So, I finally decided that it’s time to go back to building my own NAS (I had one for a short while before). Given my use scenario, paying as much as they now charge for a high-end NAS that might temporarily meet my needs doesn’t make a lot of sense. And, Synology devices are crazy expensive. Additionally, my Synology NAS, which is a 4-bay device, has a problem with one of the bays that actually ended up destroying 2 hard drives, so I only have 3 usable hard drive bays. However, you are locked into their hardware and their software and are restricted by their timelines for upgrading to the latest software. There is a lot to like about Synology products. The convenience of having a pre-built NAS with a web interface has been nice. As a result, I was no longer able to serve videos to my Roku, which was one of the primary reasons why I even have a NAS in the house. This eventually came to a head about a month ago when the latest Plex client on my Roku stopped working with the very outdated version of Plex server on my Synology NAS device. It also means that I haven’t been able to run the latest version of Plex for the last 4 years because Plex stopped supporting the CPU in my Synology box. In practical terms, these limitations have meant that I have not been able to run Crashplan on my Synology box since the first year I bought it because I have more than a terabyte of files I am backing up and the 512 mb of memory cannot handle that (I created a workaround where I run Crashplan on a different computer, but am backing up the files on the Synology box over the network).

While the box is small and draws very little power, the inability to upgrade the hardware (other than hard drives), means that I’m basically stuck with what was considered cutting edge back in 2012 when I bought it. Second, the CPU (MARVELL Kirkwood, Arm processor) is in the same situation. First, the amount of RAM is limited and cannot be upgraded. However, there have been a number of serious problems with the Synology NAS I bought (DS413J).

You can read about it here.įor about the last seven years (since 2012), I’ve been using a Synology NAS (Network Attached Storage) device in my house as a central repository for files, photos, music, and movies.

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