in the closet) and it has been running absolutely flawlessly for the now two years I've had it.
My track record with Linux installations otherwise is "I keep killing them by just breathing on them, god damn.". I'm a walking Linux genocide horror show.
Convience is nice and something they do really well. Rocksolid for me for 3+ years. A recent issue with a my failed cache drive. Within 2 days the issue triaged and investigated by their devs. The experience was great.
My biggest problem with Synology continues to be their Kernel version being very old. They were still shipping version 4.4 this year and only the new product this year gets version 5.10.
And you dont get Kernel version upgrade in between DSM.
Are you sure? Synology do a very bespoke BTRFS and backport a lot, even though it's incredibly complex to do so. Their BTRFS is not standard, or rather it's not the standard version for a given kernel version.
My Synology NAS for example has 8 GB RAM and a J4150 processor. Runs about 15 containers, Wireguard and on top DSM (which is Synology's OS). Usually idles around 1-3%.
Software makes all the difference - DSM has been by far the biggest benefit and surprise to me and I would be deprived of time with anything else. I'm running TrueNas as a second backup server but it no way compares to DSM. Sometimes I don't want to trawl through logs and trial and error just to get a basic CRON setup to backup a file off another server, there's countless examples where DSM has just worked.
I really think Synology is missing a trick here, they clearly have software that is miles ahead of everything else and customizable should you need to. They should be more like Microsoft of the NAS world, making DSM run on non Synology platforms, or at least making it easier to do yourself. It's a great OS and it sells itself and can easily be a way to up sell stuff like Active backup for business.