“third-party HDDs”
In my day we just called these… HDDs. Anytime something so ubiquitous has to be labeled third-party, you know who the bad guy is instantly.
Third party ram, third party motherboard, third party cmos battery…
well after hearing this. when I buy a NAS i’ll be going with any brand except synology
Same! I was actually just looking at them. Glad I saw this first
I really love my Synology NAS (DS220+). I don’t anticipate needing to replace it anytime soon, but given how well it’s treated me, I would almost certainly replace it with a 2024 model instead of a newer one if I had to, given this new limitation.
This decision from them seems short-sighted, I hope they reverse it.
Turns out my next NAS will be a custom after all.
Looks like I’ll have to treat my current Synology like I treat my Brother printer. Reverently.
I bought a U-Nas case a while ago. Just a small NAS-style PC case with eight 3.5" disk bays. I built it up and played around with it, but never put it into service in my homelab. It just sat there (off) with Truenas or something on it for testing. Well, it was a good thing I never did anything with it as I needed it the day my Synology died last year. It was a DS1518+ on (a lot of) borrowed time having lasted nine years. I mentally toyed with buying a new NAS, but the idea of spending a few thousand dollars didn’t excite me (or the wife).
So, I loaded up Xpenology on a thumb drive and plugged it into my U-Nas. It did not take me long to see how easy this was to load up a Synology DSM and hit the ground running. Then, once I loaded all my disks in, it saw everything and asked if I wanted to upgrade the OS. Sure, why not?
So, all data intact and running a mostly generic set of hardware as a Synology only a couple of days later. Zero extra cost for me as I already had everything. But you can do this too with hardware you might have laying about. I highly recommend it.
DS1518+ on (a lot of) borrowed time having lasted nine years
DS416 nervously blinks in the corner
Don’t you dare.
DS213 … 😰
But why are the bays so expensive?! (A 6 bay is like almost six times a one bay)
I’m still running my DS1812+, she’s purring along with no signs of distress. 😅 I have another DS1515+ that I recently added and the difference in speed/responsiveness in the DSM OS is night and day. So the older DS1812+ is now mostly for long term storage.
Do you like the U-Nas? I had an 810a (I think thad was the model) and found it way too restrictive in terms of size.
The PCIE slot also needed a riser cable since the card has to be parallel with the motherboard, the cable blocked about 1/3 of the CPU fan. I had a pcie card since it was an HBA
That looks like the one I am using. I bought a tiny motherboard that had the newer Supermicro Optilink connections. This allowed for all eight bays to be used with smaller cables that helped airflow and it had one onboard M.2 slot that I am using as cache. I did also put the PCI-E ribbon cable in to use with a 10Gb card, but I should pull that out as it’s only using the 1Gb link where it sits.
I don’t recall where, but there was a whole buildout of this Unas case on some blog linked from reddit years ago and I just followed that except for changing the motherboard. The parts I swapped in did better on the build than the blog version. They had to trim things to make it all fit. I didn’t have to do anything like that. It just worked.
All in all, a very nice NAS package that has the same footprint as the Synology.
Yeah I really liked the case, in theory. And I’m really happy you like it. I did have to trim the case as well. I swapped out for a Fractal Design Node 804. Definitely bigger, but I like it a lot more
Nice! I’ll keep this in mind!
oh no what did brother do
Qnap has been pretty good so far.
Can confirm, love my QNAP NAS
Some companies make it too easy to choose their competitors.
Synology requires self-branded drives
I’ve started to categorize enshittification headlines by how many words it takes me to know I won’t be dealing with a company again (after reviewing the article for accuracy, of course). This one only took 5 words, and one is a compound. That’s pretty efficient.
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Yo, you alright?
The enshitification will continue until revenues improve…
Glad I built my own OMV
OMV is great.
Very True, Though im utilizing a virtual machine as my go to NUC has bit the dust.
I had OMV running on an old Llano based system. I upgraded the system to Intel N100. I just put the drive in the new system and it booted with no issue (after network reset)
I’m not familiar with the term OMV, could u enlighten me?
I believe they’re referring to https://www.openmediavault.org/
I saw it early on when I started my homelab journey a few months ago, ended up going with proxmox instead though.
I was a little worried about the “user friendly” aspect as that usually implies it’s more limited.
I am indeed referring to openmediavault. Thanks.
Ohhh ofc, I should have gotten the abbreviation 😅 Thank you.
my bad - I should have linked. Thanks to /u/[email protected]
Haha wow what an absolutely HORRIBLE descision, wtf?! So glad I went with QNAP!!
That’s a shame. Building your own NAS it’s not that difficult and a valuable learning experience.
Have any handy non-video guides you would recommend on how to do so? I’m keen to learn this.
Any PC building guide, use a case with enough 3.5" bays and a mainboard with plenty of SATA and M.2 ports (if you want SSD csche).
After that it gets more specialized.
Get a fractal case, go to pcpartpicker for the rest… Get a gold PSU… Be sure to check on getting a motherboard-cpu combo that supports ECC RAM… Install a linux distro with proper support for zfs (e.g. I wouldn’t recommend Arch), perhaps TrueNAS Scale. Done :)
I’m using TrueNAS Scale right now on my second server (landfill bound, offered money for it, got it for free baby!) which was just some Dell computer from some older people who bought a brand new computer because this one was “not letting them install stuff”. The permissions, and the way things are explained for the settings/permissions, are AWFUL for someone who has just now dipped their toes into this OS.
TrueNAS Scale is great for what it is, but please be ready for some headaches if you’re fresh into the scene. I still recommend it for now.
Ha, mines an old Dell too. Not running Scale on mine though.
My NAS is a 10+ year old Dell XPS I had laying unused. ~16TB of storage in RAIDZ1 and I still have SATA ports free. Like you said though my limiting factor is space for 3.5HDD.
Their low power compute hardware, very compact form factor, and OS/apps are the selling points.
There are both commercial and DIY alternatives, but I am not aware of any that really check all three boxes quite as well.
When my disk station eventually dies I’ll go the DIY route but that doesn’t mean I’ll be excited to do so.
What do you buy for the chassis? Seems like that (with hot swappable drives and two color LEDs next to each) is the main reason you’d buy something like synology
I built my own nas back in the day and it is not worth it. trying to remember an the mdadm commands, setting up Cron jobs for scrubbing and smart tests, setting up email notifications if the tests fail, flashing the firmware on my hba, setting up dynamic DNS, fail2ban (later a private key whitelist), borg etc etc. it’s not too bad if you’re an experienced Linux user but it’s still a lot of time out of your day, meanwhile if you’re a new Linux user then you’re basically just playing russian roulette with your data. building a jellyfin server is a good learning experience but for a nas I would pick an off the shelf appliance every time
buying brand name is almost always a bad idea when it comes to computers.
take advantage of their modularity, people. desktops are still popular for a reason.
That’s a big fuck-up.
Hey maybe the Sonos app guy can help them out.
Will avoid. Thanks for the heads up.
Feeling real good about learning TrueNAS Scale now.
Any tips on dealing with ACL?
As the poster above stated, permissions and the way things are explained for those permissions or the settings in general are vague as fuck to someone who has just now dipped their toes into the OS. It’s a headache to learn, but once you get it setup (I recommend using Obsidian to keep some notes for your future self on how you set it up) it does relatively work absolutely fine.
Is there any thing in particular you need info on? I used Kagi Assistant during the moments where I didn’t fully understand why things were the way they were, i.e. “I want to use this like I use my Synology, what the hell is an ACL??”. I may be able to fumble you along like I did myself! :P
EDIT: I guess I could actually try to answer your question. What I did was create my own admin account and group and named them my name. After creating them, I logged into my newly made account (or tried to!) until I realized I didn’t have the same permissions as the TrueNAS_admin account, so I essentially copied those. I then logged in successfully this time, so I made sure I could do what I could do on the admin account. I could, so I then made sure the truenas_admin account was disabled. (or, I believe I did. I may not have, so look into that before you try it). Then I used Kagi Assistant to give me a general overview of what permissions my admin account should have so that I can always access whatever the hell I want on my own setup. I am at work right now, but I wrote down the list of groups that you would add to your Auxiliary Groups. Some that I do remember are: apps, libvert (and the other virt. These are needed for you to use the NAS as a VM, which I did want to try out since my Synology is way too under powered for any real VM tinkering) and whatever groups the truenas_admin account has. If you’d like the full list, I can try to remember to give it to you, but once I am home, I usually have too much going on for me to remember things.
After that, I am actually able to do mostly what I want for my own setup. I’m a single person using it all the time, so your mileage and needs will probably vary. :)
I think the biggest problem I’m having with it is making virtual machines that have access to my Nas, and containerized apps as well.
Trying to setup ersatz tv and give it access to my Plex library, but it can’t seem to access it.
The other thing I’d like to figure out is how to passthrough a GPU to a VM so I can output video, but that’s way beyond ACL issues
Oh, you mean my biggest problem?!
I’ve just resorted to using the shell to set permissions on stuff. For the most part everything works but I’ve had issues with NFS shares. I think some of that was copying from Windows and Windows trying to do things it shouldn’t but once I just manually set things up I was able to back all my stuff up.
VMs and apps run in their own little areas so they just happily hum along.
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You might want to actually reply to Cort because I’m not sure they’ll see this after a day and not replying to them.
Yes, I swear I clicked the reply button on THEIR comment, but you know how that goes. Lol
Okay I guess I’ll start scouring the internets for a quiet, low energy build
They’ve been implementing this for a while with some of their models. There’s an excellent script that is actively maintained to get around their shit policies.
I’m only using a Synology (ds1823xs+) because I got a killer deal. (Sometimes I still wish I went with unraid.) I’ve never encountered any issues using unapproved hard drives with this script.
My man, I wouldn’t bet on Unraid not going the same route like Plex.
Ha! I bought a plex lifetime pass years ago while on sale. Maybe one day I’ll switch to jellyfin- maybe sooner than I think.
On a positive note synologys brtfs is pretty cool. If anything, it’s one less thing I don’t need to worry about.
I also bought a Plex pass years ago on sale and back then the app was fabulous, nowadays it is simply meh. I am still running it, but seriously considering switching to Jellyfin
