FreeNAS vs Synology

Synology

Devices: ds1812+ and ds2419+

Pros

• Hardware are very stable (more than 10 years without issue)
• Low power and low noise
• Reasonable price
• Mix size hard disks in volume
• Upgrade Hard disk easily
• Identify hard disk easily
• Crashed volume in read-only mode, data can be retrieved
• Many apps can be downloaded
• Operations on NAS are organized user friendly

Cons

• Cannot move or copy share folder after volume crashed, manual copy and resetup required
• Bad hard disk can cause extension unit disconnected from main unit
• Doesn't accept bad hard disk which smart testing failed, shows failling HDD list
• Create many special folder named as @eaDir in everywhere, which can be issue when using some services, and huge number of small files in it.
  Note: This folder creation feature could not be disabled.
• Dedup can not be handled
• CPU is weak for virtual machines

FreeNAS

Just started on an i7 PC with 32GB ram.

Pros

• Opensource
• Can be installed in a normal PC
• Hardware upgrade is easy, and can import disks used in other NAS before
• Insensitive to bad hard disk
• ZFS can handle bad sector natively
• ZFS can perform dedup natively (haven't tested)

Cons

• Not easy to understand the tasks to be performed
• Network configuration screens are everywhere, not easy to find them
• Network aggregation configuration isn't easy to understand
• Disk, pool, and dataset are highly related to ZFS
• Share folder permission and ACL are too complex for NAS operation