Is QNAP a good alternative to Synology these days?

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kefkafloyd

kefkafloyd

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  • #1
    I've been a Synology guy forever, but their slide into lousy business practices is hard to ignore. Between their lagging on supporting faster built-in networking (there's no reason the 923+ doesn't have 2.5GbE) and their playing stupid games to win stupid prizes with branded parts, I'm ready to look at alternatives.

    For COTS products, the first alternative I think of is QNAP, because they offer broadly similar products and software. But their security problems always give me pause. Not that Synology doesn't have security problems, but the amount of ownage on QNAPs over the past few years have me worried.

    TrueNAS is overkill for this scenario (a home file server that isn't running a bunch of services). I'll never buy a TerraStation. Is Asustor actually good or are they just as bad at security/service?

    If it turns out the best answer is "stick with Synology and ignore their drive warnings" then that's what it is, but I'd like to explore other options before committing $800 to buying a 923+ with RAM and 10gig upgrades.
     
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    Demento

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  • #2
    In the semi-pro, SOHO market, it's more like "Is Synology a good alternative to QNAP these days?". Although they're very similar companies these days, Synology started more in the home and QNAP more in the comms cabinet. I remember someone telling me a while back how excited they were that their Synology was getting volume snapshots, and I just thought... I've had that feature forever.

    QNAP is slow on patching and their developers like to write bugs. But what do I care? I don't attach my NAS to the internet and neither should you. Ignoring timeliness their support is good. I gave away an old TS-218 a few years ago that was 11 years old and still received OS patches. I update the replacement twice a year with whatever's current, make sure nothing connects to the outside world, and get on with ignoring what happens to people who do that. I run docker containers and a domain controller on it, so I'm quite happy with the feature-set at least. I've been looking into what a 2.5GBe card for it costs (It has a PCIe slot) and it's quite surprisingly not outlandish.

    So I would say very solid hardware, very good feature set and power user stuff on the software side, but quite bad at releasing bugs out from QA and a bit slow to fix them.
     
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    w00key

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  • #3
    Demento said:
    But what do I care? I don't attach my NAS to the internet and neither should you.
    Click to expand...
    It is no longer best practice to assume internal networks are safe and outside is bad. Especially in the commercial space, every endpoint is potentially hostile.

    For that, QNAP is on my shitlist until they stop scoring so many perfect 10s and 8+ on CVSS.
     
    Demento

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  • #4
    w00key said:
    It is no longer best practice to assume internal networks are safe and outside is bad. Especially in the commercial space, every endpoint is potentially hostile.

    For that, QNAP is on my shitlist until they stop scoring so many perfect 10s and 8+ on CVSS.
    Click to expand...
    They'd be a lot better if they weren't so slow. I haven't followed recently, but there was one year where they'd have avoided 65% of their reported bugs if they'd just used the most recent "libxxx.c" instead of the one they started coding against 3 years ago when they started whatever the hell they were working on and has since had 4 buffer overflows patched out of it.
     
    Paladin

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  • #5
    I've had a QNAP for a couple of years now and it has been great. The support seems fine to me, plenty of updates and patches etc. I actually kind of like when I see a product getting security attention like QNAP has recently. I don't like that it has bugs but I like that people are paying attention and that it is getting fixes. Much better than some of the more low end options like Asustor or Zyxel. I had a Zyxel for years before the QNAP and it was fine but almost never got updates after the first few months when I bought it. I am sure it had a ton of security issues.

    I too never expose my NAS to the internet or use any cloud style features and I am careful to turn off anything like that aside from the reporting stuff. It's for home use so I don't feel the need to 'zero trust all the things' anyway. I can accept the risk. ;)

    Synology is still fine if you can look past their sketchy business choices, still a good product. QNAP is fine too. Just update it (it has auto updating, works great) when they release or a few days after. No big deal. Either way, don't open them up to the internet. All platforms have their big bugs eventually, and over and over.

    If I had the need for something with a LOT of storage, and compute power, I would certainly give TrueNAS Scale a shot. I use it at work and it is easy enough to setup and run. Easy to update and use. I just don't need that much capability at home and I don't keep around the old hardware to make it worthwhile to build one. Otherwise I probably would.
     
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    hestermofet

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  • #6
    kefkafloyd said:
    TrueNAS is overkill for this scenario (a home file server that isn't running a bunch of services).
    Click to expand...
    I think you misunderstand what TrueNAS is. It's a file server. Any other functionality beyond that is kind of janky, and not ideally run on TrueNAS. Synology, QNAP, etc are if you want an overkill machine that runs containers, a media server, Minecraft server, database server, web hosting, etc. and you also might want to serve some files.

    As for QNAP vs Synology, I've used Synology always but QNAP struck me as offering better hardware and more feature-rich software for the same price. I think home users shy away from QNAP because you can't use mismatched capacity hard drives. Not an issue if you are a small or medium sized business, but if you are a home user, you'll probably be buying different capacity drives over time as they go on sale and you allocate household finances budget to it, and for that, SHR with Synology is your only option. Businesses budget enough at one time for a real upgrade, so I think QNAP has more buzz in that market segment. People at home rarely consider it because you need evenly sized drives, i.e. you need to purchase all your storage at the same time to make sure each drive is the same capacity.
     
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    redleader

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  • #7
    I've had bad experiences with QNAP support. A while back they shipped a batch of bad NAS boards where if you had one within a certain date code it would probably fail, and there was a giant thread on it elsewhere where lots of people had the exact same issue all from boards with the same batch code. Mine failed just like everyone's and they gave me this ridiculous runaround trying to troubleshoot bad hardware, trying make it hard to RMA, and generally refusing to help before finally agreeing to replace it. Even then took weeks to get it back to me during which I couldn't access my data.

    I could see a budget vendor being slow to correct problems, but it really seemed like their support was trained to deny everything and shift as much of the cost onto the customer, even for their own manufacturing defects.

    Otherwise they're basically fine hardware-wise, just hope you don't get a defective part.
     
    kefkafloyd

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  • #8
    hestermofet said:
    I think you misunderstand what TrueNAS is. It's a file server. Any other functionality beyond that is kind of janky, and not ideally run on TrueNAS. Synology, QNAP, etc are if you want an overkill machine that runs containers, a media server, Minecraft server, database server, web hosting, etc. and you also might want to serve some files.
    Click to expand...
    To clarify, I know what TrueNAS is; more that I'm talking about the hardware/equipment/maintenance/effort I'd need to put together to roll my own standalone TrueNAS system. It would be overkill in terms of effort/capability/etc. Synology/QNAP as a hardware product is much simpler to deal with despite their OS being more capable out of the box. I can just buy a Syno/QNAP box, stuff in some drives, and be off to the races. And yes, I know there's COTS TrueNAS stuff, but it's not meant for me.
    hestermofet said:
    As for QNAP vs Synology, I've used Synology always but QNAP struck me as offering better hardware and more feature-rich software for the same price. I think home users shy away from QNAP because you can't use mismatched capacity hard drives. Not an issue if you are a small or medium sized business, but if you are a home user, you'll probably be buying different capacity drives over time as they go on sale and you allocate household finances budget to it, and for that, SHR with Synology is your only option. Businesses budget enough at one time for a real upgrade, so I think QNAP has more buzz in that market segment. People at home rarely consider it because you need evenly sized drives, i.e. you need to purchase all your storage at the same time to make sure each drive is the same capacity.
    Click to expand...
    The point about mismatched drives is a good one. That said, I don't use mismatched drives in my systems; I build an array and replace the array as a whole. This new system would be replacing and consolidating some aging Synologies in the house.

    redleader said:
    I've had bad experiences with QNAP support. A while back they shipped a batch of bad NAS boards where if you had one within a certain date code it would probably fail, and there was a giant thread on it elsewhere where lots of people had the exact same issue all from boards with the same batch code. Mine failed just like everyone's and they gave me this ridiculous runaround trying to troubleshoot bad hardware, trying make it hard to RMA, and generally refusing to help before finally agreeing to replace it. Even then took weeks to get it back to me during which I couldn't access my data.

    I could see a budget vendor being slow to correct problems, but it really seemed like their support was trained to deny everything and shift as much of the cost onto the customer, even for their own manufacturing defects.

    Otherwise they're basically fine hardware-wise, just hope you don't get a defective part.
    Click to expand...
    Duly noted. For the record, I've never had to deal with Synology support (other than for downloading/installing new versions of DSM), so I'd have no basis for comparison.
     
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    Paladin

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  • #9
    I think basically every consumer electronic company is basically similar in that regard. They train their support staff to deflect or delay escalation and RMAs as long as is reasonable and you rarely get really helpful support from most of them. It does happen, but not most companies. Even when it is a known issue that a lot of people have experienced, they will tend to drag it out until the lawyers have basically agreed that they have to do something to replace or refund the faulty products. Some are better, some are worse but almost all do it to some degree or other.

    I usually wait to buy expensive products until they have been on the market long enough for such manufacturing defects or design defects to become obvious so I can tend to avoid that kind of thing. Not 100% effective but it helps. In the case of a NAS, I would not hesitate to buy it used/refurb if you want a safe purchase for cheap (not the disks, unless you get warrantied ones). Less risk of a loss if it fails, and the bell/bathtub curve of failure should take out the faulty ones before they make it to a secondary market, usually. If you can find one with a return policy or warranty, that makes it extra safe. I've had a few high end PCs and NAS devices that I got that way, as well as some expensive headphones and other audio gear. The huge majority have been really great for half the price of retail or less.
     
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    asbath

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  • #10
    I suggest QNAP hardware with third-party software. For the record, I have 2 QNAPs, both of them are consumer/SOHO level units. TS-464 and a TS-451D2.

    The TS-451D2 runs QTS 5.x. I have it blocked from the internet at the router level. It's my backup of my backups from the TS-464.
    The TS-464 runs Unraid, and does the heavy lifting. Among other duties, it sends a copy of all backups to the TS-451D2.

    QNAP hardware screams along with Unraid on it. QTS is slow and clunky in comparison, and updates from Unraid are just about as timely as with QTS. That said, Unraid now is on a licensing subscription model, so that might take Unraid out of consideration for you. I've tried TrueNAS before, and much prefer the community and support of Unraid than TrueNAS.

    hestermofet said:
    As for QNAP vs Synology, I've used Synology always but QNAP struck me as offering better hardware and more feature-rich software for the same price. I think home users shy away from QNAP because you can't use mismatched capacity hard drives. Not an issue if you are a small or medium sized business, but if you are a home user, you'll probably be buying different capacity drives over time as they go on sale and you allocate household finances budget to it, and for that, SHR with Synology is your only option. Businesses budget enough at one time for a real upgrade, so I think QNAP has more buzz in that market segment. People at home rarely consider it because you need evenly sized drives, i.e. you need to purchase all your storage at the same time to make sure each drive is the same capacity.
    Click to expand...
    One small correction, I think. You can use mismatched drive capacities in a QNAP, you just lose some capacity in your RAID. For example, you could have a 4TB and a 16TB in a RAID 1. You just lose 12TB of storage. QuTS supports some sort of ZFS implementation, so you can get mismatched drives in that configuration, at least that's my understanding. My SOHO units don't support QuTS Hero, just plain old QTS.

    QTS does let you "expand" your volumes when you buy larger capacity drives. It's slow, but it worked flawlessly a few times when I upgraded my drives. It's just a wizard that you follow the steps in until you're done. Over the last 4 years I went from (in RAID1) 1+1TB to 1+4TB to 8+4TB and now 8+8TB drives.

    It's a far cry from SHR on Synology, but you're not prevented from using mismatched drives entirely in QTS.
     
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    Sogarth

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  • #12
    rodalpho said:
    Indeed you can still expand your arrays, which is the major feature missing from ZFS and the reason why I don’t recommend truenas for most home users.

    RAIDZ expansion is coming to ZFS soon though, after many many years, and at that point truenas will make a lot of sense.
    Click to expand...
    I've been running TrueNAS SCALE, reasonably happy with it. But the reason I opted for it was its support for Kubernetes... which they're about to throw out in favour of Docker Compose. Which, sure, is simpler, but also less capable. sigh (Yes, I've done the VM-running-k3s thing before, but was hoping to not end up with that again.)
     
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