QNAP or Synology?

[KenZ71]

When hearing others talk of sunk cost and various vendors falling out of favor I smile that I chose the Roll Your Own with ZFS option years ago.

I have been able to swap our parts as they wear out and / or ready for performance upgrade. ZFS being a fairly open standard allows me to pull a drive from my NAS and view the data on my Linux machine if needed. I find this ideal if the NAS becomes unusable due to power supply issues or some other mechanical breakdown.

 

[sfx2000]

The sunk costs are not relevant at all. Except when a restricted and usually artificial budget is guiding your purchase instead of logic and getting the best use of your money over the longest time period is the goal.

Sunk Cost was probably not the right term to use...

What I was trying to get at is what is the cost to move from one vendor to another? It's not just the cost of the HW, but also the ramp up time learning a new platform. Migrating generations across the same vendor is typically easier than having to set something up completely from scratch and start over. Not just moving over the data, but having to rebuild the shares and user accounts (and permissions, etc). So I would recommend staying in the QNAP camp if you're already invested in QNAP (and likewise, if one is a Synology customer, I would recommend staying with them).

It's a similar conversation that one would have about trying to sell someone on Windows when they've got a time and money investment in Macintosh - just using that as an example... it's not that one is better than the other, it's that each has it's own way of doing things.​

While QNAP does offer expansion chassis - my thoughts are similar to others in this thread, esp. on lower end NAS, that they're not the best value.

The TS853Pro is a nice step up, so is the TS-871, which if you're looking to grow capacity and serve more users, might be a better choice.

And then perhaps, keep the 509 around, re-drive it with bigger drives, and use it as a backup to the new NAS box.

 

[sfx2000]

When hearing others talk of sunk cost and various vendors falling out of favor I smile that I chose the Roll Your Own with ZFS option years ago.

I have been able to swap our parts as they wear out and / or ready for performance upgrade. ZFS being a fairly open standard allows me to pull a drive from my NAS and view the data on my Linux machine if needed. I find this ideal if the NAS becomes unusable due to power supply issues or some other mechanical breakdown.

ZFS is pretty cool when running on Solaris, but I can't recommend it on Linux, at least not as a primary filesystem, mounting a ZFS volume resolves a lot of those concerns perhaps.

In the SNB level - I'm not certain that ZFS has much to offer - it's more towards the enterprise/carrier space, where we have many more spindles and storage requirements as compared to what we typically see here.

It's good to see that some folks run it as a hobbyist, that's cool - but in a small office production environment, unless they're running an OpenSolaris environment (or Solaris actual), I can't see risking it over other options.

 

[Threska49]

Isn't Synology suppose to have experimental support for Btrfs?

@sfx2000 You may be thinking of opportunity costs?

 

[sfx2000]

Isn't Synology suppose to have experimental support for Btrfs?

@sfx2000 You may be thinking of opportunity costs?

Yeah, they mentioned something about that - that's not the component that they use for Synology Hyrbid RAID (SHR) - btrfs is something that can be put on top of it - gives lots of flexibility when building out storage pools - might get a little scary between SHR and btrfs when trying to recover/rebuild if and likely when a disk in that pool dies...

 

[Shabbir Rao]

I have experienced both QNAP and Synology. I believe both are good and easy to setup but I would prefer QNAP because it is easy very to create packages with any third party software in it.

 

[stevech]

Isn't Synology suppose to have experimental support for Btrfs?

@sfx2000 You may be thinking of opportunity costs?

I read that Synology's next OS called DSM 6. has an option for Btrfs. On the user forum, people are discussing its merits and demerits.

 

[stevech]

I have experienced both QNAP and Synology. I believe both are good and easy to setup but I would prefer QNAP because it is easy very to create packages with any third party software in it.

See: http://www.snbforums.com/threads/nas-recommendation.26123/page-6#post-220288
posts #105-106

 

[sfx2000]

I read that Synology's next OS called DSM 6. has an option for Btrfs. On the user forum, people are discussing its merits and demerits.

I would shy away from btrfs for the moment - can't go wrong with ext4, as it is well known, very well tested, and every modern version of linux supports it if one has to mount the driveset on another machine to do recovery/repairs...

 

[sfx2000]

I have experienced both QNAP and Synology. I believe both are good and easy to setup but I would prefer QNAP because it is easy very to create packages with any third party software in it.

QNAP and Synology have rich 3rd party application support across their ARM and Intel platforms.

 

[stevech]

I would shy away from btrfs for the moment - can't go wrong with ext4, as it is well known, very well tested, and every modern version of linux supports it if one has to mount the driveset on another machine to do recovery/repairs...

YES! I never use a beta release. I never use the first new release, in any software category. I've read a bit about Btfrs and haven't found a compelling reason to use it. Since my 2-drive NAS does not use RAID by intent, changing the file system time would be easy if I ever chose to do so.