Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff.

On products you can buy TODAY, you find:

  - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches
  - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem
  - Kernel 4.4
  - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app)
  - smbd 4.15
  - PostgreSQL 11.11
  - smbd 8.2p1
  - Redis 6.2.8
  - ...

And it's not only about security, but about features (well, some are security features too). We're missing new kernel features (network hardware offload, security, wireguard...), filesystem (btrfs features, performance and error patches...), file servers (new features and compatibility, as Parallel NFS or Multichannel CIFS/SMB), and so on...

I think they got stuck on 4.4 because of their btrfs fork, and now they're too deep on their own hole.

Also, their backend is a mess. A bunch of different apps developed on different ways that mostly don't talk to each other. They sometimes overlap with each other and have very essential features that don't work and don't plan to fix. Meanwhile, they're busy releasing AI stuff features for the "Office" app.

Edit note: For myself and some business stuff, I have a bunch of TrueNAS deployments, from a small Jonsbo box for my home, to a +16 disk rack server. This was for a client that wanted to migrate from another Synology they had on loan, and I didn't want to push a server on them, as they're a bit far away from me, and I wanted it to be serviceable by anyone. I regret it.

The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit (https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_...). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS (https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno...) to act as a key vault. Synology claims that volume encryption protects if you if the storage drives are stolen, but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen?

My main issue with their system is how closed it is.

I got an issue where mind would randomly start writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise. I’d stop all containers, leave it as close to idle as I could manage, still spiking.

There was no way I could learn what was causing it.

I would like to assume it was a disk maintenance process or something, but for all I know it could be mining bitcoin and I’d be none the wiser. It went on for some weeks then stopped.

At a customer I ended up having to help one department running two Synology boxes as a side project. I came in with low expectations, and still was thoroughly disappointed.

- one device died, was EOL at that point, and newer ones no longer can read the disks - stupid limits for array size. Depending on your setup adding disks can mean "copy everything off, delete arrays, and then create new ones". Also, want one 200TB array with your disks? Depending on model size you'll have to do multiple arrays instead with a bit to way lower capacity - syncing a share to another instance is broken, with pretty much no useful debug information. Already the setup is stupid (doesn't let you select which array it goes on the target machine), and then seems to change access permissions of the sync user on the target box (i.e., you can do one sync, after that you'll need to reset the access permissions). I wanted to avoid doing my own sync script, but seems I'll have to do that in the end - stupid disk compatibility warnings (which currently you can disable when you have SSH access) - wireguard only via third party addons. It's 2025. I didn't even check before if those things can do wireguard - it didn't occur to me that a device sold nowadays might not be able to do that.

While debugging I also noticed that pretty much every software component is from the stone age.

They also have this weird full disk encryption that doesn't validate that the boot partition is compromised, allowing exploits like this: https://forums.spacerex.co/t/bounty-first-person-to-share-ho...

This breaks both the 'store key locally' and the KMIP setup.

And for their file-based encryption you cannot change the password. You need to create a new folder with a new password and copy all files over.

> A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem

But don't you love it when companies invent their own security instead of using battle-tested open-source systems?

> Multichannel CIFS/SMB)

My DS918+ has multichannel SMB and possibly also parallel NFS. It only works if you have multiple NICs connected.

Other than that, i completely agree. Their tech stack is horribly outdated, and while i understand their reasoning for not upgrading, there's a limit to how long you can do that. Their reasoning is that they know the software that's currently running, warts and all, and can better guarantee stability across millions of devices with fewer moving parts.

I have a DS 923+. These extremely old softwares you mentioned were always weird to me but everything worked fine so far. What I'm not happy about is the vendor lock in, and the abysmal virtualization / transcoding performance. I want a NAS that comes with a similar ease of use as the DSM, but can double down as a __very lightweight__ virtualization platform for my local test deployments and as a media PC that I can rely on. What would you suggest?

Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?

You regret switching them from Synology to Trueness? Am I misunderstanding your final note?

It's confusing me after the preceding displeasure wrt Synology