I have been a Synology NAS user for almost 10 years. The first one I used was an ARM based 212j. It worked well and the DSM software was really nice and polished.

After a few years, I upgraded it to an Intel based 218+ due to the 212j power supply failed. It still works after I replaced the power supply, but I wanted an upgrade to a better CPU.

The primary use case of the NAS for me is to back up all my family photos and all the medias that I have collected over the years. I used two 4TB HDDs to store all the data, the HDDs are slow, but mainly I used it to store data only, so its acceptable.

After I have kids, I started to stream media from my NAS more often. The slow HDDs slowly become an issue. For example, when I’m copying some videos from my Mac to the NAS, it will become so unresponsive to a point that I cant even stream anything anymore, even accessing it using the DSM webUI also not possible. It will only become accessible when the data copy is done.

I wanted to try full SSD NAS for quite some time, but the cost per GB delta between SSD and HDD was too big to be possible. Fast forward to 2025, there is still delta between the 2 but its close enough for me to try it finally.

Originally, I wanted to replace the two HDDs from my Synology NAS to two SATAs SSD. But I have a few NVMe SSDs from my old PC that are sitting around doing nothing, so I decided to utilize it instead of letting it sit there gathering dust. Unfortunately, the Synology 218+ was old enough that doesnt support NVMe, so instead of buying a new Synology NAS that supports NVMe just to test out this full SSD NAS idea, I used a Raspberry Pi 5 to share these NVMe SSDs using Samba.

To my surprised, the Raspberry Pi 5 worked really well. No more unresponsiveness when copying files between the drives anymore, and the power consumption is so low that its only taking around 5 to 6W under load, it about the the same power used when the two HDDs are hibernating in the Synology 218+!

After testing this setup for a few weeks, I decided its time to retire my Synology NAS and completely switch over to my DIY setup. I’m happily using this octopus like setup ever since, until I watched this mini PC review from Jeff Geerling.

The little white box in the middle caught my eyes immediately. After watching the detailed review from Jeff, even though he didn’t pick the white box, which is Beelink Me Mini as the machine that he is gonna use in his homelab, but still, this machine fits all my requirement. So I picked it up, put all my NVMe SSDs in and then installed Open Media Vault as my NAS OS. The experience is good far, CPU performance is definitely an upgrade to my Raspberry Pi5. Files transfer between my computers to this NAS is also on par with the Pi 5. And the most importantly, my setup is no long octopus like, everything just fit inside this little white box. Power consumption is a little bit more than the Pi5, but at least it decluttered my homelab. 🙂