Overpriced imo, might as well just build your own with new hardware. (I built one in the 4 drive chassis with a intel 4130t years ago)
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I’m mainly interested in the case to be honest. That, and trying to find ECC RAM here is stupidly difficult.
I dont think the sell the XL case as a stand alone you can get the mini case tho
Likely going to get the bare minimum, the case+mobo/CPU+32GB combo.
Ablecom CS-T80 is the XL case
Hrm not sure how one would order one tho, there is the CS381
That would be a good DIY option but kind of pricey and fitment could be pretty tight per wendells help on GN build.
Oh this is pretty nice
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This is old, but it does have the mpn for that case. Never sold to directly to consumers afaik though.
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@Optimization looks like @mutation666 and @oO.o went above and beyond, hope your questions are answered.
My 2cents IRT "why Synology over - insert anything FreeNAS here - " is user experience. But outside of your situation and more specific to me is also power consumption. My current setup is really costing me every month.
TLDR: IMO FreeNAS can do what Synology does without getting really into the weeds of maybe Zoneminder just does zones, Synology now has AI (facial recognition, subject recongition) etc. But Synology’s GUI is built so a derp like me can actually do the things/get them going. FreeNAS has been more of an IT training experience- watered down because they have made great strides to make it user friendly. Don’t get me wrong, its not like I’m building my own software stacks here, and compiling from code, debugging, building out datasets via CLI etc.
– Ranting –
Its a gross generalization or oversimplification, I’m sorry. So staying away from the weeds such as ZFS vs. BTRFS. Consumer hardware vs. enterprise (ECC, redundant power supplies, the quality of the power supplies themselves etc. For me its coming down to user experience.
I am not ‘burned’ by FreeNAS. In fact I have cold feet to leave it. I’ve become a member of the ZFS church- a ZFS snob. Their webGUI is good (just wish some things were actually there vs. having to CLI sometimes), their plugins ever evolving in support, quality and ‘one-click’ install like fashion. FreeNAS is great, for someone that wants the general use of a NAS then IMO its pretty much turn key. But to get deeper into features, its geared for the “I can do this myself” admin or enthusiasts.
Look at Synology like its made for your parents- but at the same time its packed with features if you do want to use them- in ‘one click’ like fashion. And if you don’t find it in the GUI, it is built on Linux, you can go under the hood if you choose to and there is a lot of support/documentation.
Hell I might get the Synology and be totally un-impressed and regret it. But from what I’ve been reading and watching, it checks all the boxes for me.
- NAS RAID 6 (I’ll miss ZFS though)
- SMB, iscsi, NFS
- can put in a 10 gig card
- Camera NVR with #itjustworks zoning, notifications, self-hosted port forwarding NO CLOUD, great Android app, pretty much all of the features of my reolink app, promise of future updates such as better and better AI (disclaimer, will be paying a few hundred in licensing for all of this).
- Host one or two small VMs saving me from running a power hungry ESXi or Xen box to just run a small Splunk build and HomeAssistant build
- Plex
- Home PC backups that are really trick- will make a bootable USB image of your PCs
- More generic backup options as well, lots to choose from
- Services one would use NextCloud for, but I’m assuming more refined (and more secure by default vs what people have to do on Plex)
- but largely that all the above has been gone over with such a fine tooth “how to make this user friendly” comb it makes it easy and simple.
I will migrate homelab’ing stuff to type2 hypervisor duties, not to always idling away type1s- as I do still want to homelab, but I don’t want the infrastructure I’m homelabbing from/on to be part of the homelabbing anymore.
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FWIW, I tend to set clients up with Synology for main production server and FreeNAS for backup/archive.
With the caveat that rsyncing Synology to FreeNAS is unnecessarily unintuitive, it gives the business owner/manager an interface they can log into and mostly understand while retaining the data integrity/compression/etc benefits of ZFS.
I used to do all FreeNAS, but I found that the clients are very uneasy about having all of their data on a box that they can’t comprehend, especially since I am almost entirely administering offsite.
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Just random google of “zoneminder facial recognition”- one of the first hits is a good example @Optimization
This is obviously a techie, maybe an admin somewhere, maybe a dev somewhere. They relish the thought of going to git and playing legos with docker, builds, software stacks etc. I want a little check box “Face detection? Yes/No”. Select “Yes”, another tab appears “select faces from known photos” or something like that- that it works near real time, no weird bugs, loops, glitches.
@oO.o I can totally see myself making a small, power efficient RAID z2 box to serve as a backup. Brush off the rsync dust after setting up rsync with FreeNAS and the pi backup I did. Reminds me I need to setup a cron to reboot the Pi maybe every week. Logged in and found the backups had been failing- rebooted the pi, all fixed.
Imagine years from now a Synology ZFS option. I don’t think its a far stretch with how mainstream its becoming for Linux. Maybe the hold back is the hardware, Synology is kind of light on the hardware.
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I think they’re kind of all-in on btrfs, although IIRC, they’re still using MDRAID underneath it. But I expect they’ll wait for btrfs to gradually mature.
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you can put a very power efficient cpu in any of those cases so your point is kinda moot. But I get not wanting to do extra work.
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Appreciated all the responses immensely, especially the rant 
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FreeNAS is a NAS first, with some light server features thrown in. Synology feels like it’s the other way around nowadays.
If I’d want the Synology features I’d get the cheapest unit with the features I want and would see if I could set up a ZFS box (FreeNAS or Proxmox) to handle the storage so the data is secure (I do not trust Synology’s Btrfs implementation). Hell, if Xpenology worked for the hypothetical use-case I might go with that and just throw it in a VM.
On another note, if power consumption is a big concern my impression has been that FreeBSDs power saving features still lag behind Linux’s so that might be a consideration too (one of the reasons why I stuck with Proxmox over FreeNAS)
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This is worth some investigation. I like this idea.
Off topic, what is the recommended VPN service as of late? Nord? Private internet access? Tunnel bear?
Spin up your own ? (not sure on you reasons for wanting one)
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Depends on the purpose I think, but I’ve been rolling my own for many years now.
I use openvpn to get into my home network (when away), but I want to start navigating from home to sites with protection.
Are you guys getting entry level VPS and spinning up your own?
Afaik, PIA is still good. They provide the underlying service for Librem Tunnel.
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Yeah, I’ve been using DigitalOcean for mine.
Certain speech is illegal in my country, and my government mandated all internet traffic “metadata” be logged by service providers, so I spread jurisdiction overseas.
TorrentFreak does good VPN coverage. I can’t remember which company specifically (NordVPN perhaps?), but any where law enforcement has handed them a notice to provide logs and they’ve responded in court with “Can’t help you fam, we don’t have logs” is probably a good bet.
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