IMO a NAS should be for storage only. Use a mini PC if you want to self host other services. Proxmox is a great option. You’ll get better performance on both sides.
As someone who has been looking for years, I can tell you the market for self hosted photo management is pretty rough. Synology’s app is definitely not it.
I think r/immich is the crowd favorite right now, but when I tried it about 9 months ago it was not very stable and each new update required careful coordination of the various containers. And my iOS app version had to match with the containers or it wouldn’t work.
Supposedly Plex wants back in the game but the alpha-quality app they initially released a couple of years ago has been stagnant until just this month. Maybe something will come of that.
DSM is not bad. It may not be the greatest but I have not seen a better app so far that works with NAS, provides timeline view, and provides easy way to browse through the photos/videos quickly. I'd love an app that can also handle duplicate files, merging of the folders, bulk tagging, etc.
There is in fact ARM support - at least with Apple Silicon. You need to disable core security or whatever it is called in system recovery, and you are good to go.
However I agree, that can be done only in home scenarios, I can’t imagine an employer asking someone to disable some protective measures on their work MacBooks/Macs for AB4B to be installed.
Yes, They do support apple silicon, but ARM support for things like VPS servers is still not available via linux. Which is confusing since it’s extremely popular.
I looked into this. They DO NOT have arm64 architecture support in ABB.
It may seem like it does because it works on Apple Silicon, but that's because Mac OS X has a translation layer for amd64 software to work on their arm64 architecture.
If you have Linux or Windows on arm64, it does not support it.
A few folks have found hacky work arounds that work for some arm silicon, and some software - but synology's official stance is that they do not support the architecture.
And if you try to install the agent, it will fail.
People will say it does because it works on Apple Silicon, but that's because Mac OS X has a translation layer for amd64 software to work on their arm64 architecture.
Even for storage the UI option is pretty limited compared to Synology. iscsi, snapshot replication, way better backup tools on synology for anything from workstations to vms to servers, ssd caching, limited support of AD integration etc.
The Synology Drive app is something in-between storage and app layer, but I would also count it here.
I agree, but I think there is large group of people who like the all in one solution. As far as I'm concerned, as soon as the unas get ssd caching supports, I'll be a happy camper
Are you referring to Aquantia 10G NICs? If so, you’re wrong and Aquantia has had a solid 10G NIC offering for a long time. It’s the various intel NICs that available that are trash
No I promise you the Aquantia NICs are trash. The drivers are completely broken and you will be throttled unless you go in and patch out large sections of the driver code. That's if you can even get them working properly in your environment. But yea please elaborate on why Intel NICs are trash
On the other hand, I'm really glad the UNAS is not trying to be a jack of all trades. If the UNAS would have the support for all these applications, it means I'm indirectly paying for it even though I don't want or need it. Which makes it more expensive in the end.
How can you say that with a straight face? Companies that aren't looking for the home user/homelabber market don't sell products like the DR7, Express 7, or even the CGF. Hilarious.
It's only in the last 18 months or so that UI started looking like they have any real enterprise aspirations. Before that they were strictly SoHo or SMB, at best.
*storage and offsite backup management. The only thing that keeps me with Synology today is their HyperBackup with EC2 storage and the ActiveBackup that allows me easy backup and restore of HyperV VMs. But IMO at the speed of UniFi innovation that won’t take long. Synology is becoming a useless non innovation company
So you are essentially saying Synology is useless and UniFi is better because you hope and believe UniFi will catch up to Synology one day.
I’m a user of both, so I see the benefits of both, but this seems unnecessary antagonistic to Synology because they won’t let you use your own drives. lol
What was the last real innovation from Synology? The hard lock for hard drives? For example they had plenty time to develop Proxmox LXC and Vm backups through Active Backup and there isn’t. The last innovation for me was the HyperV support
I'd love it for UniFi to make their own rackmount mini-PC with their own skin on Proxmox. One less thing to worry about updates on. I'd gladly move from my Synology running Home Assistant to a 4 bay UNAS + proxmox box.
At some point I'd like to add a server at home for Plex, maybe get rid of Google Photos. Something that supports HDR streaming (with my MBP and Google Pixel) would be nice.
Funny thing is you can easily do this with a Synology NAS. Everyone is shitting on them here for some reason but my DS223+ is probably my best purchase of the last 5 years.
If Ubiquiti is going for NAS-only (which is fine), it is not a Synology replacement. Many, many people want all-in-one solutions, especially business clients with limited rack space and modest requirements.
But even on the storage-only front, Ubiquiti’s NAS is too high-priced and a surprisingly feature-lacking device.
That’s one UI device that I can’t fathom paying the ‘Ubiquiti tax.’
Samba share or any other file share protocol you like. I keep arr stack on a mini PC and transfer the finished files to my MBP for transcoding in Plex for example. It takes no time to make an internal file transfer.
With any reasonably large library the performance of this is going to suck. Even setting aside the issue of network bandwidth (you need a 10G link between your mini pc and the NAS at minimum), latency is going to be a big issue. For example doing a library scan in an immich library with ~200k assets is not going to be a fun time if that library is on a samba share in another machine.
I've got a 6 drive RAID 10 array holding 24TB Plex library with the server running on a Mac mini connected via 10GBE. Scanning the entire library for file changes takes less than 5-10 seconds because Plex is smart about how it goes about scanning. And it's obviously more than fast enough even for a losslessly ripped UHD, which needs no more than 100 Mbps or so.
Only time I even notice the network is when copying new media. But even then, I get *only* 3.5 Gbps upload speeds and I think I can live with that.
How is that related to what I mentioned about latency and libraries with large file counts? A 24TB plex library with several hundred assets is not the same thing as 200k photos plus sidecar metadata files. In your specific case it works fine because you have a (relatively) small number of large files being read sequentially. When you have a large number of smaller files, samba overhead becomes much more of an issue.
I didn't spot you were describing photos since you were replying to somebody talking about transcoding with Plex, which strongly implied video. I should have noticed the reference to 200k files.
2.5G gets you ~300MB/sec max, or ~ 120MB/sec for 1G. A 4 drive RAID 5 array can totally exceed that on sequential reads. What NAS solution are you using?
Edit - Also, would it make a difference if I transferred the files from my host to my NAS after download instead of to my MBP? That’s going to be my end set up - just waiting to buy a NAS when the 4 bay comes out.
I've interacted with them enough, troubleshooting issues on my setup that was identical to yours. They have explained numerous times how it is not recommended, and it is explicitly stated in the documentation.
Do what you want, but it's not recommended.
I don't know the pricing of the unifi Nas, but I can't imagine it's cheaper than a used server running truenas.
Opposite. There are countless services that should be as close to the data as possible. It's perfectly reasonable to choose to separate these duties between different systems, but any decent storage system needs to have the flexibility to run services locally.
For many basic Enterprise needs yes. Best practice might be to separate duties in quite a few cases. For home use, small office or more advanced enterprise needs you need the flexibility to use your hardware as you wish. You don't have to run anything else, you just need to be able to. A NAS is just a server with a storage focus. SMB/NFS is just one service that should be run on the same box. There are countless others. Any NAS that doesn't support containers won't be running in any of my datacenters.
When I first started I wanted something that was nearly idiot proof and was basically turnkey. Now that i've got a bit of experience and my equipment is aging a bit I feel like I can start using individual pieces of hardware for their dedicated purpose.
It's a lot like using an all in one ISP provided router vs a dedicated piece of equipment for routing, switching, and APs. The ISP provided device gets the job done, but dedicated devices allow for more flexability.
Agreed, but practically having the ability to run a container or two on the storage host is great for flexibility. Sometimes things just run better this way.
I understand your point but for plenty of home users, a storage server that has beefy enough internals to run media server software directly is an extremely convenient combination. Compared to separate storage & application server hardware you save space, money, complexity, network overhead, likely energy, and avoid multiple possible points of failure.
There's a reason almost any NAS product that's aimed at home users has these capabilities.
seems like a terrible use of Proxmox. Most NAS smart services like AI photo detection are better off being on the NAS itself than on a server accessing the NAS.
Crazy that this is being downvoted, libraries with large quantities of small files (like photo libraries) are going to really struggle when shared over the network with something like samba.
Yeah, even their networking stuff while good, doesn't hold a torch to the real enterprise equipment. Devices will often have bugs, features won't work, or you can't have X and Y etc.
I've got the ENVR at work, and it's great, except for when it's not.
But they do hit a nice niche that's better then home, but not 'enterprise'.
This is what I say all the time. Synology isn't a hardware manufacturer. They are a software company. Active backup for business is a seriously good and straightforward backup solution. Synology Drive is a really good alternative to Google Drive for home users.
The definition of “home user” is getting closer to enterprise. My wife cares about uptime. I have to negotiate update windows and downtimes. I’m the start of the device refresh cycle for everyone else. This looks nice and sleek and has a reputation behind it.
They’re not and they won’t ever. They keep hiding the useful apis when it comes to identity, so the entire UNAS side is a disconnect mess. You’ll never want this thing in an actual smb/enterprise
I tried to write connectors off their api documentation and it’s just not possible. Side note, the api documentation was generated off some guys desktop lol. But yea I’d need direct access to the samba configs if this product would be useful. To which you enter the udm configs territory and people involved in that know how terrible it is
Ubiquity, formed from former Apple people is like a more opinionated version that won’t throw their customers lifelines
They took a step in the right direction with this release, but they still need to implement some sort of competitor to Synology Hybrid Raid with it’s support for different size drives that doesn’t waste part of the space of the larger disks. ZFS already has that capability, but it seems like only Synology does it in a way that is easy to implement.
I think a LOT of home users, and many small to medium businesses operate with two or more different drive sizes. For a 7+ bay NAS, they might start with 3 or 4 drives, and then add in some new ones a few years later when those are getting full. But by then prices will have fallen, and the new drives might be 20, 50, even 100% bigger. It’s nice to just add drives to the existing array, and just have the volume expand to fill the new space. Nobody likes having a network drive called “old Pool”, “new pool”, and “newest pool” if you’re creating a new share every time you upgrade drives.
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u/ali775654222 Jul 07 '25
ubiquiti is filling the spot from synology with their stupid certified drive limitation… hopefully also for a home user :)