Synology DS923+ 4-Bay NAS Enclosure Expired

Look at your local Facebook marketplace or Ebay for HP N40, 54L, Gen server 8 or 10 plus all of these except the agen 10 Plus will be below 300 400$. And a much beefier cpu. And ram upgrades possible.

Only caveat would be the synology form factor is very portable. But the micro server is not a huge arse server like a 3U or 4U its a very small cube box shaped server that can take 4 drives plus 1 more (2.5 inch).

You can also add Quad Nic Lan or SFP port etc on it

Granted Synoly boxes are very nice and small, but if it's a NAS cmon how often will you be moving it around. Usually would sit in a corner in your basement or office etc.

You can also use a old server or custom build your small form NAS Box but those wouldn't be same as the HP Microserver.

The best thing about these HP microservers is they are very robust and reliable. I have N54L running DSM 6.1.2 since more than few year and had it on DSM 5.2 before that.

The thing is you cannot just update to synology firmware updates or risk breaking it.

The Xpenology is a port / hack with that caveat yoi get a much beefier cpu and ram etc.

I have the HP N54L running 4x 10Tb drives (red easy stores) for almost 2 years or more. As long as you don't firmware upgrade there aren't any gotchas.

Yes the one thing is Synology quick connect doesn't work as that needs a legit synology serial, but it is very easy to install Zero Tier or tail scale..I use ZT.. for remote access (vpn) from outside your house

HTH

Personally, after 6 years of dealing with Xpenology, I find it to be a disaster.

Synology is constantly releasing patches to break Xpenology. First Synology started scanning for non-standard hardware, and would refuse to boot the kernel if they detected hardware they didn't sell.

For awhile, people (like myself) were resorting to buying the same peripherals (LAN cards, for example) to get around that.

Synology finally managed to break Jun's bootloader on 6.2.1, and for nearly 2 years, the only solution was to not update with the latest vulnerability patches Worse, if you ask if Jun, or anyone else, was working on a fix on the Xpenology forum, the thread would be deleted - no one wanted to talk about it.

Then Red Pill came out, and the war with Synology started all over with 7.x. Now every time a patch comes out, everyone races to the Xpenology forum to see if it breaks Red Pill.

Quite frankly, it's not worth the hassle.

these prices just keep going up and up when they should be going down