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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

#61
post #46

I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers. However... Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firm…

Synology is consumer and SMB focused, though. High end storage that level of integration makes sense, but for Synology it's just not something *most of their customers care about or want.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#62
post #46

I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers. However... Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firm…

For an entertaining/terrifying perspective on firmware, obligatory Bryan Cantrill talk "Zebras All the Way Down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#63
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Additionally, 20TB is only going to run you $300-400 for a consumer drive.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#64
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…

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Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#65
Honestly given how lots and lots of things just build on Debian, seems easier to me to just use an off the shelf older Supermicro motherboard with an plain IT mode SAS HBA and something like an Enthoo Pro case and just call it a day running stock Debian. Certainly far few surprises and bullshit.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#66
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…

How much does S3 cost these days? I've been burned by their hidden surge pricing before and hesitate to rely on them for personal storage when self hosting is fairly cheap.

Disk hosting cost isn't much

Bandwidth to get all of that back down to your system is much pricier, depending on how much you use that data.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#67
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…

Not defending them in any way, but I know with my Infrant (then Netgear unfortunately, who last year killed the products) ReadyNASs which also used mdadm to configure BTRFS with RAID5 in a similar way to Synology and QNAP, the recommendation was that you don't want your BTRFS filesystem to run low on space, because then it runs out of metadata space, and if it does that it becomes read-only, and can become unstable.

Basically, the recommendation was to always have 5% free space, so this isn't just Synology saying this.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#68

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.

Do you have a plan on what you’re going to move to? I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays. I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I co…

I use a qnap TL-D800S for 8 bays connected to my home server. You could use as many as you have available PCIe ports.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#69

What's better for running Plex ? Assuming I want 4 drives and something that can transcode multiple files in real time.

You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. You can use an odroid H4 or any cheapo Alder Lake-N laptop for your Plex server, and any NAS solution to store the media.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#70
> When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon.

In a way this is a valid point, but it also feels a bit silly. Do people really make use of devices like this and then try to overnight a drive when something fails? You're building an array-- you're designing for failure-- but then you don't plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.

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