Synology DiskStation vs. TrueNAS

Synology DiskStation would be well suited for a smaller organization of under 100 employees where you have a lot of collaborating between teams and clients. If you have to have a common space to save documents and project files so both employees and clients can access or upload if needed, this product is perfect! You can create links for clients to access or upload files, while you and your coworkers have a shared collaboration space. If you have a large team, over 100 I would not recommend this product. For us, it seemed to work really well because there were about 20 of us using it, but it is hard for me to imagine it working well for a group that is 5x our size. I don't know, maybe it would still work really well. If you had to know exactly when something was updated and have real times updates on things being added, I would also not recommend this product.

Incentivized

We have many TrueNAS units deployed and they've served us well everywhere. Our most common use case is using it as storage backing for virtual machines. We have Proxmox talking to it, as well as having it acting as the hypervisor. We've never lost data with it, even when faced with multiple disk failures. We've also always found the performance to be robust and able to handle the needs of our clients. Our clients range from libraries, to medium sized enterprises and we've always been able to make it work, and work reliably.

Incentivized

• File serving for Windows PC's is outstanding in terms of compatibility and performance and reliability
• The cloud storage service is like our own private dropbox and very helpful
• The backup for business make backup a no brainer with backup to the box and hyperbackup providing a off-site cloud backup option to Synology Cloud or a plethora of other options

Incentivized

• iSCSI Datastores for virtualization.
• NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking.
• Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS.
• The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility.
• Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage.

• the focus of synology is on SMB users, we have a 1.3PB Synology NAS unit that needs higher-end DiskStation software to handle the 95 x 16TB drives we have
• in summary, Synology NAS software doesn't handle enterprise customer needs
• syncing of files with android and IOS devices, in particular with DSM 7, the Synology Cloud sync software doesn't work (the staff are working on a release in the coming months). But syncing files from mobile devices to the Synology NAS is a key reason 2 of our Synology NAS units were purchased, and without the syncing we are limited

Incentivized

• more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better
• allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares.
• some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares .

It provides us with great ROI compared with other solutions. It is also a versatile product, having NAS and SAN product lines depending on the business requirement. Furthermore, the implementation of dual controller lines would allow us to consider it for more critical applications to supplement the more enterprise-level SAN solution. It also is a wonderful backup solution, having all the applications available after purchase of the appliance without the further need to purchase additional software or licensing.

Incentivized

The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?

The Synology DiskStation is easy to set up and manage. The interface is clean and features are well documented. These units are reliable and can be set up to do scheduled integrity checks so failures can be mitigated before they halt business operations. The available packages for expanded roles makes these devices versatile.

Incentivized

The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login

Support is pretty solid. There is good documentation and the help articles inside the interface provide you answers to common questions and instructions for many scenarios that you may encounter. I have not needed to speak with support very often and my experiences have been good overall with their support team.

Incentivized

The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.

The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.

Synology NAS replaced any cloud storage for way cheaper, more controlled and expansible. Qnap is the second best and was also an option but back then it had less functionalities. It does the backup just as Synology DiskStation but the support was better on the Synology DiskStation. That and the fact the price and modules for physical expansion are available, Synology DiskStation became my choice

I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.

• DiskStation has provided an accessible storage solution to our developers for local backup that they can control. No need to contact IT to do anything. This has been a win for IT and our users.
• DiskStation provides good support in a mixed PC/Mac environment, eliminating the need for multiple solutions. It can act as a file share for both platforms, and as a result, provides ease of access, regardless of what a user is using for their OS.
• While DiskStation provides quotas per user, I'd also like the ability to set policies - so that business-critical data is getting backed up to Enterprise-focused storage, and not to our local DiskStation. This is partly a people problem but could be addressed by enabling policies that disable code from being stored.

Incentivized

• Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware.
• Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives.
• The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing.