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?
If the only thing worrying you is the hard drives, we put random HDDs in a new Synology and it works just fine. We decommissioned our previous one that was running for since 2007 or so basically non stop. There was a noisy fan we had to replace but that was all.
Just a note, but ages ago I slapped 4 identical drives in a Synology unit that were not on the tested list and did experience a problem. I’ve always checked the list when I buy bulk drives off eBay and never had a problem since.