Comment by toomuchtodo
1 day ago
Pays for itself in ~40 months of not paying $100/month for streaming services.
Edit: Drives are not included :(
1 day ago
Pays for itself in ~40 months of not paying $100/month for streaming services.
Edit: Drives are not included :(
That's without storage. They are charging $750 each for 24tb HDD's, so filling it up brings that cost to $16k. Only need to run it for 13+ years and have zero HDD failures in that time, and then pay for all the media you are going to load it up with. Not exactly sure this would be cheaper or easier than just paying for streaming services and cancelling them when you don't need them.
You don't have to buy from them, you can get third party hard drives. Although those are expensive too
Yeah, not dramatically cheaper.
Let's be honest, at a certain point it's a hobby. And it's still cheaper than snowboarding.
Yes piracy costs less than paying for content. You could also just use a standard usb HDD to torrent to, or even stream torrents for free.
A more fair comparison is this nas vs another brands nas. Or compared to S3 if you just need a place to dump files.
The drives are the expensive part, though - 16x24TB HDDs adds another $11k.
(Not that you need that much for canceling streaming, I’d get a home Synology or diy TrueNAS for that anyway)
As a Synology owner, I would not recommend anyone to get into Synology at this point after the drive BS they pulled off. I'm planning on building myself a DIY server with Unraid instead.
Happy Unraid user here.
The ability to mix and match drives in the main Unraid Array is of course the original feature and draw. Adding a few TB at a time for whatever leftover money I had after taxes each year is really appealing.
But they've added SSD write caching, VMs, Docker containers, a Docker "app store", and recently ZFS drive clusters (mostly for SSD storage).
It's pretty great and incredibly easy to admin. I presently have well over 125TB of mixed Unraid and ZFS cluster storage in a Fractal 7 XL. It's running around 30 containers, a handful of VMs, Tailscale and literally requires less than 20 minutes a week of system level administration (probably more like 5-10 minutes). Of course I'm spending far more than that messing with the actual apps, but that's a personal problem ;)
It gets regular updates, and I'm sure my uptime would exceed a couple of years except for reboots needed to handle the updates and the occasional power outage. You can ignore the updates of course to min-max your uptime. ZFS has been rock solid on my SSD array.
You can recreate the core array bits with a bit of effort and MergeFS and SnapRAID, add Docker, some VM host system, ZFS and a few other things and you can get Unraid "for free" with a fairly normal Linux distro, but the administrative overhead will be a bit more.
One tradeoff is that Unraid exposes a core set of features for each of these, but you could get to quite a bit more specific of a configuration if you go the regular Linux route. The Unraid devs are slowly adding more ZFS features (for example) to the regular interface, but it takes time. Some more expeditionary Unraid user attempt to use those features more or less at their risk with results reported in various forums.
I’m still on DSM 6, and just added a new unapproved drive, and it was just a click through warning. Is it much worse on the newer DSM versions?
EDIT oof yeah that’s pretty horrible, I take back my Synology recc. Looks like it’s partly model-based restrictions. That’s a shame, they were nice as relatively low maintenance devices.