That's a shame IMO. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go down the right path. I built a NAS 5 years ago in a Fractal Design Node 804 and put TrueNAS Core on it (back then it was called FreeNAS). It's been totally "set and forget" for me. The only thing I've done in 5 years is upgrade TrueNAS, which has always worked flawlessly.

I do wish TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) would stick around (it's still going for now), but TrueNAS Scale (Linux based) is probably OK too. Scale has a bit too much focus on being an all-in-one "server with storage" than a simple NAS. I like my NAS to be completely separate from everything else and only accessible via NFS etc. That way I can trust ZFS is keeping snapshots and no software bugs or ransomware etc. can truly corrupt the data.

I honestly think continuing to buy Synology is likely a mistake: not only have they not even properly apologized for this insanely bad anti-consumer decision, it's merely one of many over the past few years. (I speak as an 1819+ owner.)

If you're not interested in running your own, I think the most promising option is the UniFi UNAS which is due to be shipping soon (edit: Already has actually. A new model is due to ship this month though.) Ubiquiti, despite having Apple vibes, has been on a roll lately. The UNAS seems like it should be highly competitive (7 bays at $499!), and will probably be very nice for people who already use UniFi equipment in general. (Edit to temper people's expectations, though: the UNAS sticks to NAS fundamentals. You don't get the suite of applications like with Synology, or even a Docker integration. But you can use it as Network Attached Storage, after all.)

"successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.

And it feels like for most of these companies it's a whack-a-mole of cycling from which happened to burn you last rather than any actually being fundamentally "better". Pretty every alternative mentioned in this thread have released some real bad products.

> "successful" boycotts always have a weird decision afterwards, as you want them to be "rewarded" in reversing course, but still cost them enough to not be worth trying things again next time.

I wouldn't want a company to be "rewarded" for reversing an anti-customer decision, but instead they should be made to realise that their customers goodwill can disappear and be very difficult indeed to be won back.

However, most consumers aren't aware of these kinds of issues/boycotts, so most companies don't get to reap the full impact of shitty decisions.

At this point I'm not suggesting a boycott at all, I'm placing a vote of no confidence in Synology. There is no reason to believe they've had a "change of heart" on their mentality, they're not stopping due to backlash, they're stopping because their greedy scheme failed. If they can figure out one that works, is there any reason to believe they won't take it?

Go to the Synology website and browse to a NAS. Here's Synology's closest product to the new UniFi UNAS offering, the DS1825+.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1825+

> See why Synology drives are ideal

And it just links to a marketing video announcing Synology drives... Does it explain why you should use Synology drives? ... No. It is literally 100% marketing puffery. They do not mention or acknowledge any of the dumb software lock-in tricks they were playing. Coupled with no formal announcement, they are apparently willing to do the absolute bare minimum to win back customers who left over this. Apparently for some people, this is good enough, even though unlike many markets there are actually plenty of competent NAS products. And we wonder why enshittication is so prevalent? We're paying for it. Its a positive signal that they can't get away with anything, only almost anything. Feel free to experiment with user trust! There's no consequences anyways!

And honestly, while Synology DSM is a pretty decent experience, though to be clear I have personal misgivings with it all over the place, I really struggle to see how it can justify the price tag. The UniFi UNAS Pro is a new and weird product, but by any account it does have solid fundamentals for the job of network attached storage. Comparing the specs... The DS1825+ comes with 2x2.5GbE... versus the UNAS Pro's 10GbE. It comes with 8 bays over the UNAS Pro's 7. It comes with a Ryzen V1500B over the UNAS Pro's Cortex-A57, both with 8 GiB of RAM. One thing the Synology NAS has is the ability to expand to 18 bays with additional enclosures, which is certainly worth something, but what I'm trying to say is, the specs are not actually leagues different especially considering that this is what you get without paying extra. For Synology you will pay $1,149 over the $499 of the UNAS.

Don't get me wrong. UniFi UNAS is brand new. I don't think it has support for running third party applications or Docker workloads, and there are definitely less storage pool options than with Synology DSM. But, it really seems like for the core NAS functionality, the UniFi option is just going to be better. Given that neither of these devices are actually all that powerful, I reckon you'd probably be best off actually just treating them like pure storage devices anyhow, and taking advantage of fast networking to run applications on another device. Especially with 10 GbE!

You could literally buy two UniFi UNAS Pro units and a Raspberry Pi 5 and still come up a little short on the price of the DS1825+. Not that you should do that, but it says a lot that you could.

So sure, buy whatever you want, but Synology already played their hand, so don't be surprised when they do what they've already shown they are more than happy to do. I'm not buying it.

And P.S.: Yes, there are plenty of mediocre or crap products on the NAS market, but you literally don't just have to buy on brand names alone. There are plenty of reputable reviewers that will go into as much detail as you want about many aspects of the devices, and then you can use brand reputation to fill in any gaps if you want. It feels silly to hinge entirely on brand reputation when you have this much information available...

I agree, two companies that I've dropped recently.

Synology: Switching to Unifi

Sonos: Switching to Wiim.

I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.

Synology photos is garbage... it does do one thing ok which is backup photos.

The software stack of usability is severely missing. So they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of it well.

In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only does storage.

Agree! Though to be clear I’m not saying it’s necessarily amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem to like it!

I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.

That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog. Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone actually used and liked it. It worked alright but the client apps were/are a giant leap behind alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.

But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.

Weirdly, Audio Station is the best app I've found for streaming podcasts from my Synology (given the quirks of podcast hoarding in practice). Admittedly, I haven't looked in a few years... maybe I should get on that.

That seems plausible. I don't think there's as much competition among audio apps, and I (perhaps naively) suspect there might be a lower bar for UI polish. We were using XMMS back in the day, and while it looked cool, it wasn't the paragon of user-friendly design.

Synology Photos works amazingly for me and significantly better than any alternatives I've tried.

For what, besides backing up photos?

I seriously want it to work well. How do you find 1 out of 10,000+ pictures you've taken in the last 20 years without spending hours self categorizing beforehand?

I choose location/person/timeframe and go from there.

I just went through a complete restore of my NAS from backup and then migration to a new NAS. It was flawlessly executed through Hyperbackup so I don't agree with you at all.

Hyperbackup is good, but that is a core function of a NAS no? I was speaking more about apps like Photos, Videos, Surveillance, Docker, Web hosting. Things a NAS usually don't and shouldn't do.

Personally that’s all I need/want. I still run UnRaid as my “app” server, I just want dumb storage, hotswap bays, and software raid.

That's correct AFAIK, but software like Plex and Jellyfin work just fine if you store your media on a separate machine. For the price gap between the Synology NAS and the UniFi UNAS you could buy a cheap machine to run some workloads on over the network. Even better since the UNAS has very good connectivity out of the box (10GbE) that I figure it will basically always be bottlenecked on the HDD speeds anyways. Maybe a Raspberry Pi or small form factor computer could be sitting above the NAS. Many of us already run Home Assistant OS anyways, and if you don't... It's never too late to start :)

I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good stride and just released some pretty solid good value products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without it, it is challenging to ignore how much better of a deal you're getting for the core functionality for sure.

I of course hope people do some level of research before buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people. I do acknowledge Synology DSM has a lot of stuff built in, but frankly most of it just isn't that great.

I don’t disagree with any of this. But I have a few non-tech savvy friends (and particularly older folks) who just want a clever box they can plug in and it will do stuff - even if it’s a bit clunky. I wonder how much of the Synology market people like that represent.

After I heard from someone who worked there about how incredibly bad their code and software development practices are I wouldn’t trust them with my data. And that was for their enterprise products.

Having dug into Synology DSM to try to debug issues, I would bet my left kidney the code quality in DSM would give any of Ubiquiti's own crappy code a run for its money. These vendors don't make sales on code quality, for better or worse.

I don't think Unifi UNAS has the same functionality as Synology. From what I read, it's focused just for storage as opposed to letting you run things on it like Docker, Plex, etc. I have an extensive Unifi investment across multiple sites so I'm well versed in Unifi but I don't think it's the same use case for UNAS.

As someone that has a UDM, I will never buy another Unifi product. It had all sorts of issues. It doesn't even have proper QoS lmao.

You should still look at alternatives. A NAS company that is willing to consider a move like this even once is not a trustworthy company.

It shows you that their management is probably not making the right decisions in other areas as well.

I'm quite happy with TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and I find it easy to install/configure/maintain. I just watched a YouTube video on configuration with sensible basic setup like snapshots and other maintenance.

On a tangent, I don't really think that purpose-built NAS hardware makes sense for home use unless you really have a serious amount of data. Standard desktop hardware makes a lot more financial sense and is a lot more flexible.

I've always opted for building my own and running linux every time it has come down to replacing, but I might split out NAS and compute this time and take a chance on a UGREEN one (maybe DH4300?), the reviews look solid for a new product segment from them.

I'm likely not buying a Synology at this point.

If anyone has one of their (UGREEN) models (or other brands) I'd be interested in hearing perspectives.

Edit: A lot more mentions of their models in the thread elsewhere at this point.

I bought a Terramaster DAS as I already had a NUC, just connected with USB, supports 10Gbit but my NUC only does 5.

Looked a lot at NAS alternatives and ugreen, asustor, aoostar all seem pretty good, as you can just run truenas or a linux distro. Can also do DIY chassi with mini itx board.

I checked out Terramaster too, but was unsure of the interface. Does the HBA do any abstraction or is it IT mode and direct access to the disks?

This guy talks about it at 3:30

https://youtu.be/ZdEqEWiA2CE?si=ILPrTNBsZMqgcBNJ

Good luck when it doesn't work though. I decided to take the hit and pay their exorbitant HDD prices on the basis that they came with a warranty etc and one of the drives failed within 3 months.

It was genuinely like pulling teeth. They demanded I ship the drive at my own expense from the UK to Germany and they didn't send a replacement for 3 weeks after it arrived at their warehouse. I had to buy another drive to repair my RAID cluster while waiting. Absolutely outrageous customer support.

You need to have pretty tight supply chains if you’re going to support warranty claims on something as consumable as disks. I don’t know who supplies their HDD and SSDs, but you’d want the relationship and traceability to be pretty robust.

Syno have always been a software company first, a hardware company second, and a storage media company last. It makes sense to try and control the full vertical, but they just don’t have enough clout to compete against the big enterprise companies.

I honestly believe the disk whitelisting thing was part of an attempt to overvalue the company in preparation for a sale.

That was the absolute deal killer for me. Even if the white labeled drives were the same price, which they decidedly weren’t, if I have a Seagate that dies, I know a local shop where I can buy a replacement an hour later. All Central Computers has in stock from Synology is a 12TB drive for $300 (LOL no). Amazon Prime’s largest drive is an 18TB unit for $800 (WTF are you kidding me?).

I don’t have time to wait around for them to ship a drive. I certainly don’t have the budget to stock up on spares at their exorbitant prices.

Hard pass.

If you just want storage and not apps, Ubiquiti's UNAS line is a much better choice, especially if you're in their ecosystem.

Would not recommend, given my UDMs logs are full of random errors and issues all the time, which seems "normal" for them. Not to mention pretty ui but weird bugs and strange behaviours - plus ui looks great but feature wise it sucks.

Next time I upgrade I'm just buying mikrotik again...

Fair enough, but I've used thousands of Unifi devices at work and at home and I don't recall ever having to look at the logs. Obviously YMMV, but their NVR storage has been rock solid.

Yeah UNAS is one option I'm exploring. But the only thing I'm wanting on top of all that is something like Plex or Jellyfin and I don't know how well it will play with a UNAS if running on a external server

It’ll be fine. I eventually managed to get a Mac mini to work nicely as a headless docker + VM server. It’s a moster, and averages just 7w of power draw. A neat saving for a solar house (the old nuc 9 was 70w).

It works fine as a NAS, but you need to run Plex on a different server.

You can't run Plex directly off the device like a DS224+ would.

A N100 or other type of cheap hardware will be much better than the synology.

https://cwwk.net/collections/nas/products/cwwk-eight-slot-10... (NAS-N150-8P)

That + a Jonsbo N2 is a great option, it's what I run.