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Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

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Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#22
post #12

Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensi…

I think preventing alarm fatigue is a very good reason to fix issues.

But 5% free is very low. You may want to use every single byte you feel you paid for, but allocation algorithms really break down when free space gets so low. Remember that there's not just a solid chunk of that 5% sitting around at the end of the space. That's added up over all the holes across the volume. At 20-25% free, you should already be looking at whether to get more disks and/or deciding what stuff you don't actually need to store on this volume. So a hard alarm at 5% is not unreasonable, though there should also be a way to set a soft alarm before then.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#23
post #4

Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home. I have completely lost patience with maintaining local hardware like this. If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective. This feels like smuggling cargo on a federation starship, which is way cooler…

S3 or glacier? Glacier is cost competitive with local disk but not very practical for the sorts of things people usually need lots of local disk for (media & disk images). Interested in how you use this! 20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay fo…

> S3 or glacier

This is the same product.

> 20TB

I think we might be pushing the 1% case here.

Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

For me, knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#24

I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.

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Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S3 or glacier? Glacier is cost competitive with local disk but not very practical for the sorts of things people usually need lots of local disk for (media & disk images). Interested in how you use this! 20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay fo…

> S3 or glacier This is the same product. > 20TB I think we might be pushing the 1% case here. Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should. For me, knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes.

20TB isn't all that much anymore, especially if you do anything like filming, streaming, photography, etc. Even a handful of HQ TV shows can reach several TB rather quickly.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#27
post #22
post #12

Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensi…

I think preventing alarm fatigue is a very good reason to fix issues. But 5% free is very low. You may want to use every single byte you feel you paid for, but allocation algorithms really break down when free space gets so low. Remember that there's not just a solid chunk of that 5% sitting around at the end of the space. That's added up over all the holes across the volume. At 20-25% free, you should already be loo…

5% of my 500 GB is 25 GB, which is already a lot of space but understandable. Not many things would fit in there nowadays.

But 5% of a 5 TB volume is 250 GB, that's the size of my whole system disk! Probably not so understandable by the lay person.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#28
post #2

Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH, this year's upgrades were to like ~2020 tech and some of these models won't be upgraded again until 2030! The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I've previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I'll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardwar…

Do you have some examples of the superior customer hardware options? I currently use 2x12 bay Synology NAS and one of my favorite parts of it is the hardware, the easy access to the hotswap hard drives. If I could get that form factor, but with a custom NAS software solution, I’d be very interested.

I run a Sliger 3701 [0] with an ASRock Rack Ryzen motherboard (choose B650D4U or X570D4U to suit) using TrueNAS Scale. This replaced my old FreeNAS Atom C2000 setup that ran for over a decade with zero issues.

Add in a Mikrotik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIE [1] for high speed networking. Choose your own HBA.

0: https://www.sliger.com/products/rackmount/storage/cx3701/

1: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#30

I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.

I'm in a similar position. I'm on my second NAS in the last 12 years. I've been very satisfied with their performance, but this kind of behavior is just completely unacceptable. I guess I'll need to look into QNAP or some other brand. Also, I think my four disc setup is in a RAID 5, but it might be Synology's proprietary version, so I'll need to figure out how to migrate off of that. I don't think I'll be able to just insert the drives in a different NAS and have it work.
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