alt Hacker NewsThe real trick, and the reason I don't build my own NAS, is standby power usage. How much wattage will a self built Linux box draw when it's not being used? It's not easy to figure out, and it's not easy to build a NAS optimized for this.
Whereas Synology or other NAS manufacturers can tell me these numbers exactly and people have reviewed the hardware and tested it.
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There are power meters like KWS-303L that will tell you how much manufacturers lie with their numbers.
For example my ancient tplink TL-WR842N router eats 15W standby or no, while my main box, fans, backlight, gpu, hdds and stuff -- about 80W idle.
Looking at Synology site the only power I see there is the psu rating, which is 90W for DS425. So you can expect real power consumption of about 30-40W. Which is typical for just about any NUC or a budget ATX motherboard with a low-tier AMD-something + a bunch of HDDs.
To me, it's a question of time and money efficiency. (Time is money.)
I can buy a NAS, whereby I pay money to enjoy someone else's previous work of figuring it out. I pay for this over and over again as my needs change and/or upgrades happen.
Or
I can build a NAS, whereby I spend time to figure it out myself. The gained knowledge that I retain in my notes and my tiny little pea brain gets to be used over and over again as needs change, and/or upgrades happen. And -- sometimes -- I even get paid to use this knowledge.
(I tend to choose the latter. YMMV.)