This is a review of my Synology NAS for anyone who's interested in potentially building a NAS and is looking at options. I bought this NAS during Black Friday when everyone on Amazon was heavily discounted. The NAS (Synology DS920+) was $100 off. The HDDs were also heavily discounted. I put 3x IronWolf 12TB drives in. I also splurged on RAID1 M.2 SSD cache. The SSDs were $300 off so there was no way I could resist. So I have a 2TB M.2 read/write cache. The hard drives are in RAID5 / SHR and I plan on adding a fourth drive down the road.
TLDR It's really good for basic NAS functions. It has Active Directory support which is very useful. Synology Photos works well enough. The backup solutions that are available are awful. I'd recommend it 100% if you don't plan on backing up Linux devices.
The good
Firstly, it has Active Directory support. I didn't buy it because of this, but I'm glad they have it. This has made authenticating to access the shares so easy. It also lets me configure GPO which is amazing. I reinstall Windows pretty often so having all my GPO done once and then domain joining is a huge time saver. The speeds themselves are really good. I get about 100MB/s transfer speed. It also lets you automate certain schedules. For example I don't have to manually run data scrubbing, Synology just does it every three months because I told it to. It also runs Emby which is purely for multimedia. It works really well but I really just have it as a nice interface for some music I have on CDs. It also has integration for UPSes. I bought an Eaton 5S UPS which has definitely saved my ass before.
It also has Synology Photos which is sort of like Google Photos. It has less features though. It doesn't let you search for photos based on what could be in it. It's purely for backing up photos with an OK interface at best. That's it. Nothing fancy whatsoever. The hardest part was actually getting Google to cooperate and let me download my entire Google Photos library to back it up. I ended up doing the entire thing on my universities internet because of how fast it is. It would have taken me ages to do on my home internet. Regardless, all my new photos are backing up to Synology Photos and I've never had any hiccups.
The bad
Backups. This is definitely Synology's weak point. The "best" worst app is Active Backup for Business. It lets you backup your PCs and Linux devices. The Windows side has worked decently. It sometimes will say it's never seen the device before and is going to back everything up for the first time. Thankfully there is deduplication and it seems as if I've never actually gotten duplicates.
Now, here's the disaster: Linux. So you download the file and run the install script. When I initially had my VPS from Hetzner, it worked really well. I set it up hasslefree and it reliably backed up every night. However, things went sour when I got my dedi from Hetzner. Apparently, Ubuntu now ships a newer kernel than the initial 5.4. Synology doesn't support anything newer than 5.4. No big deal, I go ahead and downgrade to 5.4. This was a lot harder because I had to temporarily rent a KVM from Hetzner so I could properly boot into the older kernel and delete the new 5.13 one. However, backups simply kept failing. I could never back up my entire system on the dedi. It screwed up my system so bad I almost had to reinstall the entire OS. This would've been a problem because I had already deactivated my VPS so I couldn't just SCP the data over a really fast gigabit to gigabit connection again. Synology has still not added support for newer kernels yet. They also said support for backing up Macs was coming in DSM 7.1 (Synology's operating system). Unfortunately this didn't happen.
It would have been nice to backup a hardwired Mac. However, using the NAS over WiFi is really slow. This obviously isn't the NAS's fault here, it's just a limitation of WiFi. It works OK if I'm on my home network and have a good signal. However, if I try and upload a file to the NAS and I'm not home and on my VPN, it's extremely slow. However, I really don't want to open my NAS to the cloud or use a Synology Account. Thankfully it's not required and you can keep it off of the internet and local only. However, my home network was already setup for this kind of thing. It would probably be a lot harder to achieve what I have without some additional router features.
Conclusion
I've liked it so far for the most part. I feel like a lot of the haters for "prebuilt" NASes like Synology are the ones who don't actually care that much about their data and are willing to risk it all on a complete DIY / "I want to tinker with it" system. I'm not like that. I don't want to deal with it breaking.
