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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

#131
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…

For large datasets, the cost of that is like rebuying your NAS every 9-12 months.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#132

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…

BTRFS doesn't care how big the disks are and you can just tell it to keep x number of copies of each data / metadata / system block and it will do the work of keeping your copies on different devices across the file system. Much like SHR, performance isn't linear with different sized devices, but it's super simple to setup and in tree where ZFS has a lot more complexity and is not baked into the kernel.

Snapshots are available, but a little more work to deal with since you have to learn about subvolumes. It's not that hard.

Edit: TIL, SHR is just mdadm + btrfs.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#133

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…

Did you factor in the resilience and redundancy S3 gives you and you cannot opt out from? I have my NAS, and it is cheaper than S3 if I ignore these, but having to run 2 offsite backups would make it much less compelling.

Yes and no. I have been using NAS for a long time, and I use older drives as offline/offsite backups. So the cost is mostly amortized already. Those machines are off except once a week (local)/ once a month (offsite), to do an incremental backup. So this is a good use of some older drives.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#134

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…

Any Linux with LVM. You don't need fancy proprietary OS for that.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level Some QNAP devices can be coaxed into running Debian. https://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Debian_Installation_On_QNAP https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/QNAP

Sure, but don't you lose the app ecosystem then?

Hacker flexibility or consumer take-it-or-leave-it, pick one.

Debian offers flexibility and control, at the cost of time and effort. PhotoSync mobile apps will reliably sync mobile devices with NAS over standard protocols, including SSH/SFTP. A few mobile apps do work with self-hosted WebDAV and CalDAV. XPenology attempts to support Synology apps on standard Linux, without excluding standard Debian packages.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#136

I've been very happy with my Synology NAS that has served me so well, but forcing this sort of vender lock-in is simply unacceptable. I suppose this means I'll have to look for some other solution. The problem is - I've formatted my drives with SHR(Synology Hybrid RAID - essentially another exclusive lock-in) and this would mean a rather painful transition to the new drive, since this now involves getting a whole new…

It’s readable / writable in any Linux system if mounted properly - the SHR is just an (extremely well done and convenient) UI for setting up standard raid partitions in a way that uses the entire disk.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#137
post #104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best solution in my opinion is to buy 5y old, used, server motherboards and CPUs (like AMD Epyc 3 right now). They are fairly cheap, it is durable products designed to work 24/7, and it comes with a huge number of PCIe lanes and extensibility. Same with enterprise SSDs for home usage, which is usually very little write. A used enterprise SSDs with a ton of endurance and very little writes is probably the best bang for your bucks. Wouldn't do that with hard drives though.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#139
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?

I think you'll find that the word "find" doesn't mean "has to search", like one can find their nose in the middle of their face, if one desires.

Change the word to "seek" and it may make more sense.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#140
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…

I agree, I don't buy spares, but when I have a drive failure, the first thing I do is an incremental backup, so that I know my data is safe regardless, while I am waiting for a drive.

Also worth noting that I don't think I experienced hard fails, it's often the unrecoverable error count shooting up in more than one event, which tells me it's time to replace. So I don't wait for the array to be degraded.

But I guess that's an important point, monitor your drives. Synology will do that for you, but you should monitor all your other drives. I have a script that uploads all the smart data off all my drives across all my machines to a central location, to keep an eye on SSD wear levels, SSD bytes written (sometimes you have surprises), free disk space and smart errors.

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