Nice to see a tech company actually getting punished for their anti-consumer policies.
I first heard about this update from Cory Doctorow’s newsletter: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah
The post about the original policy: https://hexbear.net/post/4619813
I personally have made the step from synology to qnap partly because of this policy.
i hadn’t heard about this before. what a bunch of maroons. i can’t believe they thought this was going to fly.
Their enclosures are dogshit too. You can roll your own for like half the price if you have spare components laying around or a decent local computer thrift store. It’ll be like 10x better to because you can put actual real NAS software on there, or just run a virtualization server.
Only benefit for these style appliances is that they usually come with 2.5Gig + network adapters, but a smaller ATX build could just get a PCIE card that does 10 and that benefit is gone.
If I wanted to go about looking into this, where would I start? Hardware and software wise.
For software… TrueNAS is probably worth checking out but may require some tinkering. I’ve been running it since it was called FreeNAS, about 10 years now actually. It’s been rock solid but I decided to splash out on enterprise grade hardware at that time. Like, actually tracked down and bought the exact RAM modules from the mobo QVL type shit. I guess it was worth, bc I have had almost 0 issues with it once I got it set up the way I liked. I scarcely even log into the admin console anymore, it can be very hands off, set-and-forget, or what have you. I’m only asking it to be a NAS though. I used to fuck with the jail feature so I could have it also run services (bittorrent client, DVR, Plex, etc) but that was a huge pain in the ass for me so I ditched that idea and run services on a different machine now which I very much prefer. The newer TrueNAS versions may make this easier, I dunno.
If I were starting from scratch today, I’d do it on surplus enterprise hardware (from ebay or a local computer thrift shop) and see if I could make copyparty work for me. Looks like a real nice app that could maybe do everything I need out of a fileserver, but I have no time to fuck with it and my needs are already met.
This sounds incredibly complicated. Basically I just want to setup a storage setup with redundancy and a silent machine. I’ve got a Synology already but with the hard drives in it its way too annoying to keep in the same room so i hardly use it.
I don’t own one, but look into n100/n150 machines. I had been looking at These but decided to upgrade an old pc instead. But the cpu is only a few watts so should be nice and quiet. Forget which exact reviews I’ve seen of it
Copyparty is cool, but it’s still a very green app. If you want to use that, I’d run it as a container within your TrueNAS/FreeNAS install. That way you get the foundation of the tested software with a fun UI added on top.
Also having read some of the copy party source, it was written by a madman
Yeah for sure if I get time to tinker I’ll just run copyparty separately, and that’s probably good advice for everyone, thanks. Wdym a madman? Did they leave a manifesto in the comments?
USB3.0 can do a 2.5g eth card pretty easily.
Always feel dirty using USB for stuff that isn’t basic I/O lol. Plus if I’m building my own I’ll probably wanna go 10 gig because why not
ugreen seems mildly cheaper with better processors
i don’t understand why it’s hard to shove snapdragon with crazy transcode power into those things, ideal application. (that is if you want a small boy, cause sourcing mini motherboards with laptop chips, single 12v plug and 4 sata ports and enclosure is a pain and cost roughly as much as those dumb things, even if they shouldn’t)Security is the main issue if you keep it open to the internet.
