Greetings! I’ve been daily driving a Raspberry Pi 4B as a home server for quite a while now and thought it was a great time to make the switch to a proper NAS.
My current Home Server setup uses 2 Raspberry Pi’s. One is where i selfhost all of the stuff i need, and one hosts my website.
The Pi only has 4gb of RAM, which is ok for me. But i can’t really say much about it’s performance. In Jellyfin, it’s struggling with streaming music. Not even a movie, a single MP3 file, it struggles with it.
I tried solutions like Nextcloud for a Selfhosted Cloud Storage Solution, but it would always wipe out it’s config every time the pi reboots.
I am looking forward to buy a Synology NAS. Their Web interface seems intuitive (theres even docker support too) and easy to use. However, i really am concerned on what data can Synology collect off of it.
So, what data can Synology collect off the NAS and is it safe in a Privacy nerd’s view?
I’m also a long time Synology user. Been using their NASes since around 2009.
Buy something else. You don’t want their current-gen hardware. As others have said, they’ve been removing features and hamstringing their own hardware. In a few years, when mine are no longer supported, I plan to buy or build something else.
I’ve been a synology user and fan for over 15 years now. Both personally and at work. They used to be powerful-for-the-price, efficient devices with good software. Photos, drive, media server, file storage, a docker containers were the big use cases. They were easy to set up securely for remote connections, and I’ve never seen one fail.
Nowadays though, I’d recommend something else. They have started on the enshittification journey. They removed hardware decoding features, they force you into their hard drives now, the hardware is overpriced, and other diy systems have caught up wrt features and ease of setup. Synology isn’t bad today, it’s just not the only game in town anymore. You can get more for less money with the same amount of effort.
WRT to data collection-I don’t think they collect anything now. But I’m not sure I trust them anymore. It probably won’t stay that way.
Synology has walked back their HDD decision (for now…), but as a DS224+ owner I actually just bought a new system, because I find the Synology software ecosystem to be kind of clunky and limiting.
I looked into ready made NAS machines but wasn’t sold on the software that came with them. Ended up building a small PC and installing OpenMediaVault on it which I have been super happy with.
Depending on how many HDD bays you need you can just buy a refurbished office Dell or HP and it’ll do the job more than adequately.
Whatever you get, don’t get Synology. They’ve been working on penalizing you from using any drives and only allowing you to buy Synology-branded drives by removing features (source)
Which the back peddled from. But still a very bad direction. As well as removing drivers that allow video encoding a while ago.
If you’re not concerned about them starting to require that you use Synology-branded hard drives, then :
For most Synology services/apps, we do not collect data on what you store or what you do with your files. We generally only collect statistical data on what packages are installed and which functionality is used. This helps us keep track of what features are important or popular. Purely statistical data is not linked to your account and does not include Personal Identifiable Information (PII). (Source: the other forum)
I know you are asking about Synology but like the other poster suggested, build your own.
A coffee lake Xeon server like a 2224G uses shockingly little power (15 watts streaming 4k plex), has ECC ram and are available on eBay for ~$200. I bought several used Lenovo Xeon servers a couple of years ago and they have been fantastic.
I’ve gotten pretty skeptical about the real advantages of NAS for home use. You could get any number of low cost PCs used or new and just jack in some external drives, and you’d be surprised… LVM allows for multivolume “drives” these days, and while I can’t speak to longterm robustness, it is SO much cheaper than a NAS with internal drives, and your network is probably no faster than USB2… In terms of privacy, they’re almost certainly hashing every file you send/receive, if not everything it stores, and possibly nmapping your network for marketing research like how Roombas phone home with your house layout.
