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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#171

Post by Uvix »

CPLX wrote: post #71
mjg59 wrote: post #14

Synology are bad at technical restrictions. That doesn't help most people, and it's not any sort of defense, but anything they strongly attempt to impose here is going to fail. It took me an evening to break the protection they imposed on another layer, and a chunk of that evening was me and a bottle of mezcal and just writing INSERT statements into sqlite, we are really not talking about extreme competence. But! Tha…

Is it clear what the actual restrictions are here? I have a couple of diskstations and like them and was about to buy another. How does this actually affect me as a practical matter?

It depends on the model you buy. On 2025 models forward, you cannot add unsupported disks to a storage pool. If you bring an existing pool forward from another machine, it will let you continue to use the old disks, but any replacement ones would need to be Synology-branded.

Re: The Synology End Game

#172

Post by lmm »

bayindirh wrote: post #94
re wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up the ransomware attack out of curiosity: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/asusto... It looks like Deadbolt also hit QNAP and Terramaster.

Also, it looks like only units which are accessible from the internet are hit, but isolated units did not get hit.

> only units which are accessible from the internet

Sort of. Accessible via Asustor's own software which they'd been promoting to users, which I'm pretty sure had some kind of hole punching / bridge node setup so that you could use it even if you were blocking all inbound connections to your NAS. Obviously if you completely disconnect it from the internet in both directions then you're safe (but also can't get updates etc.)

Re: The Synology End Game

#173

Post by etbebl »

snowwrestler wrote: post #156
codeflo wrote: post #12

The year is 2025. Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough anymore. If a company or product is beloved by customers then that means it doesn't squeeze them to the max. This is clearly money left on the table that someone will sooner or later extract. High-end brands are not exempt from this.

Is NAS a growth market at all anymore? My somewhat unexamined opinion is that most folks can and probably do just store everything in the cloud. I would not be surprised to find out that Synology is seeing a smaller market year over year and becoming desperate to find new revenue per person who is shopping for a NAS today.

Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.

With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.

Re: The Synology End Game

#174

Post by extraisland »

M95D wrote: post #82
extraisland wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some quad core celeron board integrated thing. It draws 15watts. I added a PCI-E sata which gave me 6 extra ports. I am sure you can buy better ones. I used a Fractal Node Case that has 6 drive bays. Installed TrueNAS Scale on an SSD. Swapping drives is a pain as I have to take the computer apart. But that is infrequent. So it is fine.

15W with or without the PCIe SATA? And it's still 10W too much.

I think you are being a bit silly. I just plugged the numbers into an online cost calculator.

That is extra 10 watts, is less than £2 a month in the UK. Drives are about 5 watts idle and I have 6 of them.

The NAS costs me about £20/month. Which isn't too crazy IMO. The UK has some of the most expensive energy prices in Europe.

I will probably be upgrading the board to something better in a few years and see if I can put in a GPU for some AI bits and pieces.

Re: The Synology End Game

#175

Post by mergy »

Used to love Synology and had a NAS from them, but it EOL'd and it was a shame since the hardware and drives were fine.

I went to TrueNas and have been extremely happy and never looked back.

Re: The Synology End Game

#176

Post by izacus »

exmadscientist wrote: post #98

A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it . I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it. A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and…

There's really nothing that comes close to the hardware + software package Synology offers .

I was looking for alternatives, but anything else didn't come close to Syno Photos+Drive+Surveillance+Active Backup package you get with the NAS.

There's alternatives to each, sure, but they mostly need massively more powerful hardware to run pile of docker containers and end up being alpha quality.

Re: The Synology End Game

#177

Post by izacus »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #99

I'm currently on the market for a NAS. Main use would be simple RAID storage for personal stuff: photos, etc. Also local backup. I'd been considering the Synology SS425+. I was aware of the restrictions on disk support. Comments in this thread are making me think twice. So what's good? Ugreen? I'd appreciate recommendations.

Ugreen has no encryption support which is quite a pain for storing personal data :/

Re: The Synology End Game

#178

Post by whatevaa »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #92
M95D wrote: post #50

But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog: There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports. Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB r…

SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.

NAS are usually for capacity, not speed.

Re: The Synology End Game

#179

Post by tetris11 »

torben-friis wrote: post #79
tecleandor wrote: post #48

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

My main issue with their system is how closed it is. I got an issue where mind would randomly start writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise. I’d stop all containers, leave it as close to idle as I could manage, still spiking. There was no way I could learn what was causing it. I would like to assume it was a disk maintenance process or something, but for all I know it co…

There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them

https://forum.doozan.com/list.php

Re: The Synology End Game

#180

Post by Paul_S »

sumtechguy wrote: post #163
Paul_S wrote: post #107

I ran my own NAS for over two decades in some old 4U I got for cheap, using whatever discarded consumer HW I got for free and I never got the point of Synology. Colleague who has one said it's compact. Well, this year I bought one of those gaming cube cases (with space for 10 drives, what do people do with them in gaming pcs? OK, only 8 spaces are actually drawers with grommets but physically you can fit 10) and reti…

I did something similar years ago. Couple of drives in an old beige tower case. Setup the sharing wand what not. Not exactly 'hard' but it was one thing. Time consuming. Once you have done it a few times the novelty wears off and its more of a chore to mess around with the thing. NAS boxes like that 'just work'. You plug some drives in, set it up, done. However, one comment in here puts it perfectly. The software on…

20 years ago it was a chore but nowadays it's faster than baking a cake. 10 minutes prep time (configure os and add drives), 10 minutes bake time (installation) (or 10+ hours bake time if count building the array)

But let's assume you don't have a clue and have to follow some tutorial and do some reading and it takes you 2 hours. That's amortised across a decade. Especially now when easy distro upgrades are basically unattended so you can use the same setup for a decade and stay up to date.

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