I'm endlessly impressed at how good Synology's DSM interface is. The experience is so incredibly seamless in all the important ways. And it's not just a gimmick—all of the benefits of draggable, resizable windows are there: you can drag files between folders, you can open multiple settings windows at the same time, and so on.
DSM is basically the reason to buy synology over competitors : you pay almost twice the price the hardware is worth, and in exchange you get their top notch software and support.
I am lowkey thinking of setting up a NAS / inhouse server, on the one hand I can build something myself but OTOH I'm hearing nothing but glowing reviews about Synology.
I didn't want to use mine as 'just a NAS' and was hoping the Linux+ssh they ship would allow that, but it hasn't gone as I had in mind. Certain things I wanted require jumping through weird extra hoops, and system decisions I don't particularly agree with are just imposed. The toolchain generally seems quite dated, the kernel is from 2017 (v4.4.59+) and to me their proprietary package format (.spk) seems pointless given we already had apt-get/etc. I saw back in December they deprecated DDSM, also DSM7 was delayed, still not out and that was before Corona so who knows now.
If you wanted the option to spin down your disks, sorry, it's evidently impossible b/c Synology requires you to use their partition layout which dumps their OS partition onto all your data disks.
My needs are low write/high read & I would have preferred installing the OS on a dedicated SSD. In fact I paid extra for a '+' Syno with SSD slots, but whoops, too bad the slots can't be used for a bootable OS because there's no BIOS. So something, probably log file appends for services I don't care about are why my data disks spinning 24/7. Maybe that's good for Syno's support costs but it's not great for me.
Why not install Ubuntu you might ask? Sorry, not possible == no BIOS.
I know plenty of people love their Synos -- if it works for you, great. Just one guy's opinion. If you need a NAS for 'just' file serving then you might well be OK.
But if you want to do anything beyond the surface, I suggest looking elsewhere.
If you're not prepared to do everything the "Synology" way (most of which is perfectly fine) then a Synology isn't for you.
I personally am very happy with my Synology doing mostly file serving, and I use docker to run as much custom packages as I can. It's not completely seamless but it works well for me. And I really value many parts of the Synology hardware and software.
You can run Synology DSM on non-synology hardware. Works like a charm, obviously not supported by the manufacturer but there are some use cases where this can be very handy.
So, here is something not so glowing then. I've got two of them, both 12 bay versions, an older one and a newer one. The old one would handle drives larger during the initial configuration than it would handle during a rebuild and this bit me quite hard.
Eventually I fixed it by using an old 36 bay chassis running linux to do the rebuild but it should not have taken that, if I had been stuck on the Synology setup it would have caused loss of the array.
The experience with Synology up to that point was good enough that I did in fact buy the newer and larger model, but even there there were rough edges, for instance that the model as listed could not handle all the drives it was supposed to work with without upgrading with outrageously overpriced memory.
So, after many years as a Synology customer that's my experience, I would still recommend them but I would definitely ask if the buyer is planning on maxing out their kit and if they do to ensure 100% compatibility between the parts before committing their data to it.
If the idea of adding more to your duties as a recreational sysadmin doesn't excite you, a Synology is fantastic. And there's quite an extensive array of app packages you can run on them with nice interfaces.
However if you're looking at doing more than basic storage, you might want to look at something like FreeNAS, Proxmox or Unraid. I've no experience with any of these but if you're wanting to do a lot of app containers for stuff like databases, media servers, home automation, Unifi Controller, download managers etc, these might make more sense.
I personally run a dozen docker containers on my Intel CPU Synology, but I wouldn't describe it as a seamless experience. I do 99% of the docker administration from the terminal (via ssh to the nas) and maintain it with custom shell scripts. I'm very happy with the outcome as I get the benefits of Synology (Hyper Backup being a particular highlight) and docker containers running on hardware that was running 24/7 anyway.
If there's anything more tedious to me than being a recreational sysadmin, it's being a recreational sysadmin of backups.
Hyper Backup is everything that's good about macOS Time Machine, but even more reliable and runs on my NAS. It took no time or mental effort to set up, it keeps multiple snapshots, and most importantly it has always WORKED when I've needed to recover stuff.
Synology is great. I've got a 2012 model still chugging away in my closet with no signs of stopping. I can probably count the number of times I've had to reboot it on my 2 hands. Very reliable. I just wish they would put slightly more powerful CPUs in their lineup.
But I also have a 2011 model that is still chugging away. I'd still be using it today as my main NAS except I wanted to get a second NAS to act as a physically separated, mostly cold backup. The old one is now a Hyper Backup target for the new one, and I have it on a power schedule so that it spends 99% of the time completely switched off.
I've got a 2012 two-dish model too, right now it's only used as home media server but for quite some time I was using it for work (NFS with users and all that, and iSCSI for occasional use). Setting it up was stupidly easy.
Xpenology is like a hackintosh. Once it's running you get 98% of the day-to-day experience, but not the absolute seamlessness of everything working without hacky installation steps, rough edges and questionable ethics vis a vis software licensing.
It's a heck of a lot faster when running locally on your own NAS, but it's also worth remembering that it's not just a fancy demo where all of the window content can be stuffed into a single large JS file and downloaded ahead of time. Synology's UI is actually doing real stuff, and the content of every window has to be streamed from the server on demand.
There's a live demo: https://demo.synology.com/en-global/dsm