Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives.
I’m remembering, I’ve wanted a NAS for ages to replace my WD Book backup drive.
The sad reality is any major corporation is capable of this, they need the profits to keep rising, even if they screw over their employees and customers in the process.
My recommendation, as someone who has basically no experience with NAS, and only just got into it earlier this year (so take it with a grain of salt); build it yourself.
If you don’t care about power consumption you can pick up an old PC for close to nothing (assuming you don’t already have one just sitting around, wink-wonk) chuck some disks in it and call it a day. If you do care about power consumption, you can look around for a cheapo board with a decent low-power CPU.
I have a small NAS running an Intel N100 chip. It has very low power draw and has barely affected my bill. I’m running Unraid right now, but initially I was just running a headless Debian 12 installation. If you go the fully manual route (as in not TrueNAS or Unraid) it’ll take a little bit of manual labour, but nothing that can’t be achieved as a fun weekend project, and once it’s up and going you’re gucci.
This prebuilt corpo crap doesn’t really offer anything you can’t achieve yourself, except maybe fancy spyware apps for your smartphone.
Just wanted to say thanks for this, I’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of NAS devices and I think I can cover my needs and my whole family with N.2 storage. Something along the lines of 12 TB should be enough so 4 *4tb (one redundant) may be the best option and I’m a stickler for power consumption, so a little N150 can probably run everything for less than 20w.
Hey, I’m glad you found it helpful. I run a lot on my N100.
A DNS hole for privacy and ad blocking
Audiobookshelf for all my audiobooks, because screw Amazon and Audible
Copyparty for simple file management/transfer, as I don’t need a full office suite like Nextcloud
Jellyfin for my films/series
Linkding for managing bookmarks
Navidrome for my music library
As well as some extra services mostly for utility reasons, a reverse proxy, some headless game servers, etc. The applications don’t all do things at the same time, e.g. Jellyfin isn’t sitting and transcoding 100% of the time, so the only time it’s really loaded down is when a lot of people connect to a game server.
My only advice would be to maybe check the price/performance difference between the N100 and the N150. I was initially going for the N150 as well, but found that paying double for the marginal performance difference of the N150 just wasn’t worth it for me. I spent the savings on more storage instead.
A proper mea culpa from them could maybe have brought me back, but nope, let’s just quietly pretend we didn’t just try to fuck over all our users and hope no one notices. Complete lack of respect for their customers.
I hope people will remember that Synology readily changes their mind on this kind of thing, and continues to not buy their shitty hardware.
I’m remembering, I’ve wanted a NAS for ages to replace my WD Book backup drive.
The sad reality is any major corporation is capable of this, they need the profits to keep rising, even if they screw over their employees and customers in the process.
My recommendation, as someone who has basically no experience with NAS, and only just got into it earlier this year (so take it with a grain of salt); build it yourself.
If you don’t care about power consumption you can pick up an old PC for close to nothing (assuming you don’t already have one just sitting around, wink-wonk) chuck some disks in it and call it a day. If you do care about power consumption, you can look around for a cheapo board with a decent low-power CPU.
I have a small NAS running an Intel N100 chip. It has very low power draw and has barely affected my bill. I’m running Unraid right now, but initially I was just running a headless Debian 12 installation. If you go the fully manual route (as in not TrueNAS or Unraid) it’ll take a little bit of manual labour, but nothing that can’t be achieved as a fun weekend project, and once it’s up and going you’re gucci.
This prebuilt corpo crap doesn’t really offer anything you can’t achieve yourself, except maybe fancy spyware apps for your smartphone.
Just wanted to say thanks for this, I’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of NAS devices and I think I can cover my needs and my whole family with N.2 storage. Something along the lines of 12 TB should be enough so 4 *4tb (one redundant) may be the best option and I’m a stickler for power consumption, so a little N150 can probably run everything for less than 20w.
Hey, I’m glad you found it helpful. I run a lot on my N100.
As well as some extra services mostly for utility reasons, a reverse proxy, some headless game servers, etc. The applications don’t all do things at the same time, e.g. Jellyfin isn’t sitting and transcoding 100% of the time, so the only time it’s really loaded down is when a lot of people connect to a game server.
My only advice would be to maybe check the price/performance difference between the N100 and the N150. I was initially going for the N150 as well, but found that paying double for the marginal performance difference of the N150 just wasn’t worth it for me. I spent the savings on more storage instead.
A proper mea culpa from them could maybe have brought me back, but nope, let’s just quietly pretend we didn’t just try to fuck over all our users and hope no one notices. Complete lack of respect for their customers.
I still wouldn’t. If a company flip flops so readily I wouldn’t want to deal with them.
Yup. Too late.