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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2022-07-23, 15:02

Ruminating about Synology and the possibility of a DS920+…

I've been reading and watching lots of reviews for Synology's hardware and software, and I'm definitely not a fan of what I've seen of their management software, but hopefully I wouldn't have to interact with it very often once things are in place. Too many years of working closer to bare metal with command-line Linux sysadmin stuff makes me feel like their Windows-style GUI is a few too many levels abstracted away from what I want to do. As for the hardware, I've learned that most of their products are on a two-year refresh cycle as can be seen by the last two digits in their models, and the DS9xx+ series is due for an update any day now.



2016=DS916+… 2018=DS918+… 2020=DS920+… so, maybe 2022=DS922+?

Some of their other products have been updated this year, and I imagine the buyer's remorse would be pretty intense since I'm already on the fence and considering building a much more powerful NAS from scratch for the same price. I'm also more than a little disappointed by their insistence on using Synology-branded or Synology-approved products for everything potentially user-serviceable (there's even a list of approved third-party hard drives its software checks) or else you may void the warranty and/or have to work around some settings and warnings. I guess that's not too surprising considering their business model, but sheesh.

On the bright side, I'm a bit less worried about btrfs after reading up on recent experiences from many folks. I think I'd still prefer ZFS, but btrfs+SHR will do fine if it's the next best option.

I also have a different problem of figuring out where I'd put this thing. We just use wifi for everything in our house, and this has me thinking it may finally be time to hire someone to run ethernet cables to a few strategic locations. If I'm going to do that, then I'm certainly in no hurry to drop a thousand bucks on hardware since I won't have a good place to use it. Have any of you run cables through residential walls from a ground floor to a second floor? (We have a small cape cod style house.)

Also…

Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle View Post
I had to remind myself that this is a NAS, not a full on server. Yes it can do many things, but in the end it is a NAS. I will (and do) have a server for heavy compute tasks. This is why my Plex server is now on dedicated hardware. My VMs run on ESXi host and such. Things like Homebridge are lightweight and EASILY handled by the NAS with docker, so there it sits. I will say, buying bigger is better since you can't upgrade the hardware but in the end you really have to know what purpose you're buying the hardware for and go from there. If you plan to run media on the NAS, you REALLY want a CPU that can do the hardware transcoding. It makes a huge difference.
Thanks for the examples and details around your workflow, shell, docker, etc. Yeah, I think if I get a Synology NAS, I'm pretty sure I'd end up putting a PC server right next to it to do the heavy lifting for things like transcoding.

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