You’re impressed with what Synology NAS can do, but you wonder why you can’t find one with the hardware specification you desire at the cost you can afford. I was facing this very question when I tried to find the perfect NAS for myself. Synology provides a wide array of products for home and SMB. Most of them have severely under-powered CPU’s and RAM. The PLUS series, for instance, one of the advantages is the ability to run virtual machines. But with a Celeron processor, what kind of performance can you expect?
Solution: Xpenology.
As explained by xpenology.org:
Xpenology is a bootloader for Synology’s operating system which is called DSM (Disk Station Manager) and is what they use on their NAS devices. DSM is running on a custom Linux version developed by Synology. Its optimized for running on a NAS server with all of the features you often need in a NAS device.
Hardware
I will be providing a series of tutorials to detail how I got mine set up, the issues I faced, and their resolutions. However, with Black Friday around the corner, Canada Computers is having sales on almost everything. The components below are what made up my baremetal Xpenology server, which hosts this website. Just in case if you’re interested in putting a custom server together and you’re wondering the hardware to get, the list below is what works for me. You can see the standard MSRP as well as the sale prices at time of this blog. Buy before they’re gone.
- $129.99 CASE: Fractal Design Node 304 Black (FD-CA-NODE-304-BL)
- $119.99 / $104.99 PSU: Corsair CX-M Series CX650M 650 Watt 80 PLUS Bronze Certified
- $139.99 / $119.99 MB: Asus PRIME H310I-PLUS R2.0/CSM
- $368.50 / $336.99 CPU: Intel Core i5-8600K 3.6 Ghz 6-Core
- $154.99 / $144.99 RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2X16GB) DDR4 2666MHZ
- $199.99 / $139.99 SSD: Sansung 860 EVO 2.5″ SATA III 1TB
- $569.99 / $499.99 HDD: WD Ultrastar 14TB DC HC530
Note that I do NOT work for Canada Computers nor do I get any incentive if you click on any link. But I do personally shop at Canada Computers due to their low prices.
While I prepare the upcoming series of tutorials, you may head to Xpenology.com, which is the community behind Xpenology. Please stay tuned as the upcoming Xpenology series of tutorials will be exciting!
