Is Synology still the highest recommended NAS, or has Drobos fixed the drive failure thing?

I haven’t looked at the offering for a few years, so wondering if anything has changed in the landscape.

Just yesterday I was asked what NAS to recommend for home/small business network backup. I too am interested to hear what the current synopsis is.

And I suppose what backup software. They use mostly Windows, I use mostly Mac so I am not current on Windows best practices.

I lean towards RAID 1 simplicity within a NAS. Duplicated large hard drives are just not expensive these days.

Personally I prefer NAS units that run as close to silent as possible. Fan noise and unit whir are disliked.

I'll keep an eye on this thread because I'm in the market for a NAS as well. I'm only considering Synology and Qnap really, and I'm leaning more towards Qnap because to me it seems their hardware is more powerful.

I think Synology is still the way to go if you want ease of use. I've been a big fan of mine. I even upgraded to a newer version and the drive migration process was very smooth.

*edit*
I would never even try Drobo again. I had so many problems with it when I set one up for a client of mine. Absolutely miserable, and the client was so [understandably] frustrated that they pretty much stopped calling me. Every Synology I've installed has worked from the get-go and has lasted.

I recently bought a netgear and a qnap, the qnap performs much better (8gb ram) but the netgear has a much cleaner gui, hard to fathom exactly where some stuff is on the qnap. This is our second of each, haven't had reliability issues with either brand, we had a Buffalo for a while and that was crap.

Both of my Synology (DS211 and DS416play) boxes are still going strong.

Something I wish I had known before buying a Synology for my needs:

https://duckduckgo.com/synology%20rsync%20issues%20acl?ia=web

They don’t use standard ACLs under the hood, which can interfere with some possible uses, mostly around rsync or extended attributes used by Macs and other Unix/Unix like systems.

Picked up a DS218play earlier this year to try and salvage what’s left of my old NASes. Open to selling/trading it to someone local if interested before I look at converting it to an iSCSI disk instead of a NAS.

I've been using successfully several 5bay Synology NAS units, and few Drobos (both Ethernet ad USB) for a decade, without any issue with either.

Synology is by far my favorite, due to its great OS and many features and apps. Drobo, however, is the simplest NAS solution I've ever tried, deliberately designed to almost only perform the basic function of storage, and do all the rest by itself. To anyone on this BBS I'd recommend Synology. To anyone who has no clue and wants to store stuff , I'd suggest a Drobo.