I have a DS220+, which frankly I love, but I’m looking to replace it soon. It only has 2 drives, Synology is pulling some fuckery with needing their branded drives and I’m staying on the 6.x firmware given what I’ve seen/heard with 7.x
All that being said, I’m trying to find something that is:
- At least 4 bays
- Small form factor (it shouldn’t be much bigger than the drives it’s holding)
- Capable of running Docker
- Capable of backing up to an S3 bucket
- Capable of backing up Windows Clients
- Habe a decent GUI (I can do CLI, but frankly, don’t want to)
I was thinking potentially QNAP, but didn’t know what else is out there. I really do like Synology and would have looked at one of their models but their vendor lock in move ticked me off. Maybe finding a used 420 or 920?
Ha, of course “self-hosted” is the community I comment on for the first time after lurking for years, but …
UGREEN NASync. I own a DXP4800 Plus, and it fits your descriptions. Its OS is Debian (custom-built; but you can throw your own distribution on it and won’t even lose your warranty, though!), but it has a decent frontend, a mobile app even, 4 SATA3 + 2 NVMe bays, gets regular updates, is accessible via pretty much any protocol under the sun, can be backed up automatically to a lot of cloud storage providers, and I run a bunch of containers on it (which I used docker-compose for), since it ships with first-class support for it.
Overall, a huge value for its money so far (been running it for a few months), and can definitely recommend it, especially as an alternative to the incumbents like Synology or QNAP, and it’s a lot less power hungry and quieter than just getting a server rack off eBay.
Guess I need to write my first ever comment now as well haha
Can second this! Recently got a DXP6800 Plus and the hardware is great. Though I didn’t really bother with the UGREEN OS and installed TrueNAS on it fresh out of the box.
In comparison to my old 6-bay QNAP the only downside is IMO that it’s a fair bit bulkier. But it still fits nicely under a desk.
Same here, I have the 4800 Plus and immediately installed TrueNAS when I got it. Has been running flawlessly since March.
Does it have an app to automatically backup photos and documents from an Android or iOS phone by chance? I know I can use syncthing, but in my experience a tool like Synology Drive works more reliably.
I only have an iOS device, but its app is great and yes, it offers that functionality. So I reckon they wouldn’t have done this just for iOS 😄
I just got a UGreen unit and while it is taking longer to set up then I’d like, the interface is pretty good and docker was up and running pretty quickly. Traefik is a royal pita, but that’s a user problem since I never used it before and it’s my test system.
FWIW, I used caddy on my unit, and it’s working quite well. But I’ve also had caddy running on the VPS the NAS replaced, so it wasn’t exactly a novelty.
Happy to help if there are things you’re struggling with.