All my stuff is running on a 6-year-old Synology D918+ that has a Celeron J3455 (4-core 1.5 GHz) but upgraded to 16 GB RAM.
Funny enough my router is far more powerful, it’s a Core i3-8100T, but I was picking out of the ThinkCentre Tiny options and was paranoid about the performance needed on a 10 Gbit internet connection
Same here in a Synology DS918+. It seems like the official Intel support numbers can be a bit pessimistic (maybe the higher density sticks/chips just didn’t exist back when the chip was certified?)
Most 720p TVs (“HD Ready”) used to be that resolution since they re-used production lines from 1024x768 displays
It would be to replace my 4-bay Synology DS918 NAS with something with more drive bays and 10 Gbit connectivity
I recently got upgraded to 10 Gbit fiber at home so I’ve been through researching this stuff.
With a 3G WAN, I’d go with a 2.5 Gbit LAN - 2.5G equipment is quite affordable now. The next step is 5G but that equipment is rare, and 10G starts getting expensive.
Do you know what router they’re giving you? What LAN ports does it have? Does it even have a 2.5 or 10G LAN port or only 1G ports?
USB 2.5G adapters are available new for cheap and I’ve had good luck with them, even using one on a Synology NAS with an open source driver.
The wiring is probably fine as long as you don’t have any very long runs. I’d keep it and only replace it if the links randomly drop down in speed to 1G.
2.5G switches also aren’t too expensive. You can get one with only a few ports for the devices that can make use a lot of bandwidth (PC/NAS/Server) and plug your current switch into it for all the 1G devices like TVs, game consoles etc. The PiHole definitely doesn’t need a fast connection.
There isn’t a standard that is broadly-adopted, but NUT (https://networkupstools.org/) has reverse-engineered drivers for nearly every UPS out there, usually each brand has their standard so as long as the brand is supported it will work. (NUT is also what TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, etc use internally for their UPS support)
I’ve had good luck with using NUT with APC UPSes (both consumer models and buying used enterprise rack-mount models).
One cool thing you can do with NUT is share the UPS state over the network, so that multiple machines can respond to the power state instead of just the machine that is plugged in via USB directly.
When I was following Synology communities closer, the common wisdom was that the expansion units weren’t great in either performance, stability or cost, and you were better off buying a new, bigger unit and then selling your old one used to recoup the cost difference.
I’m also in the same position, I have a DS918+ that is full. It’s also 6 years old and probably on the tail end of getting software updates so I’m weighing my choices…
For anyone who’s not in the Synology ecosystem, this is what the release notes are:
Starting from this version, the processing of media files using HEVC (H.265), AVC (H.264), and VC-1 codecs will be transitioned from the server to end devices to reduce unnecessary resource usage on the system and enhance system efficiency. These codecs are widespread on end devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs. If the end device does not support the required codecs, the use of media files may be limited.
This mostly affects things like streaming to a TV, streaming box or tablet with limited codec support.
When watching videos on Linux, the support on the NAS itself doesn’t matter, just the support only your PC. When opening videos over SMB in dolphin, the codec support on the NAS does not come into play. The thumbnails are generated by your PC.
Just install VLC on your PC and it will play whatever you throw at it, regardless of OS codecs. I would not re-encode anything.
edit: It looks like the biggest impact is using Synology Photos - it can’t generate thumbnails for HEIF photos/HEIC videos anymore
This is why I’m still using a Synology ¯\(ツ)/¯
I can install all the fun stuff I want in Docker, but for the core OS services, it’s outsourced to Synology to maintain for me