I know this topic has been done ad nauseam but I’m stuck in a decision loop that looks something like this…
“…OK screw it, I’m going to stop talking about it just get a [non-enterprise/non-rack] Synology/QNAP NAS. I rent an apartment and they have a much smaller footprint and low power draw out of the box. Damn, it really costs that much for 4 bays with entry level hardware? NIC and RAM upgrade costs how much??? What if Synology abandons that model? Where’s the fun in this solution anyway…”
“…OK I’m going to look at going DIY instead. It’s more interesting, more customisable, virtually unlimited support, can be cheaper. Man that case is big and ugly… hey that ITX case looks alright. Wow consumer ITX boards are expensive, rather limited, and look like they will suck power too. Woah OK enterprise ITX mainboards are not in my budget. Hmm that aliexpress NAS board looks alright, but could be a dice roll. Do I really have time for this anyway? OK screw it I’m getting a Synology…”
And so on… I get all the pro’s and con’s of each, and that’s part of the issue!
Ultimately homelabbing is a hobby, and if I wasn’t such a nerd I would have bought a turnkey solution already or just paid Big Tech for the solutions I require.
On the other hand, the storage is a critical part of the infrastructure and could suck the fun out of the hobby. Maybe it’s best to pay for a solution created by people smarter than me (and paid for their time), so I can spend time on fun things that aren’t mission critical.
So I want to hear from fellow nerds, which path did you chose and do you regret it?
I use both, no regrets. My DS918+ acts as a backup repository for my VMware VMs and bare metal PCs via Active Backup for Business. It’s also a Time Machine repo for my Macs. I also use TrueNAS Scale on a dell T330 which acts as my media repository and shared VM storage.
The advantage of the Synology for me is its application ecosystem. Active Backup for Business is by far the cheapest way for me to back up all my VMs and bare metal Windows PCs (I have a lot, more than even the Veeam NFR license would cover.) Active Backup deduplicates my backups across the entire dataset, which is awesome. I also use the Hyper Backup to push some of my more important VM backups to Backblaze B2.
The advantage of my TrueNAS system is it cost significantly less than the Synology, was very easy to add 10Gbit fiber networking to, and has iDRAC. ZFS is also awesome. I also run a virtualized TrueNAS Scale instance, but its only purpose is to serve as a mirror for the primary TrueNAS system and the Synology.