Recently I realized how ridiculus cloud storage prices are given that physical storage is dirt cheap. That relization was brought from our company's Dropbox anuall cost at 432€ for 3 people that need to share 250GB of files.

A good quality 4TB HDD disk with 3 years of warranty costs about 100€ and I cannot accept that the management cost for maintaining them is that high. There must be a program or a appliance that can perform Dropbox like operation on a local drive.

Enter the NAS space.

Photographers and video people who are the outmost practical tech experts on YouTube  say that these devices has gotten very far from when I tried to hack together a FreeNAS instance on a Raspberry Pi.

At the cost of a very cheap computer you get a 4 bay unit (pictured above) with all the safety, collaboration and sharing features one could need. It handles syncing to remote units and even backing up cheaply on Amazon Glacier.

So I put it to the test.

I recently moved houses and I have a big photo collection sharded between drives and backing up to Amazon Glacier. Also I wouldn't mind a media server and a replacemen to my personal 20GB dropbox.

I decided to go for a single drive unit cause this is an experiment and it costed less than 200€ with a drive.

I am astouned by the performance of this cheap thing that I can use from anywhere in the world using Sinology’s relay service. With few clients a cheap device performs faster than any Dropbox app. 

More expensive models run on x86 hardware Support Docker and VMs. The VMs can be windows flavored which is good as we could retire the accounting software server and use this instead.

There are a lot more things you can do like running webpages, ruby, python and other community packages on these. They are basically easy servers preconfigured for own usage. You could probably use bigger models as production application or database servers as they have redundant reworking and power supplies but I suppose there are better suited machines for that. 

For small office use though they seem great on first contact.

It’s not all roses though.

You need to study a bit to know what RAID configuration to use and there is no collaboration editing unless you are using Synology’s suite. Frankly this is better than Dropbox and is a drawback only if you were used to Google Docs which I am not.

As easy it might be, a non technical person cannot operate this with safety in my opinion. 

But I am, so suck it Dropbox, we are buying the big boy Synology.