I bought a U-Nas case a while ago. Just a small NAS-style PC case with eight 3.5" disk bays. I built it up and played around with it, but never put it into service in my homelab. It just sat there (off) with Truenas or something on it for testing. Well, it was a good thing I never did anything with it as I needed it the day my Synology died last year. It was a DS1518+ on (a lot of) borrowed time having lasted nine years. I mentally toyed with buying a new NAS, but the idea of spending a few thousand dollars didn't excite me (or the wife).

So, I loaded up Xpenology on a thumb drive and plugged it into my U-Nas. It did not take me long to see how easy this was to load up a Synology DSM and hit the ground running. Then, once I loaded all my disks in, it saw everything and asked if I wanted to upgrade the OS. Sure, why not?

So, all data intact and running a mostly generic set of hardware as a Synology only a couple of days later. Zero extra cost for me as I already had everything. But you can do this too with hardware you might have laying about. I highly recommend it.

oh no what did brother do

Can confirm, love my QNAP NAS

Very True, Though im utilizing a virtual machine as my go to NUC has bit the dust.

I believe they're referring to https://www.openmediavault.org/

I saw it early on when I started my homelab journey a few months ago, ended up going with proxmox instead though.

I was a little worried about the "user friendly" aspect as that usually implies it's more limited.

Any PC building guide, use a case with enough 3.5" bays and a mainboard with plenty of SATA and M.2 ports (if you want SSD csche).

After that it gets more specialized.

Yep, same, it's even a 1522+! I had some concerns going in, but had a good prior experience with a 216j that someone gave me for free (I still rate the 216j as a small RAID1 box). I heard the spiel that the Synology DSM OS was worth it, but honestly it has shortcomings, uses old technology and is not very adaptable. Fine if you just want to plug and play, but next time I'm going back to Proxmox and will give TrueNAS a go.

Oh, you mean my biggest problem?!

I've just resorted to using the shell to set permissions on stuff. For the most part everything works but I've had issues with NFS shares. I think some of that was copying from Windows and Windows trying to do things it shouldn't but once I just manually set things up I was able to back all my stuff up.

VMs and apps run in their own little areas so they just happily hum along.

As the poster above stated, permissions and the way things are explained for those permissions or the settings in general are vague as fuck to someone who has just now dipped their toes into the OS. It's a headache to learn, but once you get it setup (I recommend using Obsidian to keep some notes for your future self on how you set it up) it does relatively work absolutely fine.

Is there any thing in particular you need info on? I used Kagi Assistant during the moments where I didn't fully understand why things were the way they were, i.e. "I want to use this like I use my Synology, what the hell is an ACL??". I may be able to fumble you along like I did myself! :P

EDIT: I guess I could actually try to answer your question. What I did was create my own admin account and group and named them my name. After creating them, I logged into my newly made account (or tried to!) until I realized I didn't have the same permissions as the TrueNAS_admin account, so I essentially copied those. I then logged in successfully this time, so I made sure I could do what I could do on the admin account. I could, so I then made sure the truenas_admin account was disabled. (or, I believe I did. I may not have, so look into that before you try it). Then I used Kagi Assistant to give me a general overview of what permissions my admin account should have so that I can always access whatever the hell I want on my own setup. I am at work right now, but I wrote down the list of groups that you would add to your Auxiliary Groups. Some that I do remember are: apps, libvert (and the other virt. These are needed for you to use the NAS as a VM, which I did want to try out since my Synology is way too under powered for any real VM tinkering) and whatever groups the truenas_admin account has. If you'd like the full list, I can try to remember to give it to you, but once I am home, I usually have too much going on for me to remember things.

After that, I am actually able to do mostly what I want for my own setup. I'm a single person using it all the time, so your mileage and needs will probably vary. :)

Ha! I bought a plex lifetime pass years ago while on sale. Maybe one day I’ll switch to jellyfin- maybe sooner than I think.

On a positive note synologys brtfs is pretty cool. If anything, it’s one less thing I don’t need to worry about.

Interesting, I must have missed it when investigating. It seems a little "Linux power user"-y, though - is that accurate? It says for home office, but is it good for movies/music/etc hosting?

https://www.openmediavault.org/features.html

I can figure out how to get things done when I know the goal (I learned plenty of command-line, docker containers, etc setup with Unraid). So not a beginner. But to be honest, I can't even understand if the features on this "features" page are things that are important to me because I don't know enough acronyms and foundational knowledge, so it's a little imposing.

The thing I like about Unraid that's dead simple, which I'm sure more technically-minded people can do with many solutions, is use drives of different sizes as long as each drive is less than the size of the parity drive(s). Since content shares are automatically distributed across drives, and those drives are different sizes, is that not very similar functionality?

I guess my question is, is the hybrid RAID solution above different only in that the array presents as a single drive to the user, rather than a single (multi-drive-apportioned) share?

tal, good to see you! I remember you for the "kagis real quick" comments you've left before! I actually started using Kagi because of you, and the assistant was a great help in getting my TrueNAS Scale setup, among many many other things. I actually love searching for things (most of the time) now! Thank you for enlightening me! :)

Oh, that's definitely how it should be (but pretty much never is). That's good to hear.

I can't say I understand the reasons for that.

But the flash drive content is very minimal and in 2+ years of using it, anecdotally I haven't had any problems. The cache drive is separate (I use an SSD for that in addition to my 3.5" HDDs), and once booted my understanding is the entire OS is in memory, so it isn't a bottleneck. The OS flash drive is small and just settings, and one-click backup, so I don't have anxiety over data loss.

Mh, I'm not sure. This is only the case for enterprise versions and it kind of makes sense that you want to strongly encourage people to use verified drives in their buisness solutions.

They're all updated to the latest DSM, maybe any change is just on new models shipping.

We use a LOT of their small 2 bay units at customer sites, and the latest we've installed were using Synology brand drives, so not sure about those

No, others said they patched the Synology OS in software.

My point is that you buy Synology for the hardware. Just like a router or laptop or phone, wipe the OS as soon as it arrives and install the better FOSS OS.