[leokennis]

I find Synology NAS's to be at the sweet spot between "too simple for anything except accessing some files remotely via the vendors app" (like WD) and "another tech babysitting project".

DSM is rock solid in my opinion, and gives enough freedom to tinker for those that want to. The QuickConnect feature makes it easy to connect to the NAS without being locked in to one specific app.

[jghn]

Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails.

Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm able to mount drives on it from all of the devices in my network. I can use it as a BitTorrent client. I use it to host a Plex server. And a few other odds & ends over time.

Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue, and replacing some HDDs as they were aging out.

All in all it has struck a perfect balance for me. I'll grant that "solder a resistor onto the motherboard" is likely beyond a typical home user but it's also been a lot less fiddling than some home-brew solution.

[ryandrake]

> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue

You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!

[surlyville]

Same here. Still rocking a DS415+ from 2015. Had to solder a 100ohm resistor to work around the Intel Atom C2000 flaw. Has had a new set of spinning rust in that time too. It's also connected to UPS so will power down if there's an extended outage. Stuck on DSM 7.1 but it does the job.

[delecti]

Yeah, the GP comment doesn't seem to be their target market. You nailed the appeal though.

Non-customizable? That's the point. Ancient Linux kernel? I can't imagine why I'd care for such a device.

[dymk]

As for the ancient Linux kernel, I want the device I’m using for backups to be secure. I’m not saying I need to be using the kernel on ~main, but there are important security fixes merged in the last 5 years.

[sixothree]

It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM. It really is something special. It's worth a small premium in hardware costs. But I share a lot of the concerns as everyone else here and will be considering other options.

[CharlesW]

> It's hard to find any other products that compare to DSM.

A friend has a Synology NAS and I have a QNAP NAS. In my experience, QNAP's QTS (QuTS Hero if you want ZFS) is directly comparable.

[aftbit]

I find that Linux NAS and router project require essentially no babysitting. You do have to do some initial setup work, but once it's done, there's no maintenance (other than replacing failed hardware) for years and years.

[AuryGlenz]

I just lost a bunch of files on mine due to their Drive software. I was setting up a folder to sync and just clicking the folder in their file explorer when setting it up isn’t enough to actually select it, so the sync went one level higher than it should have. That decided to wipe out the folders on that level instead of trying to sync them back to my computer, for whatever reason.

Also for whatever reason when you use Drive files don’t go into the regular recycle bin. They go into the Drive recycle bin…but only if you have file backups (whatever they call them, where it saves copies of files if they’re changed) enabled. I didn’t, for that folder.

Poof go 15 years of raw photo files.