Synology nas are nice. I will say there’s definitely a nice UI there and they generally work well. But there is a good bit of lock-in and there are some really reasonable roll-your-own hardware and software options these days.
If you want something that just works, doesn’t need to be super configurable and is easiest to set up and manage, get a synology. If you don’t mind putting in some work or if you need to really tweak some stuff, roll your own
I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can’t really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I’m not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it’s not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it’s been running without issue since 2017. I’m planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it’s a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.
I think it helps that I’ve always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.
Synology nas are nice. I will say there’s definitely a nice UI there and they generally work well. But there is a good bit of lock-in and there are some really reasonable roll-your-own hardware and software options these days.
If you want something that just works, doesn’t need to be super configurable and is easiest to set up and manage, get a synology. If you don’t mind putting in some work or if you need to really tweak some stuff, roll your own
I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can’t really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I’m not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it’s not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it’s been running without issue since 2017. I’m planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it’s a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.
I think it helps that I’ve always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.