Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives.
Just wanted to say thanks for this, I’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of NAS devices and I think I can cover my needs and my whole family with N.2 storage. Something along the lines of 12 TB should be enough so 4 *4tb (one redundant) may be the best option and I’m a stickler for power consumption, so a little N150 can probably run everything for less than 20w.
Hey, I’m glad you found it helpful. I run a lot on my N100.
A DNS hole for privacy and ad blocking
Audiobookshelf for all my audiobooks, because screw Amazon and Audible
Copyparty for simple file management/transfer, as I don’t need a full office suite like Nextcloud
Jellyfin for my films/series
Linkding for managing bookmarks
Navidrome for my music library
As well as some extra services mostly for utility reasons, a reverse proxy, some headless game servers, etc. The applications don’t all do things at the same time, e.g. Jellyfin isn’t sitting and transcoding 100% of the time, so the only time it’s really loaded down is when a lot of people connect to a game server.
My only advice would be to maybe check the price/performance difference between the N100 and the N150. I was initially going for the N150 as well, but found that paying double for the marginal performance difference of the N150 just wasn’t worth it for me. I spent the savings on more storage instead.
Just wanted to say thanks for this, I’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of NAS devices and I think I can cover my needs and my whole family with N.2 storage. Something along the lines of 12 TB should be enough so 4 *4tb (one redundant) may be the best option and I’m a stickler for power consumption, so a little N150 can probably run everything for less than 20w.
Hey, I’m glad you found it helpful. I run a lot on my N100.
As well as some extra services mostly for utility reasons, a reverse proxy, some headless game servers, etc. The applications don’t all do things at the same time, e.g. Jellyfin isn’t sitting and transcoding 100% of the time, so the only time it’s really loaded down is when a lot of people connect to a game server.
My only advice would be to maybe check the price/performance difference between the N100 and the N150. I was initially going for the N150 as well, but found that paying double for the marginal performance difference of the N150 just wasn’t worth it for me. I spent the savings on more storage instead.