So riddle me this, Batman - why QNAP over Synology? 'cuz that's a decision that matters to me. Seems'a'me that in 5-drive land, QNAP runs me 870 bucks. For my additional $100, I get a bunch of media center features - an HDMI port, for example, and a media-centric approach. Which is kind of cool, but I have to remind myself that I have a near-useless Roku that speaks XBMC just fine. I also note that if I look up "QNAP Time Machine" I get a bunch more people bitching than I do when I google "Synology Time Machine." both of them support it natively, both of them are not without their problems, but it appears that Synology pushed an update five months ago that made things better. That's probably what it's down to - a 5-bay Synology or a 5-bay QNAP. $750 vs $870. Thoughts?
Actually, in this regard, I trusted blindly my fellow students with that. As I mentioned I studied CS until this summer, so I was surrounded by a couple of people who were really into networking, NAS and this kind of stuff. And a couple of guys just recommended QNAP to me because they had to do a lot with it during work or privately and they loved it. I knew those people know a lot more than me about that topic so I just trusted them blindly. Regarding the "more results": I don't know how to interpret that, but it doesn't necessarily correlate with the quality. If QNAP has three times more users than Synology, the vocal minority might appear more overall, even when possibly being a smaller user percentage. That said, I never compared, looked for user feedback or have any other info about Synology. I just can speak for my experience with my QNAP. No critical or questioning buying process. Sorry bud.
I won't argue reliability one over the other. I was curious if you had any insight. As far as what I can find, there are about six times as many reviews on Amazon for the Synology box as there are for the QNAP, so there's that. On the other hand, the QNAP reviews are a little more positive. Having messed around with the QNAP's UI, I'd need a pretty compelling reason to go that way; the Synology UI is a lot more intuitive to me. Don't interpret this as me not sincerely appreciating your input - I've enjoyed this decision not at all and every datapoint I can scrounge helps. Personal experience helps loads. Thanks a whole bunch.