Computers & Hardware > Networking
"To Build or To Not build your own NAS" - Xpenology vs Synology
Chunkers:
I love it when I find new things I can geek with......
I have 2 NASes on my home network, I probably only need one + offsite backup, but I have 2 :P. They are both Synology NASes, my most recent a 2Tb DS214+ and my old DS211j. The DS211j is very slow and just does backup and security cameras - it really struggles with the HD video security camera duties, it spends a lot of its time at 100% CPU, poor thing, but seems to work. The DS214+ does all the heavy lifting - streaming video, downloading, file hosting, log-server, music server etc etc
I love Synology NASes because I think the interface is great and the web-based software and addons work really well, you pay a premium, but you get a premium product ... great! The downside is that if you want to get a NAS with 4 drive bays and a decent CPU capable of transcoding etc the prices are really high. I am currently running out of storage on both my NASes .....
Recently (today!) I discovered Xpenology, its an opensource bootloader which, for free, let’s you run the Synology DSM software on pretty much any hardware \o/
I have known about FreeNAS for some time and toyed with the idea of self-building a NAS before but now I know I can have the Synology software and interface I am definitely going to give it a try!
I have any number of horrible old PC's lying around including a Q8200 quad core, an Intel i3, an E6600 - am thinking I'll give it a try. If it works well I can look at a more custom lower-power build. Have any of you done this / tried Xpenology?
Chunks
phi2008:
I'm running Xpenology, main advantage over FreeNAS is that since FreeNAS likes to use ZFS you can't easily expand storage - with Xpenology you just add a disk and it grinds away for a while and expands. I'm also running it with a 10Gb Mellanox card which works out of the box.
Ronski:
I'm running my own server which I built, which runs windows home server 2011, it currently has 4 x 3TB drives setup as a drive pool wit iimportant stuff duplicated. It's got room for another 6 drives, and if I bought another drive bay cage it could take a total of 15. But given the ever increasing capacity of disks I doubt I'll ever need to.
It also runs Mediaportal TV server, so does all our tv recording, as well as central file storage and cloud backup.
Chrysalis:
Word of warning, be careful where you buy hdd's from.
I got 2 3tb WD Red's last week which came from a 3rd party seller on amazon.
I had noticed oddities such as.
One drive bigger than the other (gig bigger)
Weird firmware versions
No NCQ or 4k sector support which is at odds with official WD spec
Hot temps
Then finally after some advice on hardforum I checked the serial's on wd's warranty page and both were invalid.
I then noticed the seller was located in Leics so I paid him a visit today and he was shocked I took the time to visit him, instead of saying he would investigate etc. he then started trying to sell me a story that the warranty is provided by HP and is why the check failed, suggested he is knowingly selling counterfeit drives. He did refund me there and then tho.
The workplace where he had a couple of guys building pc's was a mountain of dust.
Chunkers:
--- Quote from: phi2008 on November 30, 2016, 01:51:41 PM ---I'm running Xpenology, main advantage over FreeNAS is that since FreeNAS likes to use ZFS you can't easily expand storage - with Xpenology you just add a disk and it grinds away for a while and expands. I'm also running it with a 10Gb Mellanox card which works out of the box.
--- End quote ---
Cool, sounds great but, erm, I don't really know what a Mellanox card is. Don't worry though, I never allow a lack of research or background knowledge to get in the way of me trying to do stuff 😁
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
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