I have owned my Synology NAS and enjoyed self-hosting with it for about 2 years now. I never self-hosted before owning it, so this is all I know. The only reason I purchased one in the first place was because of my discovery of Plex media server. Plex was great on PC for the first little bit until I realized I was outgrowing my ability to reliably host it for myself and family to enjoy and that’s what forced me to find a dedicated solution, which led me to the Synology NAS.
I wonder to myself sometimes if I would be better off building my own system with my own parts. What has stopped me I think mostly is sacrificing the Synology DSM OS, which I really do like and find good value in. I know there are Linux distros for specific NAS needs, but I haven’t had any experience with them to know if it’s a good choice for self-hosting.
Is Synology NAS the way?
What do you have?
How do you like it?
Are you planning to change your setup?
I’m a 20 year IT and DevOps guy, and I run Synology at home after years of old servers and whitebox home labs.
I use it because it Just Works, and when I’m at home I want to be working on my personal projects and relaxing, not learning or troubleshooting.
I have the full *arr suite, Plex and file services on my DS920+, and unless I’m transcoding several streams, the CPU barely gets warm.
I do plan on adding some edge devices on NUC, Mac Minis or Arduino, but they will run strictly as edge devices or specialty boxes like video conversion.
More devices means more complexity. The Synology is perfectly capable of running my house stuff for me, so I keep it simple.