Early Black Friday 72 Hours Sale: Synology select NAS 15% off

Quote from Viewtiful : Power Consumption is low regardless. It's not like an A/C unit. Just strip everything you don't need. All you need is Motherboard, the occasional monitor (most of the time you won't use this for FreeNAS), CPU, HSF, and one or two fans (One for hard drive - In take and one for exhaust). If you really want to transform an old computer into a nas with FreeNas, it's better to go with that. It's really dependent on your needs. If you're an average level consumer and want to back up a drive or so, stream movies/tv shows, then making your own Nas is better. But if space is an issue, and you really really want to conserve money on power, and rather not set up your own NAS, then these pre-built NAS are better. But if you are all of the above but budget is low, I would wait for Black Friday/Cyber Monday because Newegg usually has some NASes for sale. I purchased as NAS on Newegg last year on Cyber Monday for 120~ and it's great.

I think Synology offers quite a bit more if you know what you want and you have advanced needs; for simple filesharing an old PC will work fine.

A Synology NAS (like the 1812+, mentioned as on sale in this post) at $1000-ish will give you some pretty significant VAAI features under VMWare ESXi 5.1 that would typically cost thousands more, and offer massive improvements (hourlong disk operations become seconds or minutes long, etc.) in performance that until now required a much more serious SAN to do. Their DS36xxXS lineup is even better, but that's about $3000.


Even the more basic Synology boxes have some very nice programs (packages) you can download, making iTunes sharing, Time Machine targeting/backup, SMB sharing, NFS sharing, and iSCSI sharing trivial. If none of that makes sense to you, you can still take great advantage of the simpler Synology boxes, because they offer a fantastic GUI, a very, very straightforward setup experience (slap the disks in the box, click OK a few times, and you're almost done!), and very good support from the vendor and from community forums.


If you just need to share a file or two, or perform a PC/Time Machine backup or two, then download Linux-on-a-disk or use an old copy of Windows XP you have sitting in a closet, put it on an old dinosaur computer, put the old computer in a (ventilated) closet, set it up with a few shares and remote desktop access via RDP or VNC, and you're off to the races.


Power usage is an issue for some, but for those in the USA, power is still cheap enough that it shouldn't be a deciding factor. For most, the difference between running that Synology box vs. a full, old computer might be $50/year or so. In Europe and Asia it can be a very different matter.