 time here for more systems and we're going to talk about Synology versus True NAS and I've been wanting to do this video But it's not easy to articulate because it's not an easy decision because it's not like one or the other One has advantages over the other we're going to talk about that But it's not like there's an easy, you know all this way you're all that way it depends I know that's the part people hate the answer They want just a definitive answer tell me what to buy what I want to do is go over the scenarios And the solution you're looking for and help that steer you into what may make you happy And what may be the right fit for you and of course because we sell both these products and we deploy both of these products We're going to talk about our decision-making process that leads to that before we jump all into that if you could click that like button and first If you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to Lawrence systems calm If you'd like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has There is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page your support is greatly Appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below They're in the description of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly So check back frequently and finally our forums forums. Lawrence systems comm is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video And other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now Don't make the assumption that because I stuck the Synology on top of the Freenast that I think it stacks up better Just so happens the feet fit exactly this size, but the opposite isn't true So if you were to buy both of these this fits on top Not ideal though. It's not Stable. Anyways, this is a Synology DS 1520 plus and this is a Freenast or TrueNAS core I mini IX plus now both of these were sent to me by the respective companies for review IX systems sent me this and of course Synology sent me this and I haven't both turned on and running because the first thing I want to talk about is are they quiet that's one of those debates that come up a lot and Synology's done a great job across their product line of making relatively quiet products that are in this form factor And I did review the Synology rack mount stuff. It's a little bit louder, but rack mount stuff generally Noise is less of a concern. We want it to be quieter But we also want it to be cool and it's going to be running a long time in a rack So the fans usually you know push a little more air create a little bit of noise These are designed possibly to sit next to you and with Freenast TrueNAS because you can build your own or Get a turnkey product the one that they make these mini series, which I really like Offer turnkey and quiet solutions and like I said the Distation series these smaller ones like this are also quiet and it's a kind of across their product line now The nice thing about TrueNAS though is because you can build it yourself and that would be a very distinct difference between Synology I'm not going to address Exponology it is essentially a Kind of a fork, but it's not officially supported It's 100% community supported great if you're a home user and want to tinker with it So you can build on your own hardware We're going to stick specifically with the supported DSM because I'm assuming a little bit more maybe small business and other use cases Homeland people well, that's just having fun and not something I would you know deploy commercially So I'm not going to address that and we're going to keep this focused on Synology and TrueNAS because they're both solutions we deploy they're both solutions we use and I think that's a very important aspect to think About because a lot of people just regurgitate information off of spec sheets. I'm going to talk about real-world deployments I have not used many of the other ones out there So if you have your favorite NAS system, which seems to come up all the time. Hey, Tom, please review this Well, I don't use it unless I actually plan to deploy it. I'm not as likely to do a review on it So my experience is a lot of what this is going to be calling from we've sold a lot of the IX systems And we've done everything from the high-end enterprise as in $50,000 plus servers with high availability that we have sold to large companies in the enterprise market You know, of course, you've seen some of the reviews if you've spent some time this channel But you can find them for the TrueNAS, you know built purpose built hardware for the enterprise Which is awesome But this is the same software you can download and build yourself a small NAS box or if you're going I don't feel like building something. I want something that I know works That's what TrueNAS mini IX sells is this right here now same with Synology We've put a lot of these in small businesses. We've used a lot of them for the surveillance station We've had these out in the field for a while. We've been selling deploying using so all of my experience on both of these is at different levels of usage and of course internally we use Free NAS for well this video is being edited on a free NAS server So I have a lot of experience using these so that's where my reviews going to come from now Let's break down the comparison. I'll leave a link to this Google sheet. I put together, but this is a one-to-one kind of Objective comparison. I want to start there. There's always a subjective I just like something better and I try to keep that bias out at least here in the beginning There is of course some importance to that bias because maybe you like how much easier it is to set up something But even easy to set up as a real subjective easy to you, but maybe not easy someone else So let's start right here and start with the file system I think this is really important when you talk about NAS you're talking about the security and integrity of your files and Synology is taking the approach of building it on the MDADM RAID system because it's a linux based system With butterfs. Now, there's some contention You'll find if you read about butterfs handling hard drives and some issues This is why Synology has went with MDADM RAID butterfs and ext4 So they have a combination of things that they can do to take advantage of and keep it efficient and keep it good They also have bit rot protection, etc. etc So they've put this together and it's you know, we find it very stable I haven't really had problems with their file system or losses on there But NAS is not a backup just because you have a bunch of drives You should always be backing this up and that's even true with ZFS But ZFS is next level and I've heard it referred to many times as the billion dollar file system That is because of the amount of time research and development over the years that has gone into ZFS And it is an outstanding file system for absolutely massive scalable storage. So ZFS Hands down one of the you know Really advanced file systems out there when it comes to what they refer to as copy and write now butterfs bt RFS is Misspelled right here, but also copy on right. So that is Also a feature of it, but ZFS much more advanced does it really really well And also with the upcoming true NAS 12 release. They've added features such as the fusion pools and it's a really interesting enhancement that they've brought to the table with ZFS So it's it's a lot of power in ZFS and I can't say enough good things about it And it's one of the reasons it's so popular and a lot of people sing praises about it Now open source is a big factor. So if you're into the open source Ecosystem like I am and essentially an open source enthusiast like I refer to myself I'm Even though Synology is built on Linux. It's not a fully open source system And this is common a lot of companies use the Linux space and add some of their own code to it So you don't you can't just go grab the Synology with the exception of what I said about XPenology But that's still a fork and not fully supported etc. But yeah, it's not fully open source True NAS core on the other hand fully open source And this is why true NAS and IA system say well free NAS and true NAS are the largest open source project when it comes to storage Because they aren't kind of sort of open source. They are open source And it's fully open source with BSD based with true NAS And I will mention because I've done a video on it But it's you know future release is going to be true NAS scale, which is going to be Linux based Still all the great ZFS features, but a lot of people, you know, really like the Options you may get an enhancements that may come with a Linux based system So true NAS scale same thing open source and going to be based on Linux But we're going to talk today about true NAS core because it's available today on these systems even though it's in beta depending on when you're watching this with level of beta and That's going to be all BSD based Expandable raid now this is one of those Yes, but type answers. So yes for models that support SHR Synology hybrid rates So you can grab your pile of drives and throw them in there and have expansion going on And it will any intelligent way handle it. You can expand True NAS, but the vdevs have to match So I've got a separate video where I get more in depth than that So no, you can't just grab random drives There is a methodology where you have to pair up the vdevs in a similar way They don't have to be exactly the same drives. They can be different sizes But the pools themselves have to be containing the vdevs and it'll get complicated if I keep going on So I'll leave a link to that video. So yes, but is the answer on there Which is you know, I think it's important and if you want something that is a little bit easier Well, it sees from a Back to that subjective versus objective. Yeah, we're going to say it's just easier to do it in Synology But part of the thing was zfs is a little bit more rigid and the way it works But that's also what gives it some of that resilience it has for protecting your data plugins Synology and community supported ix systems and community So we do have the Synology based plugins on there and that comes down to if you have a plugin That is really specific to what you're looking for And it's only available on one of these platforms that may be one of those deciding factors that you've made your decision on and We'll get to that a little bit more at the bottom But that is obviously a factor But the fact is you have a lot of flexibility with both of these because you can run some other things on them So see if it has docker support, which we'll talk about later Virtual machine storage support as a target So nfs nice because they are supported on both of these So you can configure that and set that up Snapshot replication yes via butter fs and yes via zfs Now this is a feature of both of these file systems where you can create You know essentially snapshots to protect yourself against Maybe something that catastrophically destroys data because you have a share and you know ransomware being popular here in 2020 If something happens you can just roll back to that snapshot or Because you want to replicate it now snapshots create points in time Which you can replicate essentially a block level zfs replication. I've done videos on this extremely powerful extremely fast And it's based off of those snapshots that can be replicated to duplicate your data somewhere else and that feature Based on butter fs is available in synology s3 target support Maybe not everyone's looking for this, but I think it's interesting that it's natively built into the journey system Which essentially means it can act as an s3 server. I did a little searching I didn't find natively a way to do it on synology. I did find people who had write-ups on Doing it, but I didn't see native support for s3. It's kind of an edge case It may not be a deciding factor, but at least I'll mention it that it's built in there rsync now they both support rsync I find the rsync in synology to be a little bit trickier to use And I say that because it was easy to take two synologies and have them rsync to each other that part really simple I'll having it talk to other devices less simple True NAS core implements standard rsync So whether you're pushing or pulling data from rsync or want to set up an rsync port or rsync over ssh they just made it really simple to do in The true NAS system free NAS system. Have you want to look at it? It's been in there for a long time and it's standards based rsync Over standard ports and also standard ways to do it So I've used this quite a bit on true NAS when we have people who want to synchronize with different devices As long as those other devices whether they be a standalone device or another NAS as long as standards Implemented rsync support is there and neither the NAS or of course easy from the command line No problem syncing with this and a lot of people have a lot of custom solutions based on rsync So having that just as a built-in support is really nice to the web interface Containerization Docker is on supported models of Synology True NAS core uses bsd and iokage jails now when true NAS scale comes out that's going to be Docker based Once again, that's a future release, but hey, it's something that is out there that's available So I thought I'd mentioned that you know in the future that'll be something else And I also bring up true NAS scale every now and then because it runs essentially on the same hardware So if you ever wanted to switch between them your zfs pools should import fine And you'd be able to switch between them But your if you have built things on containerization because it's a different platform. Well, you'll have to rebuild all your plugins Windows file sharing seems obvious, but yes, they fully support it Manage users and permissions to the interface. Yes, there's a user manager in both of these So I'm not talking about active director bid just generally installing this and saying let's add some users Let's build some permissions They both have acl access control list management so you can assign users and permissions That is fully supported on both of these devices So if you just want to use a windows file server or in a windows network, it works And if you're in a small business office, I mean you go, hey, I like active directory integration Yes, we have that in both devices where we can tie to active directory So active directory can just understand this device and can control the permissions on it 80 server replacement now while this is supported in Synology It's not like a drop-in automatically every feature in 80 is there But it does have basic 80 support so it can kind of act as an active directory server Inside your network that is not a feature currently supported in churnass I don't know if it'll come in there or not But I've always had mixed feelings about this because it's not full 80 And sometimes you can have some quirkiness with it But for, you know, small officer or home user, it probably will work fine It all depends on what use cases you have for it Surveillance software is something I've talked a lot about with Synology We have Surveillance Station, it requires licenses And you get the first two for free or if you buy the NVR models, they come up with a couple more But I've done a whole videos on this, I really like it People ask me a lot about doing this on churnass There is a community supported plugin, I don't feel it's very well developed It's not something I've ever used in the enterprise, I've looked at it, it seems Well, I can only say kind of basic and not well developed It's the only way I can really describe that It's not something that I would say is turnkey Oh yeah, it's an awesome drop in replacement They have it, it's there, so I'm not going to dwell on that much It's not something I would recommend or recommend it for business Backup software, Active Backup is really cool I got to admit that's a great Synology supported tool I've done videos on how this integrates for backing up Windows computers, Windows servers How it can back up things like Office 365 and G Suite There's like a whole suite of software supported by Synology that comes with these devices And it doesn't have any licenses with it It's part of when you buy Synologies that support the Active Backup Back to, it has to be a device that supports it As of right now, it seems like a lot of them do But once again, when you're choosing your NAS, that's something you have to think about Community and third party support Yes, there's actually a lot of different plugins you can get And some of our community or third party plugins that are on there That may have other advanced features But there's nothing native supported by IAC systems It's like an automatic turnkey management tool That's like Active Backup So if you came here looking for Active Backup and that's what you want And these are all those times when we're going to go back to why we deploy Synology That Active Backup is a big one Now back to that open source conversation Now because, you know, just because we chose these IAC systems Many explosives because of what I have But I can really load free NAS to your NAS anywhere I want I can grab the code, I can do it And if IAC systems decided, seems unlikely To stop releasing the code or anything like that Someone would just fork it and move on Matter of fact, there are forks already of that particular software and deviations But I don't see that ever changing It's 100% your software open source That you do what you want with And that's a big factor I really like Synology, the device talks to Synology To get all the plugins to get the software set up If Synology says, you know what? I don't want to support it Like I said, I'm not saying this is likely But this is a factor If Synology says, you were going to expire and stop supporting And stop having updates for these models That's their choice to do so And that's it That's where the support will end If they decide to drop something out of their plugins And the way they deliver them through their system and locked in Then that's it That's Synology's choice to do so Because some of this is closed source There's not an easy way to update this Not that it's a real likely factor But it's something that may play into it Doesn't stop us from deploying these Because it just, you know Synology makes a good product Especially when you're using things like the Office 365 backup If that's one of the solutions This one of the times you're going to deploy it If they want that active backup of small office contacts us And say, hey, we need something to back up our workstations We don't want to buy some other type of service Well, then this is something that they're absolutely going to love Where they can drop this in It's pretty turnkey It gives you a nice management web interface And a lot of internal IT departments do like these Synology's They can set a couple of these up And have easy local backups Now Cloud backups are awesome And both of these do support once you get the data here Putting it in the cloud Synology goes a step further And offers some of their own storage solutions And, you know, kind of a nice feature That they do that versus And they have not locking Because you can use other ones But, you know, it's a nice turnkey system And versus IX system, still really nice We use Backplace to back these up And that's how our solution works Now, let's talk a little bit about the interfaces The Synology DSM interface Very much has a desktop UI look and feel With the control panel And just these simple things Oh look, here's my users I can create And click this little button at the top here There's my iSCSI manager I can go to the file station We can look at shares we have Package center And we can load things like Plex And all these different plugins They have nice plugins Lot of support Lot of different stuff that's supported in here I really like the extensiveness of the plugins The ease of use, so to speak Of just plugging them in there and away you go Now you still have to do some mapping And drop some permissions in there And connect to your Plex server To where your every year storage is And I, you know, I gotta admit I really like this interface It's pretty intuitive, easy to use This, though, is something I feel very at home in As well And this is where things get more subjective I like the interface a lot for TrueDAS I find it very robust It gives me deep levels of access To tuning and setting things up So when you talk about something like iSCSI You have some advanced options in here But you get a lot of very fine tuning options That may be very daunting And this may be the first problem you have Going this is a bit much This is not my space I want something very simple and turnkey Synology goes a little bit more on the simple side FreeNAS I think it's relatively easy to use Especially, you know, after you take a little time And dump plenty of tutorials on this But, yeah, it's going to be a little bit more complex They do have plug-in support here So you can still look up plug-ins From IAC systems or community They haven't broke down here You can click the install We have Plex server already loaded in here Just as a quick test To test something on here And not a problem to install But it's a little bit different Same with the ACLs and permissions The, when you design the pools Go to storage pools And if we look at Go here Edit ACLs This may seem a little bit more complicated Than the way you do that Over in Synology with the file station And the way you do the permissions So there's, like I said If you figure it out It seems easy But if their first time Or, yeah, Synology might be a little bit easier I at least wanted to give them a fair shake on that So I don't know if this really helps you In which one to choose But I've now laid out a few of these use cases Like I said, we deployed both The nice thing that amazes me About the TrueNAS is You can download for free Something that I've deployed And set up in large-scale enterprise Devirements on rack servers That cost 50 plus thousand dollars And that's your still Your systems right here The same software that's scalable Now, Synology, we've played With some of the larger Synologies We've never deployed them Our use cases mostly have been targeted At the small businesses and small offices And especially love the surveillance station So hopefully this kind of gives you Some ideas of which one to get I think the TrueNAS line Being fully open source Fits well with my open source enthusiasm And, of course, my love to tinker with things Because I can just create all the jails I want and very custom Create all kinds of different software on there Set this up as different targets For things versus the Synology For your small business going You know what, I just need something Simple turnkey I need some backups I'd like it to run a couple of cameras In my office and some files Can you do that? Yes, Synology's kind of turnkey for that Makes it really simple So if you're the more enthusiast type And love all the knobs being available To you to twist and turn And really customize with a very flexible And big community support FreeNAS If you're going, I just want turnkey And I like that UI That kind of feels like a desktop interface Synology's got you covered there And the surveillance station Granted, it does take licenses But hey, that's kind of a cool feature Along with some basic file permissions For some sharing And maybe you want to replicate this To another Synology Or use that active backup Or you want to back up your Office 365 And G Suite I've done a video on that And that's a cool feature That comes with a lot of these models of Synology You're kind of locked in To the way they design things But they do a reliable job But I will mention that Like hardware wise If you build it yourself Synology kind of gets ruled out So if you are a tinker or a homelab You want to really dive deep into it The nuts and bolts of building it Well, then you're going to go back over to your FreeNAS again And go, I want to build it myself With the FreeNAS TrueNAS line Fully open source Because I like to customize everything I don't want something talking to some proprietary servers I'm going to lock it down and do that You can do that There's no license or activation On these servers at all Some of the Synology software Does require levels of activation To get it set up Not that that's the same as a license But that's a way they have control over it So just some thoughts And throwing them out there On final thoughts on this But they're both good products They're both very reliable That much I will say for them And whichever one you choose I think you'll be happy with it Just, you know, look at the choices Look at the options And decide which one works for you Thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video Please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel Hit the subscribe button And hit the bell icon If you'd like YouTube to notify you When new videos come out If you'd like to hire us Head over to LawrenceSystems.com Fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with And what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion Head over to Forums.LauranceSystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion About this video, other videos Or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums Which are free Also, if you'd like to help the channel Out in other ways Head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you And once again, thanks for watching And see you next time