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How to Get Hardware Transcoding BACK on Your Synology NAS
(nascompares.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Are there any great alternatives that are easy to use off the shelf (with our own drives) that can compete here?
I'm basically to the point where my next NAS will end up just being a linux desktop running truenas which sounds like a lot of tinkering for something that should have a simple solution. I don't want to have to buy some big expensive enterprise array for a prosumer use case.
TrueNAS. More control for slightly more work up front. Hardware will be easier to maintain. Lots of gamer desktops that won't run Win11 available that probably have enough SATA ports to get the job done.
Gamer desktops tend to be power hogs. Running them 24/7 can rack up some hefty power bills, plus noise, plus space, plus other tradeoffs.
Better a used thin client.
A thin client for a NAS? That's a hard no for me. Take the GPU out if you don't need it, put a more efficient PSU and it will sip power as long as you aren't running 27 virtual machines on it. I guess it's more space than a thin client, but I have no idea how you are getting multiple HDDs or SSDs in a tc. USB is trash at long term data storage, and having a bunch of external drives and cables isn't superior to a slightly bigger box. Not to mention anything that's actually sold as a thin client probably won't run ZFS very well if at all. If it's not ZFS and it's not hardware raid what the hell is the point of having network storage? Save the TC for a docker host or host a VM on your NAS that it can connect to instead.
My next nas wont be synology, it will be qnap.
I'd recommend against it. It works "fine" but everything is in a thin, but walled, garden. Every app is some "Qsomebullshit." They really, really want you in their ecosystem.
Id say the systems are underspec'ed as well. The model I bought years ago pitched itself as VM/container ready, but the chipset was so weak it couldn't run anything worth a damn. It couldn't even run a scrub on lowest priority without choking all other filesystem access. When a scrub takes 3 days or more, it wasn't exactly a usable experience.
If you have the funds, i'd recommend 45drives. They make very good hardware and sell 4/8/15 disc form factors for homelabs.
Synology isn’t any different.
I’d argue a NAS is for storage mostly.
The vm/container side is less important than the "cant run a RAID parity check regularly because it makes the NAS useless" part. Thats my qnap experience. It might have gotten better, but it was shit heel for me, and the NAS was in the 1k range.
I'd argue that a NAS should be able to run containers at this point. NAS hardware does not need to be utterly gutless just because it can be. A versatile NAS is actually a great first choice for a homelab setup before you start to expand.
Off the shelf nas? Build your own. I use Xpenology. It turns my hardware into a synology nas. I did buy a Unas case, so it is a nas style, but anything that holds disks will work. Yes a little tinkering still but not much. Bootable usb stick is easy enough. I’ve also used Freenas/truenas. I like them well enough, but I had gotten used to synology. Just don’t want to buy their hardware. I run two. Works just fine.
Buy a QNAP, install an nvme drive and install your OS of choice (openmediavault for example).
Please dont.... I got a qnap TS-H886 and it is the worst NAS I have used.
The so called ZFS that it is using is a very very old fork of openZFS that does not follow any standards. The inside is a complete mess.
The hardware has nothing to do with the ZFS version, like I said, if you are unhappy with it, change the OS (you can't on most of the Synology hardware btw). Mine runs silent and got 0 issues with ZFS, it is a TS-464.
Yeah but the QuTS OS of QNAP is in this case. It is not as straight forward to install a other OS on the thing. Specially a NAS OS like TrueNAS scale. having to enable dev mode on truenas and compile a custom driver for the fans to work is not as straight forward for most people. it is not just the ZFS implementation that's bad also their whole OS it self is.
I literally don't understand your issue with QNAP hardware, it sounds like your issue is TrueNAS, the only thing I did to change the OS from QuTS to OMV was install an NVME drive and select an USB drive with new OS at the boot menu. No drivers, no dev mode, no nothing.
The cheapest option at TrueNAS is +1100$, I'm not paying that when my minimum requirements were a low TDP CPU with HW encoding and a chasis with 4 disks.
I didn't say the hardware was bad. The software is. But the issue with the hardware at least for some of those systems is the fan controller.