Synology NAS units have been reviewed by some very popular privacy YouTubers like Techlore, so I figured that these might be popular in the privacy space or someone might consider them. Would suggest watching the video before pressing buy.
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yeah what a shame.
I guess I’ll stick to the true old recommend getting a PC for a NAS.
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It has been for like 3 years now. It started from enterprise grade devices but now they are extending to 25+ series.
If you look at Synology’s announcement, they actually said (translated to English)
For users, this means that from the Plus series models that will be released in 2025, only the Synology-owned hard drives and third-party hard drives certified according to the requirements of Synology will be compatible and offer the full range of functions and support.
It means as long as the drives are within the compatible list, you should be good.
I do not support Synology’s move, and as a Synology user, I will email them for more details and evidence to “justify” their move. However, it is a inherited risk for buying pre-built units using proprietary system.
I weighed the risk of synology being more and more lockdown, and the difficulties and risk in going DIY route, I chose the former.
Indeed, if it is not for mobile apps side (no its not for myself), I would have stay with PC using purely Syncthing, which worked for me for a few years.
Highly doubt certified third-party drives will be available from any retailer, or in capacities larger than Synology’s own drives. Not a single drive I’ve ever purchased has been “compatible” with my DS1821+, and that includes brand new WD Red Pro NAS drives purchased directly from WD.
This is because they only certify very specific firmware versions and model numbers at very specific points in time, so identical products released by WD in the future don’t count.
For example, these are the same product, but only one of these models is compatible with my NAS (hint: it’s the one you can no longer buy) 
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Besides that, it’s so much cheaper to build one yourself nowadays.
You can get so much more out of your home server custom-built vs a synology NAS even if the latter is more convenient.
So, no real risk then? I’m in the market looking for both Synology + new hard drives.
It’s much more expensive, of you calculate in time needed to select, test and maintain hardware and software of a self-built home server. Even if you don’t value your time, it’s not that easy to get significantly better value, if you live in a country with high energy costs, where you can’t simply use any used desktop tower and fit in hard drives.
I’d say the opposite, there is a low chance you’ll be able to find suitable drives that aren’t Synology branded. If you want to buy their drives then obviously that should be fine.
Sorry, I’m not sure to understand. What is considered Synology branded? The Western Digital one isn’t considered Synology branded right?
But I understood that one of the Western Digital drive worked with your NAS. Is your NAS a Synology or did you finish migrating to TrueNAS?
They sell drives:
Yes, but mine is an older one. This thread is discussing how 2025+ models no longer support the drives that are supported in mine.
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Well, that’s absolutely terrible. Isn’t that shooting themselves in the foot? Sigh.
Could you develop more on how is it more convenient?
QNAP is not well viewed either (that’s what I have) and that’s the reason I’m looking to switch eventually.
I was thinking of going Synology, but with this, I don’t think I will anymore.
How hard is TRUENAS compared to setting up QNAP?
Yes.
It is pretty easy tbh, personally I think the hardest part of doing it yourself is just finding hardware that’s a nice form factor and power efficient. I haven’t looked recently though.
I’ve been meaning to set up more TrueNAS hardware, maybe we can work on some Community Wiki guides.
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I just came across your post here: Homelabs - #9 by jonah
TrueNAS or HexOS? 
Seconding that power efficient is a real challenge. It’s easy to turn your old gaming PC into a NAS, but you might pay a lot of $$$ to power 24/7 if it’s running a powerful, inefficient processor.
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Isn’t that the job of the OS? In this instance TrueNAS?
Nope, hardware
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In terms of energy efficiency, Hardware, OS and drivers all play a role.
IF you could find a motherboard with low power processors that supports barrel jack input at reasonable price then you have a good chance achieving good energy efficiency.
Repurposing old parts would be much more difficult.
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In terms of energy efficiency, Hardware, OS and drivers all play a role.
The OS can only improve energy efficiency within the bounds of what the hardware allows for though, especially for something that will be online 24/7 like a NAS presumably would be and thus likely can’t make use of things like sleep states.
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It can be done. I had a build a little while back running 6 x SSD, Asrock C236 WSI MoBo, 16gb ECC RAM, E3-1235L v5 CPU powered by a SFX PSU and measured at the wall with a kill—a-watt it idled at 9w.
This was with TrueNAS Core, tunables set to allow all sleep states and BIOS settings to correspond.
The UnRaid community seem quite into power savings (i adapted their power settings to work out mine) and they did have a Google Docs sheet that has a list of all low power motherboards.
As TrueNAS Scale also runs Linux (like unRaid), the techniques they use could be more relevant.
Edit, found it: -Die sparsamsten Systeme (<30W Idle)- - Google Sheets
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When building your TRUENAS or HEXOS machine, can you pick any NAS hard drives or is there limitations?
I need to buy more space anyways, so this would be my first step.
Also, what would be recommended between TRUENAS or HEXOS?