Synology or HPE as a NAS?

Synology or HPE?

I have a question which I have not seen covered much. I have seen bloggers make cheap NAS with desktop machines. I have not seen anyone compare Synology (or similar with an entry level microserver (like the HPE P16006-001 https://www.provantage.com/hpe-p16006-001~7HPE96K5.htm).

I have used Synology in the past because it was easy.

I have been running Ubuntu Linux on all my home computers for some time and am ok with using that as a NAS. I am looking to get 2 NAS servers (store one at home and the other at my parents house 30 miles away). I am looking for lots of diskspace, RAID 10, hotswappable is not needed, I would like something beefier so that it last longer, power usage is important- I don’t want something which can not scale up/down the power usage, I need some easy way to back up from Linux machines & Android phones. Media streaming sounds great (since we take lots of photos and have a collection of phone videos).

I am comparing the HPE microserver line with the 4 bay Synology line.

What are your thoughts?

HPE servers are not made with the same passion as Synology server. There are quite few differences between them. HPE will be very basic with its capabilities. Normally you would need to install Windows or Linux server on their hardware. In meantime, Synology have created their own operating system which use Linux backbone. By doing that they have managed to use available hardware as efficient as possible. This is why you will often see seemingly weaker hardware on Synology NAS. But the performance will be still very similar compared to some better looking server specs. In the meantime Synology will manage to reduce power consumption. Synology NAS is also better designed allowing the components to cool down with less noise and energy consumption.

HPE usually come with a service package. So you pay for the service and support upfront. You are also going to be limited to the hardware you can use inside this server if you want to upgrade. You will see requirements like HPE only hard drives and network cards and things like that. Synology will work with any drives and with most popular PCIe cards.

HPE is a fairly old system. Synology is not only improving the editing operating system but also adding more functions, apps, and innovations to their products. Things like active-active solutions where one power supply or one motherboard can die but NAS will still operate. Or things like high availability where two NAS work alongside and other will take over if first one dies.

Things like options to mix different size drives and combine capacities. Also, snapshot technology which allows you to roll back previous versions not only with your NAS system data but even entire storage. This is great protection against things like ransomware and accidental data deletion / overwrite.

You will also be able to use regular RAID options like RAID1/5/10 and add hot spare drives which will automatically replace broken drives in your system.

Xeon based alternative would be DS3018xs or DS3617xs. You can use only a few disks at the start and add more later without resetting the system. If you need a more multimedia friendly system then Celeron or Atom-based NAS like DS920+ would do a good job.

I hope this helps.

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