Budget 51-70k Synology Vs FreeNAS

A

agentmilo

Disciple
I was watching @vaibhavyagnik 's video on the 3210 rule for keeping backups and that has sent me down the NAS rabbit hole (mainly thinking of RAID arrays).

I have a lot of old computer parts around my house (family used to own an internet cafe from 2000-2013). Celerons, Dual cores, Atoms, Phenoms, Athlons and a Gen 1 i7. I'm not sure what route to take.
  1. Repurpose an old system for a FreeNAS build. Which sounds good, and I pretty much have everything I'd need around the house (cabinets, PSUs, GPUs etc).
    But I'm wary of maintainence. As I've gotten older, I'm losing interest in tinkering with devices and PCs and find myself going for readymade solutions that just work.
    I'm fine with initial config, but would like less downtime, maintainence and general breakage.

    I'm also interested in going for an APU like 3200G and use it in a Node 304 to lower power consumption and footprint (getting rid of older parts by donating / selling).
  2. Synology stations. Plug and Play, easy to configure apparently. But have to shell out 40-50k for a 4 disk system.
Would like some input from people who've walked these paths.
 
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I would suggest repurposing the old stuff and installing OpenMediaVault. Easy to install, based on Debian and works pretty well with old hardware. Alternatively if you love the Synology interface then look at Xpenology. It would involve more DIY and hardware compatibility is less but it is worth it if you can get it to work.
 
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ibose said:
I would suggest repurposing the old stuff and installing OpenMediaVault. Easy to install, based on Debian and works pretty well with old hardware. Alternatively if you love the Synology interface then look at Xpenology. It would involve more DIY and hardware compatibility is less but it is worth it if you can get it to work.
Click to expand...
Thanks- didn't know about either of those OSes.
Do you own a DIY NAS?

When repurposing old stuff, is it necessary to use a more powerful CPU, like Phenom x4 / i7 or will Celerons / Dual cores be fine?
 
agentmilo said:
Thanks- didn't know about either of those OSes.
Do you own a DIY NAS?

When repurposing old stuff, is it necessary to use a more powerful CPU, like Phenom x4 / i7 or will Celerons / Dual cores be fine?
Click to expand...
I do, in fact. An Intel Xpenology box. If you are looking for basic NAS functionalities then you actually don't need a powerful CPU. Even if you pick buy a ready made NAS, those have low lower but efficient CPUs only like Celerons.
 
Yeah, ready made nas have advangage of being plug and play. But most of the cost goes into software, not hardware. You get very basic but sufficient hardware.

With diy nas you have your upgrade options open(depending on your build), pcie expansions for sata and cache drives, faster networking etc.
You'll need more processing power if you want torrents, media transcoding and playback and other heavy stuff.
 
No harm in trying a DIY NAS since you already have the Hardware. FreeNAS is a more professional level NAS operating system because it uses ZFS. If data protection is your main goal, ZFS is the way to go. FreeNAS will require atleast 8 GB RAM. Although any 64bit processor will work, Samba transfers will be faster with a faster processor. You can also try OpenMediaVault
 
vaibhavyagnik said:
No harm in trying a DIY NAS since you already have the Hardware. FreeNAS is a more professional level NAS operating system because it uses ZFS. If data protection is your main goal, ZFS is the way to go. FreeNAS will require atleast 8 GB RAM. Although any 64bit processor will work, Samba transfers will be faster with a faster processor. You can also try OpenMediaVault
Click to expand...
ZFS plugin is available for OMV.
 
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