If you can stomach the up-front cost, buy a Synology. The convenience and ease of use are well worth the price. You could build a more powerful NAS yourself for less money, but it would use more power, take up more space, and (most importantly) require more time/hassle to manage.
My previous setup was a Mac mini with some USB attached storage. That worked mostly great for about 9 years, and I was looking to update the setup and thought I'd give some proper NAS options a look. I have always been put off by the relatively high prices of NAS devices, particularly Synology ones, but after reading about all the built-in features I took the plunge and gave the Synology DS1621+ a try. I'm glad I did!
This device has a fantastic array of features, most of which I don't really need, but the ones that I use work very well and (just as importantly) were extremely simple to set up. Here are some thoughts on the things I'm using so far:
Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR): I'm using SHR-2 for double redundancy and it was painless to set up. I love that I can pop in another drive later on and expand the pool without any trouble. It also supports checksum validation and correction with the "Data Scrubbing" feature if you're using the default BTRFS file system, so I've set that to run monthly to avoid bit-rot. I don't have enough experience with this yet to say how it works in practice, but in principle this is great.
Shared folders: this is the bread and butter for a NAS, and it was extremely easy to setup and configure with Synology DSM. It works SO much better than the shared drives on my old Mac mini because it handles permissions properly and everything "just works".
Time machine backup: this is essentially an extension of the shared folders, with one extra configuration required to make the folder appear as a native network time machine backup destination. Worked seamlessly for configuring backups for a few Macs.
Docker containers: I migrated all my docker containers which were previously running on Docker Desktop on the Mac mini to the Synology and they work much better than they did on the Mac. They are faster running and simple to manage with a decent built-in UI. I'd have preferred built-in Docker Compose support, hopefully that'll come in the future, but for my use case configuring via the UI was OK.
Application portal / reverse proxy: I love this feature, it makes routing requests to various services super easy. I'm comfortable configuring nginx by hand or via automation, but for home use I prefer a simple UI like Synology provides. You can assign certificates to routes, and everything works great with my custom domain.
Certificates: I has high hopes for the built-in Let's Encrypt support, but unfortunately it requires the server to be exposed to the internet (no thanks). Hopefully in the future they support the DNS challenge option, but for now the easy way to solve this is to use the open source acme.sh which has support for tons of DNS providers and has built-in hooks to register certificates with Synology's UI. I have acme.sh running with Synology's Task Scheduler and it works great.
VPN Server: supports L2TP/IPSec so you can use the built-in VPN for iPhone / Mac, no third party apps required on your devices. This is the only thing I have exposed to the internet, and in my testing it has worked right out of the box with very minimal configuration needed.
Other thoughts:
- Synology Chat: Slack knockoff, works better than I expected honestly! I disabled this because I don't fully trust the security of this app for exposing it to the internet.
- Hyper Backup: haven't fully configured this yet, but seems to support a good selection of services
- File Station: really nice web-based file browser which you can access via the admin UI, or as a standalone web UI
There are so many more features that I haven't even begun to explore, like the built-in Plex support, but I can say so far this NAS has exceeded my expectations and I expect that I'll keep finding new useful features as I keep digging and configuring.
On the hardware front, I did a couple upgrades:
- 32GB ram: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0899KV2L5/
- Synology 10Gbps ethernet adapter: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07G9N9KJT/
I'm using two Seagate IronWolf 8TB drives and two WD Red Plus 8TB drives so far and both work well. The Seagate drives have some extra diagnostic information available due to a special built-in integration with IronWolf drives that is very neat. Unfortunately the WD Red Plus drives say they are unverified because Synology hasn't added them to the official list of verified drives for the DS1621+, but I bet that was an oversight because the WD Red Plus drives are listed as officially verified with pretty much every other Synology NAS. Doesn't make any difference in practice.
Despite the high all-in cost, I'm completely satisfied with my purchase and expect that it'll last me a long time.
| Standing screen display size | 24 Inches |
|---|---|
| RAM | 2 GB |
| Hard Drive | Mechanical Hard Disk |
