Selfhosted

I had Synology for a second but built my own server, went UnRAID, and never looked back.

Why would anyone even use Synology?

Just buy a pc with big hard drives

This is why I chose an ASUS nuc + external bay-storage for my home networking needs, felt like synology NAS would be a limiting factor.

Guess I am going to be taking my "pro-sumer" dollars elsewhere.

Plllbbbbbb @ Synology - I just got one of these and added 2x 4TB ssds this week. I'll eventually add 2x more but for now I'm set: https://www.gmktec.com/products/intel-twin-lake-n150-dual-system-4-bay-nas-mini-pc-nucbox-g9

Fingers crossed that it doesn't blow up or crap out.

Yeah I expected that this would happen. They already did this with RAM. They just rebrand RAM, sell it for a way higher price and add a check. When they brought their own branded HDDs, I knew they will pull of the same scam.

Building an own server isn't that more expensive and you don't have to deal with the whole lockout with Synology. For example I had quite the issue to access hardware. I wasn't able to get Home Assistant running on my NAS. The issue was my Zigbee USB Stick. I got it running to the point where I was able to send commands (e.g. turn on or off lights) but the status didn't came back. I threw it on my Pi3 (now Pi5) and zero issues.

The next NAS is self build. Probably Proxmox as base, with truenas or so as main server and the rest depends on what I might need.

I'm not saying that they won't do this, but so far their actual actions have ended up pretty decent. I've had 3 Synology devices over the last 12(?) years, and while they are not perfect, they have been very good at delivering what they promised over the long haul. All of them still work fine. Even the old guy delivers.

For me at least I never considered a synology nas it seemed like the apple of home servers. Especially when I enjoy building machines anyway there was no point. Although I can definitely see the appeal for some people.

I wonder if there are more open solutions that don't require building a machine from scratch.

I have a synology I bought 3rd party ram (not synology) and it works fine. Same with drives just bought some seagate drives. Probably going to upgrade from a 4 bay to a 12 and I don’t see compatibility of ram being an issue. I just don’t feel like building a whole racked system I just want to plug and play and forget. As of now tho only thing I lose is warranty cause I’m using not “certified” ram and drives.

I had been considering upgrading, my current 4 bay Synology is physically full and running out of storage space. Moving that to a larger Synology box and adding drives would be easiest, basically plug and play.

But now instead I'll probably just switch to a more traditional NAS instead. Run TrueNAS, or maybe give HexOS a look. If I'm going to have to convert from my current proprietary Synology filesystem anyway I might as well rebuild from scratch. As it is I've shifted all the services off the Synology and Docker to a dedicated Proxmox box.