My Synology 2413+ 12 bay NAS recently died after 12 years of service.

This NAS was primarily used as:

• an iSCSI backup target for Veeam
• Video recording for home security cameras
• Media storage

Overall, i was pretty happy with the unit itself – but as per most companies these days, support was non-existent…. so when i did run into an issue, i was on my own.

Due to that, and Synology not being able to answer what would happen with my surveillance station licenses, i made the decision to go for a QNAP as:

• It was a little cheaper for better hardware specs (this is in the 8-bay desktop model i was looking at – may be different for other models)
• QVRPro – the equivalent of Synology surveillance station is free for up to 8 cameras – and i only use 4. There is apparently a 14 day retention time on video at the “free” license level…. and while i would prefer it to be 31 days…. its going to be fine most of the time.

In the ways im interested in, the QNAP has so far proven to be quite good, its setup and joining to an AD domain was simple and painless, adding disks, storage pools and volumes was easy and clear, QVRPro setup had very minor hiccups (more due to my understanding than the software)… but, it hasn’t been all great. The issues i have noticed so far:

• The lack of a Synology Hybrid RAID equivalent isn’t a disaster, but disappointing…
• Due to the above, i have purchased some more 8TB disks (previously had a mix of 6TB and 8TB) – the time taken to expand/repair is significant (as expected) – but the poor thing has been the performance of the device while this is occuring. Trying to stream anything during this process has been pointless – with constant dropouts. Having the performance degrade during a repair or expand is not unexpected – but not to the point of drop-outs.

Will be interested to see the performance difference once the rebuild has finished.