Synology’s telegraphed moves toward a contained ecosystem and seemingly vertical integration are certain to rankle some of its biggest fans, who likely enjoy doing their own system building, shopping, and assembly for the perfect amount of storage. “Pro-sumers,” homelab enthusiasts, and those with just a lot of stuff to store at home, or in a small business, previously had a good reason to buy one Synology device every so many years, then stick into them whatever drives they happened to have or acquired at their desired prices. Synology’s stated needs for efficient support of drive arrays may be more defensible at the enterprise level, but as it gets closer to the home level, it suggests a different kind of optimization.
Synology is like Ubiquity in the self-hosted community: sure it’s self-hosted, but it’s definitely not yours. End of the day you get to deal with their decisions.
Terramaster lets you run your own OS on their machine. That’s basically what a homelabber wants: a good chassis and components. I couldn’t see a reason to buy a Synology after Terramaster and Ugreen started ramping out their product lines which let you run whatever OS you wanted. Synology at this point is for people who either don’t know what they’re doing or want to remain hands-off with storage management (which is valid; you don’t want to do more work when you get home for work). Unfortunately, such customers are now out in the lurch, so TrueNAS or trust some other company to hold your data safe.
Lol! Not like uGreen put any roadblocks to running your own OS (like disabling the watch dog feature in the BIOS and some other setting to enable custom boot).
And you don’t have any fan control on their NAS. Either you estimate and configure correcrly or you need to schedule downtime.
Actual servers let you live tune (some of) the power settings. Synology supports changing the fan profile in the live OS.
Damn I was really happy for ugreen, terrormaster it is then.
It’s not like you can’t do it (I did save the original SSD and replaced it with a new ome and installed TrueNas Scale). It’s just not intended to do from uGreens perspective.
Edit: I think I used either of these guides I used on how to open and how to install the new OS:
https://youtu.be/BWNH_JzMNPc
https://youtu.be/R8t-Wqx_E3U
https://youtu.be/yh8Ao5ryOeE
Oh yeah. The HDD indicator bays are partly non-functional as well.
But you can restore some functionality with scripts you run periodically with cron. Juat search “ugreen dxp4800plus led cli github” to find it.
Edit2:
And I only chose a uGreen NAS due to the Kickstarter price. Because that was a 40% price reduction.
At least I got a solid Model that is really nice. It also has a magnetic metal dust cover Ican easily remove if needed (even easier than the one on my pc case front panel which is a Fractal Design North)