I was under the impression that the Unifi UNAS is just a dumb storage array without any of the ecosystem of apps that a lot of Synology users seem to like - the photos app, being able to run Plex, etc.
Agree! Though to be clear I’m not saying it’s necessarily amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem to like it!
I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog. Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone actually used and liked it. It worked alright but the client apps were/are a giant leap behind alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.
But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
Weirdly, Audio Station is the best app I've found for streaming podcasts from my Synology (given the quirks of podcast hoarding in practice). Admittedly, I haven't looked in a few years... maybe I should get on that.
That seems plausible. I don't think there's as much competition among audio apps, and I (perhaps naively) suspect there might be a lower bar for UI polish. We were using XMMS back in the day, and while it looked cool, it wasn't the paragon of user-friendly design.
I seriously want it to work well. How do you find 1 out of 10,000+ pictures you've taken in the last 20 years without spending hours self categorizing beforehand?
I just went through a complete restore of my NAS from backup and then migration to a new NAS. It was flawlessly executed through Hyperbackup so I don't agree with you at all.
Hyperbackup is good, but that is a core function of a NAS no? I was speaking more about apps like Photos, Videos, Surveillance, Docker, Web hosting. Things a NAS usually don't and shouldn't do.
That's correct AFAIK, but software like Plex and Jellyfin work just fine if you store your media on a separate machine. For the price gap between the Synology NAS and the UniFi UNAS you could buy a cheap machine to run some workloads on over the network. Even better since the UNAS has very good connectivity out of the box (10GbE) that I figure it will basically always be bottlenecked on the HDD speeds anyways. Maybe a Raspberry Pi or small form factor computer could be sitting above the NAS. Many of us already run Home Assistant OS anyways, and if you don't... It's never too late to start :)
I am not a current UNAS owner though, so I don't know how well this will go. However, I am willing to make a gamble on Ubiquiti lately. The UniFi line always felt like decent products to me, but lately it feels like they've hit a good stride and just released some pretty solid good value products. I was fully expecting enshittification with the UniFi Express line and instead they gave home users great value and no forced cloud account garbage. I don't personally use all of the UniFi products, but I frequently recommend them and it's rarely been a let down. I think the UNAS still has a lot it needs to prove, and adding support for Docker workloads would go a long way to making their offering have more parity with Synology's, but even without it, it is challenging to ignore how much better of a deal you're getting for the core functionality for sure.
I of course hope people do some level of research before buying things based on Internet comments of course, but I think this could be a good way forward for a lot of people. I do acknowledge Synology DSM has a lot of stuff built in, but frankly most of it just isn't that great.
I don’t disagree with any of this. But I have a few non-tech savvy friends (and particularly older folks) who just want a clever box they can plug in and it will do stuff - even if it’s a bit clunky. I wonder how much of the Synology market people like that represent.
