I recently needed some NAS and went with the “Synology RS1221+” barebone system. The system is competitively priced when compared to the similar “QNAP TS-873AeU-4G”.
Synology HDD
For storage, the sweet spot between price and capacity was at 18TB. Lets look at some options:
| Toshiba MG09ACA 18TB | 270€ |
| Seagate Exos X X18 | 280€ |
| Synology HAT5310-18T | 700€ |
Depending on the benchmark sometimes the Toshiba comes out on top and sometimes the Seagate. Both are similarly priced, so thats fine.
However, talking of the price the Synology HDD stands out by asking a 150% premium.
You might now wonder whether you also get a better performance or other features in return. Well.. guess which is the only 18TB HDD that is verified by Synology for the RS1221+?
The scammy part here however is that the HAT5300 series are just rebranded Toshiba Drives with a different firmware. So the HAT5310 likely is just the MG09ACA and the main difference is the profit margin.
Note that different firmware does not result in any noticeable difference in performance.
I went with the unverified Seagate drives and – as one might expect – there are zero issues with doing so.
Synology RAM
At this point you might say, well Synology just did not get to test more 18TB drives.
Well.. I found the 4GB RAM rather tight and wanted to upgrade to 32GB as RAM is currently quite cheap anyway.
The options here are
| Kingston KSM26SED8/16HD | 50€ |
| Synology D4ECSO-2666-16G | 350€ |
I think there appears to be a pattern here. Again, both options have the same specs i.e. DDR4 2666, ECC SO-DIMM. Maybe Synology even rebranded the Kingston modules too, but I did not verify this.
While the DiskManager did not complain about the Seagate HDD, there is a warning when going with Kingston now. I guess this is because it matters even less.
To conclude this, I first want to emphasizes that both the Synology NAS Hardware and their DiskManager software work great with non Synology Hardware – just as one would expect of a standard x86 platform.
It is just a pity that they try to FUD you into buying their overpriced HDD and RAM.
Basically this is the same game as with printer vendors predicting ravages and annihilation when using 3rd party ink.