FreeNAS vs. Synology DiskStation

FreeNAS suited really well in managing our legacy systems and it handled all our network flows really well, less maintenance is required on our part. FreeNAS also gave the option to switch to TrueNAS for free as now its support is limited. The major issue that we faced was with the installation as it is really complex and required lots of time. Rest all is good and FreeNAS still works well on our systems.

Incentivized

Synology DiskStation would be well suited for a smaller organization of under 100 employees where you have a lot of collaborating between teams and clients. If you have to have a common space to save documents and project files so both employees and clients can access or upload if needed, this product is perfect! You can create links for clients to access or upload files, while you and your coworkers have a shared collaboration space. If you have a large team, over 100 I would not recommend this product. For us, it seemed to work really well because there were about 20 of us using it, but it is hard for me to imagine it working well for a group that is 5x our size. I don't know, maybe it would still work really well. If you had to know exactly when something was updated and have real times updates on things being added, I would also not recommend this product.

Incentivized

• The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
• The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.

Incentivized

• File serving for Windows PC's is outstanding in terms of compatibility and performance and reliability
• The cloud storage service is like our own private dropbox and very helpful
• The backup for business make backup a no brainer with backup to the box and hyperbackup providing a off-site cloud backup option to Synology Cloud or a plethora of other options

Incentivized

• Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
• Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.

Incentivized

• the focus of synology is on SMB users, we have a 1.3PB Synology NAS unit that needs higher-end DiskStation software to handle the 95 x 16TB drives we have
• in summary, Synology NAS software doesn't handle enterprise customer needs
• syncing of files with android and IOS devices, in particular with DSM 7, the Synology Cloud sync software doesn't work (the staff are working on a release in the coming months). But syncing files from mobile devices to the Synology NAS is a key reason 2 of our Synology NAS units were purchased, and without the syncing we are limited

Incentivized

It provides us with great ROI compared with other solutions. It is also a versatile product, having NAS and SAN product lines depending on the business requirement. Furthermore, the implementation of dual controller lines would allow us to consider it for more critical applications to supplement the more enterprise-level SAN solution. It also is a wonderful backup solution, having all the applications available after purchase of the appliance without the further need to purchase additional software or licensing.

Incentivized

The Synology DiskStation is easy to set up and manage. The interface is clean and features are well documented. These units are reliable and can be set up to do scheduled integrity checks so failures can be mitigated before they halt business operations. The available packages for expanded roles makes these devices versatile.

Incentivized

There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.

Incentivized

Support is pretty solid. There is good documentation and the help articles inside the interface provide you answers to common questions and instructions for many scenarios that you may encounter. I have not needed to speak with support very often and my experiences have been good overall with their support team.

Incentivized

Before swapping to FreeNAS, we'd been using plan old Linux servers running Samba and NFS with ZFS storage underneath. This worked really well for our requirements at the time but required a lot of administration when new versions came along, or new users had to be added or drives needed replacing, and so on. FreeNAS did away with 95% of that work and does a much better job too.

Incentivized

Synology NAS replaced any cloud storage for way cheaper, more controlled and expansible. Qnap is the second best and was also an option but back then it had less functionalities. It does the backup just as Synology DiskStation but the support was better on the Synology DiskStation. That and the fact the price and modules for physical expansion are available, Synology DiskStation became my choice

• Low-Cost Network Attached Storage
• Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations
• FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys

Incentivized

• DiskStation has provided an accessible storage solution to our developers for local backup that they can control. No need to contact IT to do anything. This has been a win for IT and our users.
• DiskStation provides good support in a mixed PC/Mac environment, eliminating the need for multiple solutions. It can act as a file share for both platforms, and as a result, provides ease of access, regardless of what a user is using for their OS.
• While DiskStation provides quotas per user, I'd also like the ability to set policies - so that business-critical data is getting backed up to Enterprise-focused storage, and not to our local DiskStation. This is partly a people problem but could be addressed by enabling policies that disable code from being stored.

Incentivized