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Comment by jackallis | Hacker News Reader

now, only question is would they be any better than Synology for non-technical users?

truth be told; I consider myself highly technical, even with things like FreeNAS.

I went to check my custom built FreeNAS one day, and it's off, and it wouldn't properly boot so I needed to haul a monitor out to see what was going on...

I finally hit the age where I don't care to deal with shit like that anymore, and finally pulled the trigger on a synology. Couldn't be happier.

It was fun setting it up and configuring FreeNAS the way I wanted, but overall bleh because I didn't get the right HW (went dual core atom at the time, not beefy enough for plex re-encoding).

How does that help? Now if the Synology doesn't boot what do you do? Is the hope/assertion that the Synology is sufficiently less buggy that you don't mind being less able to fix it yourself?

Me too, this was the most annoying thing about FreeNAS. It just seemed to often not start up properly and require plugging in a monitor to see what's wrong. Often when I did plug in a monitor, it would boot fine, so I had no idea what the issue was.

Recently I replaced it with a barebones Arch install and it works just as well for home use, and starts fast and reliably. I think FreeNAS middleware is overly complex for home use if you are at all comfortable with administering things yourself (ZFS really makes it easy).

FreeNAS might make more complex things you'd do in an enterprise environment easier, but I think for anything you'd want to do at home, a basic Linux install would probably be easier. (eg. installing media server software, setting up a VPN server, even running a VM, etc.)

I ran into similar problems with my custom built FreeNAS too. It's still a great setup, but more work than I would like. When my server eventually dies, I'll probably replace it with one of the official FreeNAS Minis.

https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/

On the other hand maybe buying a consumer NAS can give you a false sense of security: https://kevq.uk/i-nearly-lost-all-of-my-data/

> [...] consumer NAS can give you a false sense of security

Your conclusion is not supported in the mentioned URL.

What has been described in the URL could've happened with a FreeNAS or TrueNAS or Open Media Vault system or just about any system. RAID is never a backup, and one backup is not enough.

If you read the parent comment between the lines, it implies that Synology feels worry free in comparison to FreeNAS.

My point is that both options have similar chances of breaking unexpectedly.

It is also a fact that both meterorites and rain fall from the sky sometimes, but that doesn't mean the "chance" of a meterorite hitting my head are the same as a raindrop.

You're only going to get actual, reliable and useful numbers about failure rates between competing products by doing actual studies and analyzing the aggregate results. Anything else is meaningless. And as a buyer, I'm more worried about things like warranty and technical support quality, frankly, if I'm going to buy a prepackaged system anyway, which are easier to gauge from afar.

The board on the NAS died, and took out a locally attached USB backup. He had recently turned off offsite backup.

Instead of buying a replacement synology, and moving the drives (which are all fine) he dumped the data to various other devices using Linux raw LVM, and restored 100% of the data.

This seems like it worked as intended to me (not counting the simultaneous loss of the USB stick and motherboard). Anyway, any NAS that contains important data should be backed up offsite.

> It’s clear that I not only need to replace my old solution, but I also need to come up with a more robust one too.

Is there anything better than RAID? That's what every file system seems to use and it's honestly not very good. High capacity arrays can take over 24 hours to rebuild and during this time the risk of additional failures is even greater due to read errors. RAID also requires matching capacities for all storage devices, making it hard to expand capacity of the whole array.

The only alternative I can think of is object storage which is not exactly made for home use.

Seems like totally false question. Your not comparing OSs, your comparing an OS and your home built hardware, to costume hardware and that OS.

You could just buy a costume build FreeNas OS driven NAS, like the FreeNAS Mini for example.

doubtful, non-technical users really aren't the target for things like freenas/truenas.

Agreed, if you run FreeNAS at home you are likely to be subscribed to /r/homelab. That’s not to say it’s impossible for a non-technical user to deploy and manage it, but it will have a learning curve consumer and prosumer gear doesn’t.

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