Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 415 posts

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#161

Post by lostlogin »

benoau wrote: 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…

> Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH

I think this too harsh. I bought a 1821 a few years back. It takes a generic 10gb card and does what it said on the box. It’s quick and reliable. What am I missing?

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#162

Post by mystifyingpoi »

disambiguation wrote: post #52
bob1029 wrote: 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.

Storage cost is nice, data transfer costs are often prohibitively high.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#163

Post by chme »

GeertJohan wrote: post #93
chme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use TrueNAS Scale as root OS and have it run a Linux VM, which is easily done via their 'Virtualization' feature. No need for Proxmox. Afaik it works a lot better to give zfs direct access to underlying hdds. TrueNAS also has an 'Apps' feature, which are basically glorified helm chart installs on k3s that TrueNAS installs for you. But I prefer more control so I have k8s on the Linux VM. Whats also great is that the…

I was using Truecharts before k8s was deprecated.

The deprecation caused me to move to something more neutral and stay away from all 'native' apps of TrueNAS and migrated to ordinary docker-compose, because that seem to be the most approachable.

I was also looking into running a Talos k8s cluster, but that didn't seem to be as approachable to me and a bit overkill for a single-node setup.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#164

Post by aucisson_masque »

I never understand these kind of short sighted decisions. It takes a long time to build a brand, this could potentially hurt their customer willingness to recommend and even buy their brand.

People aren't stupid, they know that yet they do it.

I believe Amazon became so popular because it treated its customer fairly well until recently, now that they are in extremely dominant position.

But Synology is far from it.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#165

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

gambiting wrote: post #79
runamok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. Those disks are likely working much harder moving the head all over the place to find those empty spaces when it writes.

....do you think the drive doesn't know where the empty space actually is?

Drives blindly store and retrieve blocks wherever you tell them, with no awareness of how or if they relate to one another. It's a filesystem's job to keep track of what's where. Filesystems get fragmented over time, and especially as they get full. The more full they get, the more seeking and shuffling they have to do to find a place to write stuff. This will be the case even after the last spinning drive rusts out, as even flash eventually has to contend with fragmentation. Heck, even RAM has to deal with fragmentation. See the discussion from the last few weeks about the ongoing work to figure out a contiguous memory allocator in Linux. It's one of the great unsolved problems in general comparing that you and your descendants would be set for life if you could solve.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#166

Post by vin047 »

trumpeta wrote: post #119

The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR "filesystem", where you can continue adding heterogeneously sized disks after constructing the FS and it will make the most use possible out of the extra capacity in the new disks. When I researched it ZFS did not yet have the resizing feature merged, now it does, though I think it is still not able to use this extra space. I'm wondering if anybody has any better…

- mergerfs: https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs - snapraid

Not used either but these were 2 options that came up when I was researching few years ago.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#167

Post by Tepix »

lazide wrote: post #111
j45 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other manufacturers like Qnap also have this app ecosystem. It doesn’t address the mandatory nature of drives when at most dell and hp have put their part number on drives for the most part.

The issue is QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level compared to Synology (also with Apps). The number of times I’ve broken things on QNAP systems doing what should be normal functionality, only to find out it’s because of some dumb implementation detail is over a dozen. Synology, maybe 1-2. Roughly the same number of systems/time in use too.

FWIW, i haven't had any real issues with QNAP since 10 years or so, but i'm pretty much only using basic features.

Once i added a 4th drive to a RAID 5 set and i was impressed that it performed the operation on-line. Neat.

Oh, there was one issue: A while ago my Timemachine backups were unreliable, but i haven't had that issue since three years or so.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#168

Post by queenkjuul »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #21

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

I saw on level1techs, a 4 Bay chassis with an AMD APU plenty capable of transcoding multiple streams. Can't remember who made it, and you'd have to DIY the OS install, but that's pretty ideal to me.

What i do, and will continue to do, is use a USB-C disk box (Level 1 also recently reviewed some they quite liked, despite the usual fears around USB) and whatever PC i have laying around. 5 years strong running ZFS over USB 3 with a 4770K, regularly serving 4 Plex streams at once without complaints and no failures (i mean, usual disks wearing out, but nothing caused by USB).

So if a 4770 can transcode 2x1080 and direct play 2x more, any old anything with hardware transcoding these days should be just fine.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#169

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

pixelesque wrote: post #107
pixelesque wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yup. After having dealt with that, I err on the side of caution and don't even let it merge small files into inodes for space savings. I still love btrfs for the CoW, snapshots, and compression, but you really gotta give that metadata a wide berth.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#170

Post by lostlogin »

benoau wrote: post #148
nottorp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh another archaic idea is that you need to transcode. All you need is one of those sticks that plug into the hdmi of your tv and can run vlc. I use a chromecast. Vlc can play mkvs directly off samba shares. Done.

TBH the only reason anyone talks about transcoding is Synology's absolute dog-shit hardware options make it a problem. Most Intel CPUs and most AMD CPUs and many ARM CPUs and all the discrete GPUs are absolutely fine with munging video and audio codecs. They're just not well-represented in Synology's lineup.

Can you list things you don’t like about the Synology?

I can transcode just fine on a 1821 (though use a separate machine to do it for other reasons). The units seems fine, what am I missing out on?

Post reply on HN