Synology tends to oversell their product a bit, so I don't completely blame him...
However, it sounds like he wanted a fancy industrial NAS device but bought a box of drives thinking it would do the same thing. Synology boxes at their heart are exactly what it says on the tin, a Network Attached Storage device, or a box of drives. They're great for home power users or small offices where you just need a file dump or a collaboration device, but if your use case is more than that you're going to need to look elsewhere.
I've had a couple sitting in my network rack for years. They do everything from collect all of the network device data to provide an NFS boot for some older devices, and act as just a general file store for everything else. They excel at this, and if you expect more then you run into jack of all trades, master of none.
My DIY Pi4 NAS is staring at you 回_回
The Pi didn’t exist when my units were put into use. My Pis do boot from the NFS share, however.
Last I checked you were almost always better off with a Linux server with a bunch of disks crammed in it, using either Software or hardware RAID, so you can easily change/configure the software. I mean unless you have a lot of money to spend on a NAS. Is that not true?
Synology provides a fairly comprehensive set of utilities on their devices for people who don't want to spin up a GNU/Linux box.
I'd put something like this in a small office where they wanted a file dump. A giant server box in a rack would be overkill for that application.
Seems like a good product. I run a Linux server for my file storage. Can see the appeal of simplicity. Have to do some research and learn commands to setup properly.
The thing with synology is you don’t need any of that, almost all of what you need to do is exposed under their GUI.
i used mine for other stuff way back when, but as things like the Pi became available, there wasn’t much need to be under the hood.
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