Qnap v Synology

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barbz

New Member
Sep 12, 2012
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Hi all,

I need to considerably downsize the physical footprint of my current server (4ru norco running openindiana) and I am looking at both Qnap (ts-815) and Synology (ds-1815+) 8 bay models.

Does anyone have any first hand experience with both companies newer models and could make a recommendation?

I need it to house 8 x hitachi 5k3000 3gb drives (in raid 6), host multiple SMB, NFS and AFP (inc timemachine) shares, plus offer ssh and scp access for non root/admin users (remote backups). Features such as google drive integration and BT clients are a bonus but not the end of the world. Performance wise it would only be serving 3 clients max at a time but more is always better.

Thankyou
Paul
 

DolphinsDan

Member
Sep 17, 2013
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I've fixed older models of both (1-2 gens)

I don't think there is a big difference but I like the Synology interface. Stupid? Yea. But they're both skinned Linux boxes.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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That said, I'd probably opt for nas4free
I installed nas4free a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised to see a Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN was auto-detected.

Of the two above, I use a Synology every day.
 

mervincm

Active Member
Jun 18, 2014
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I have a physical 1813+ and three Xpenology boxes. Xpenology is not perfect, but you can spin up one on an old box for next to nothing and easily within an hour.
 

britinpdx

Active Member
Feb 8, 2013
367
184
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Portland OR
what are you using for a guide these days?
I've been using the guides and downloads from XPEnology.nl

If you have the appropriate hardware and USB stick ready, it shouldn't take more than 20min to go through the motions of download/burn/install/reboot.

I've installed the Plex Media Server package to stream to a couple of Roku's around the house ... I'm impressed !
 

Jake1978

New Member
Jul 27, 2014
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Without getting into the whole DIY it or off the shelf, I would say Synology is the way to go.

I use an 8 bay QNAP and an 8 Bay Synology on a daily basis and it seems like Qnap has started moving towards more of a multimedia server that happens to have storage, rather than Synology who (while still offering some multimedia options) seems to have stayed truer to the NAS concept.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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It's probably heresy, but after several years with both I regard the two just as bad as one another. I gave up both my QNAP and synology kit because I found them extremely inflexible and they had many, many problems keeping up with security updates and several ensuing QA problems. YMMV of course, they just didn't fit my usage model.

If you've already got the skills and the inclination to build your own and want a small NAS-style case then you could consider doing what I did and find a nice small case and BYO; I got one of the U-NAS enclosures which is almost identical to the guts of my old 8-bay QNAP. I dare say you could outfit one of those with a C2750 mITX board and a 10Gb NIC for half of what an equivalent brand-name NAS would cost.
 
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spyrule

Active Member
Xpenology is not supported and is harder to install now.
Yes it's not supported by a vendor, but there is a VERY active community though.

Actually it's a joke to setup/install now. go to xpenology.nl and follow the tutorials. As long as your hardware is setup correctly for what you want, you can get going is literally 10-15 minutes.

It also now has better support for 3rd party NICS (I'm running a ConnectX-2 EN NIC running @ 10Gig, and it took me an extra 15 minutes to get it setup... mostly because I forgot my ifconfig syntax!)
 
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spyrule

Active Member
It really comes down to your long-term usage as well. Qnap has a few minor features (mostly networking related) that are a little easier to setup/configure out of the box, whereas the Synology has better support for things like iscsi and nfs/etc. This is important if you plan to run any kind of esxi server, but less important if you don't.

The only real difference between the off the shelf Synology box, and Xpenology, is that you can customize your hardware for Xpenology, and you cannot use Synology's "Quick Connect" feature (which is really only used to offer a unified way to login to the Synology "Cloud" feature... but you don't NEED "quick connect" to actually use the cloud service).

I've personally been running Xpenology at home for 2 years with no problems (and I've upgraded since early 3.5 version all the way to the latest 5.1 version). It's been ROCK solid, and performance is more than I need.

Its running on an

AMD A8 AM2+ 8 core cpu
Gigabyte GA-F2A75M-HD2 motherboard
4GB DDR3 Ram,
IBM 1015 Controller running in IO mode (jbod)
6 x 2TB WD RED HDDs running in Synology Hybrid Raid 2 mode (basically Raid 6)

with a simple SMB copy (which is usually far from the fastest transfer speeds) I consistently get 80-90MB/sec. If I switch to iscsi/nfs for my ESXi hosts, I can hit 130MB/sec with no problem (basically saturating a 1GB pipe).

If your comfortable with setting up your hardware, then, honestly, it's a complete joke to setup your own Xpenology box.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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It really comes down to your long-term usage as well. Qnap has a few minor features (mostly networking related) that are a little easier to setup/configure out of the box, whereas the Synology has better support for things like iscsi and nfs/etc. This is important if you plan to run any kind of esxi server, but less important if you don't.

The only real difference between the off the shelf Synology box, and Xpenology, is that you can customize your hardware for Xpenology, and you cannot use Synology's "Quick Connect" feature (which is really only used to offer a unified way to login to the Synology "Cloud" feature... but you don't NEED "quick connect" to actually use the cloud service).

I've personally been running Xpenology at home for 2 years with no problems (and I've upgraded since early 3.5 version all the way to the latest 5.1 version). It's been ROCK solid, and performance is more than I need.

Its running on an

AMD A8 AM2+ 8 core cpu
Gigabyte GA-F2A75M-HD2 motherboard
4GB DDR3 Ram,
IBM 1015 Controller running in IO mode (jbod)
6 x 2TB WD RED HDDs running in Synology Hybrid Raid 2 mode (basically Raid 6)

with a simple SMB copy (which is usually far from the fastest transfer speeds) I consistently get 80-90MB/sec. If I switch to iscsi/nfs for my ESXi hosts, I can hit 130MB/sec with no problem (basically saturating a 1GB pipe).

If your comfortable with setting up your hardware, then, honestly, it's a complete joke to setup your own Xpenology box.
Do you think it (Xpenology) would run as smooth in an ESXI VM?

I have a 5 Bay Synology w/4Gige that I've "moved" into a VM with ZFS/Napp-It but Xpenology interests me for other usages, friends, etc...
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Now to find some 2.5" drives cheap to play around with Xpenology on another controller... :)
 

PnoT

Active Member
Mar 1, 2015
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I can't speak for QNAP but I've been running a Synology for about 4 years now and just upgraded to the new Avoton 1815+ and it's a whole new beast compared to the 1812/1813+ because of the processing power and the amount of RAM you can put in it. It's a breeze to setup and use daily and everything in the interface is intuitive. You can also run a ton of custom packages on it which are literally 2 seconds to install and have running.

Synology is rock solid and I've never had one crash on me but there are few areas where it's lacking in my use scenarios:

1. dual core cpu (fixed by upgrading to 1815+)
2. RAM (fixed by upgrading)
3. SMB 3.0 support
4. 1GB NICS which limit throughput to a single thread to ~120mb/sec

As a small bonus the guy who maintains the QNAP dev tools has ported them over to Synology since ipkg is rather dated at this point. The support forums are a wealth of knowledge if you can weed through some of the junk.
 

spyrule

Active Member
The real answer PnoT is Xpenology (if your ok with setting up your own hardware).

As many cpu cores as you want (I'm running an AMD A8, so 8 cores total).
as much RAM as a standard mobo can hold.
DSM 5.2 = Samba 4.1.16 included.
I'm running a 10Gig ConnectX-2 EN pcie card. So no max 120mb/sec limit.