Synology requires self-branded drives for some consumer NAS systems, drops full functionality and support for third-party HDDs
Are your files going to be safer with Synology hard drives?
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I don't regret building my home server with Unraid at all. It's great, use any drives, don't even have to be the same sizes.
The pricing is reasonable, but one issue is that they changed their pricing scheme recently to only give a year of updates for all but the costliest license. I was grandfathered in unless I upgrade my license, but it's something to consider.
The nice thing about their new licensing model is the cost of lower tiers goes toward license upgrades, i.e. you can start with the cheapest license and if you ever need to upgrade you're only paying the difference rather than buying a whole new license (assuming they don't change it again before then.) Reduces the upfront cost a bit.
Oh, that's definitely how it should be (but pretty much never is). That's good to hear.
I'm using Openmedievault and it works just fine. No need to spend money out put up with enshittification.
Interesting, I must have missed it when investigating. It seems a little "Linux power user"-y, though - is that accurate? It says for home office, but is it good for movies/music/etc hosting?
https://www.openmediavault.org/features.html
I can figure out how to get things done when I know the goal (I learned plenty of command-line, docker containers, etc setup with Unraid). So not a beginner. But to be honest, I can't even understand if the features on this "features" page are things that are important to me because I don't know enough acronyms and foundational knowledge, so it's a little imposing.
Not OP but I use it as my nas for my jellyfin stack and run docker containers on it just like unraid. It is less plug and play than unraid. Specifically to mirror the unraid array on omv, but it can be done. I used this site a couple years ago, it appears to have been updated, but hopefully will help. https://perfectmediaserver.com/
It's certainly not very user friendly in the initial setup. It took me quite a while to figure out how to set it up. But once that's done, it works very well.
I've never used Synology NASes, but one feature that Synology NASes have that I found interesting and unusual was their ability to glue drives of different sizes together, what they called "hybrid RAID". No single-drive point of failure, but permits for using drives of different size without wasting a ton of space.
While this isn't, internally, all that technically complicated to do --- internally, I understand that it's just slicing the disks up into a bunch of Linux LVM logical volumes and merging those into an md device, keeping in mind where the logical volumes are located. You can build something like it on a Linux machine with LVM and md. However, it isn't something that other NASes that I've seen provided.
Last I looked, Unraid couldn't do it, and QNAP couldn't do it.
Based on a quick search, it sounds like Unraid still can't do that.
tal, good to see you! I remember you for the "kagis real quick" comments you've left before! I actually started using Kagi because of you, and the assistant was a great help in getting my TrueNAS Scale setup, among many many other things. I actually love searching for things (most of the time) now! Thank you for enlightening me! :)
The thing I like about Unraid that's dead simple, which I'm sure more technically-minded people can do with many solutions, is use drives of different sizes as long as each drive is less than the size of the parity drive(s). Since content shares are automatically distributed across drives, and those drives are different sizes, is that not very similar functionality?
I guess my question is, is the hybrid RAID solution above different only in that the array presents as a single drive to the user, rather than a single (multi-drive-apportioned) share?
According to their site, the OS can only boot from a thumb drive. And if the drive fails you can only move the license to a new one once per year.
Why not allow it to boot from a small SSD or something?
I can't say I understand the reasons for that.
But the flash drive content is very minimal and in 2+ years of using it, anecdotally I haven't had any problems. The cache drive is separate (I use an SSD for that in addition to my 3.5" HDDs), and once booted my understanding is the entire OS is in memory, so it isn't a bottleneck. The OS flash drive is small and just settings, and one-click backup, so I don't have anxiety over data loss.
