I have a DS220+, which frankly I love, but I’m looking to replace it soon. It only has 2 drives, Synology is pulling some fuckery with needing their branded drives and I’m staying on the 6.x firmware given what I’ve seen/heard with 7.x
All that being said, I’m trying to find something that is:
- At least 4 bays
- Small form factor (it shouldn’t be much bigger than the drives it’s holding)
- Capable of running Docker
- Capable of backing up to an S3 bucket
- Capable of backing up Windows Clients
- Habe a decent GUI (I can do CLI, but frankly, don’t want to)
I was thinking potentially QNAP, but didn’t know what else is out there. I really do like Synology and would have looked at one of their models but their vendor lock in move ticked me off. Maybe finding a used 420 or 920?
Ha, of course “self-hosted” is the community I comment on for the first time after lurking for years, but …
UGREEN NASync. I own a DXP4800 Plus, and it fits your descriptions. Its OS is Debian (custom-built; but you can throw your own distribution on it and won’t even lose your warranty, though!), but it has a decent frontend, a mobile app even, 4 SATA3 + 2 NVMe bays, gets regular updates, is accessible via pretty much any protocol under the sun, can be backed up automatically to a lot of cloud storage providers, and I run a bunch of containers on it (which I used docker-compose for), since it ships with first-class support for it.
Overall, a huge value for its money so far (been running it for a few months), and can definitely recommend it, especially as an alternative to the incumbents like Synology or QNAP, and it’s a lot less power hungry and quieter than just getting a server rack off eBay.
Guess I need to write my first ever comment now as well haha
Can second this! Recently got a DXP6800 Plus and the hardware is great. Though I didn’t really bother with the UGREEN OS and installed TrueNAS on it fresh out of the box.
In comparison to my old 6-bay QNAP the only downside is IMO that it’s a fair bit bulkier. But it still fits nicely under a desk.
Does it do RAID?
Well, TrueNAS is a RAID system, and pretty much any Linux distro can run ZFS.
The hardware is good enough to to run TrueNAS with RAID yeah 😄 I have mine using raidz2 and it doesn’t break a sweat. Though I forgot to mention that I also upgraded the RAM to 32GB. The 8GB it comes with are on the lower end of TrueNASs recommendations.
Same here, I have the 4800 Plus and immediately installed TrueNAS when I got it. Has been running flawlessly since March.
Does it have an app to automatically backup photos and documents from an Android or iOS phone by chance? I know I can use syncthing, but in my experience a tool like Synology Drive works more reliably.
I only have an iOS device, but its app is great and yes, it offers that functionality. So I reckon they wouldn’t have done this just for iOS 😄
Are there any security concerns that this is a Chinese company?
Ugreen NAS support other OS. You could put TrueNAS or Proxmox on there, so no, there’s no security concerns (beyond all computer hardware being partly manufactured there in some way).
Personally, I’ve considered this, and there a few shoddy scripts running on it (the networking setup is terrible; and the script even has variable names in Chinese), but that aside I’m not sure whether that’s of any more of a concern than with any other proprietary manufacturer‘s OS (eg Cisco et al).
And as other people have said, you can literally throw any other distribution on it and it’s just “dumb” hardware… so I would consider the risk fairly low
I just got a UGreen unit and while it is taking longer to set up then I’d like, the interface is pretty good and docker was up and running pretty quickly. Traefik is a royal pita, but that’s a user problem since I never used it before and it’s my test system.
FWIW, I used caddy on my unit, and it’s working quite well. But I’ve also had caddy running on the VPS the NAS replaced, so it wasn’t exactly a novelty.
Happy to help if there are things you’re struggling with.