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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

#101

Post by _cenw »

emmelaich wrote: post #95

I have some sympathy for this. With the disasters of the WD 'Green' series and the recent revelations on how used disks were being sold for new. Synology doesn't want to be lumped with other companies problems. They really have to sell it by minimising the price differential and reducing the lead time.

Slapping Synology stickers on Seagate drives doesn't make them magically immune from being mislabeled out of refurbishment.

This is the same old tired argument Apple made about iPhone screens - complain about inferior aftermarket parts while doing everything in their power to not make the original parts available anywhere but AASPs. Except here we have the literal same parts with only a difference in the firmware vendor string.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#102

Post by 1oooqooq »

aborsy wrote: post #29

Can you “btrfs send” snapshots in a raid array in DSM to a Linux server? If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system. I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.

you really use btrfs send? found it so limiting i assumed only host providers will be using this when btrfs finally have integrated encryption of rest data.

always just rsync/scp things and it is less problematic and faster on my weekend tests.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#103

Post by kimixa »

kbolino wrote: post #22
dostick wrote: 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…

Also Synology use btrfs, a copy-on-write filesystem - that means there are operations that you might not expect that require allocation of new blocks - like any write, even if overwriting an existing file's data.

And "unexpected" failure paths like that are often poorly tested in apps.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#104

Post by _cenw »

mschild wrote: post #88
romanhn wrote: post #73

Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.

I've been looking into a NAS myself. I think self-built is the best bang for buck you're going to get and not have any annoying limitations. There's plenty of motherboards with integrated CPUs (N100 same as cheaper Ugreen ones) for roughly 100. Buy a decent PSU and get an affordable case. For my configuration with a separate AMD CPU I'm looking at right around 400 Euros but I get total control. And as far as software…

Just keep in mind that Intel is keeping the total PCIe bandwidth out of those CPUs very constrained on purpose.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#105

Post by Hamuko »

gambiting wrote: post #82
kyrofa wrote: post #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 thi…

>>You should have spare drives on hand. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a home nas. I have one and I don't keep spare drives purely because it's hard to justify the expense.

I had a hot spare in the form of a backup drive. It was a 12 TB external WD that I'd already burned in and had as a backup target for the NAS. Then when one of the drives in the NAS failed, I broke the HDD out of the enclosure and used it to replace the broken drive. It hadn't been in use for many months and I'd rather sacrifice some backups rather than the array. I also technically had offsite backups for it that I could restore in an emergency.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#106

Post by kyrofa »

gambiting wrote: post #82
kyrofa wrote: post #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 thi…

>>You should have spare drives on hand. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a home nas. I have one and I don't keep spare drives purely because it's hard to justify the expense.

Heh, I suppose you've heard of one now. Fair enough, I could be in the minority here.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#107

Post by pixelesque »

pixelesque wrote: post #67
dostick wrote: 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.…

Actually, reading the BTRFS docs, they recommend keeping 5-10% free space:

https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/ind...

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#108

Post by therein »

chme wrote: post #76
disambiguation wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but TrueNAS is a good alternative - both the software and their all in one NAS builds. I have an unraid on a usb stick somewhere in my rack, but overtime it started feeling limited, and when they began changing their license structure I decided it was time to switch, though I run it on a Dell r720xd instead of one of their builds (my only complaint is the fan noise - i think 730 and up are better in this regar…

I also have a TrueNAS, but because of its limitations (read-only root file system), I came to the conclusion that, if I ever need to reinstall it, I would switch to Proxmox and install TrueNAS as one virtual client, next the other clients for my home lab. I have found workarounds for the read-only root file system. But they aren't great. I have installed Gentoo with a prefix inside the home directory, which provides…

> I also have a TrueNAS, but because of its limitations (read-only root file system)

It isn't really the case. TrueNAS wants you to look at it as an appliance so they make it work that way out of the box.

On the previous release, they had only commented out the apt repos but you could write to the root filesystem.

On the latest release, they went a little further and did lock the root filesystem by default but using a single command (`sudo /usr/local/libexec/disable-rootfs-protection`), root becomes writable and the commented out apt repos are restored. It just works.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#109

Post by freddie_mercury »

joshstrange wrote: post #14
PeterStuer wrote: post #13

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…

There are a lot of NAS cases you can buy. I have a Jonsbo that I've been pretty happy with for a year or so.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#110

Post by 7bit »

I will never use their plus line, but I care about the company, so this is really sad. They provided security updates over a very long time. Recently they cut automatic updates (not updates at all) for older models to make it inconvenient to run older models. Now this. With that development, I'm not sure that I will buy my next NAS from them.
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