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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

#181

Post by int_19h »

NL807 wrote: post #86
Marsymars wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. Why not? If you are not going to do transcoding, Plex should sit fine on a NAS.

Even if you do transcoding, it's still fine so long as it has supported hardware for HW-accelerated encoding. Which doesn't require all that much - even fairly basic Synology models can do H.265.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#182

Post by Dylan16807 »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #20
xyzzy123 wrote: post #11

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.

They probably factored RAID1 into that price, which you can skip if you're setting up three copies. (At least I hope they did, their hardware prices must be dire if $2000 only gets you a tiny NAS and two 10TB drives.) If I do napkin math based on US prices, a mini PC and a 20TB external drive are a bit under $500 total, and a 2 bay NAS and a 20TB internal drive are a bit over $500 total, so that's about $1500 for the triple-NAS option and $3000/year for the S3 infrequent access option. Still extremely compelling.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#183

Post by jjcob »

There is one argument for Synology doing this: There have been cases where hard drive companies mislead their customers. I personally fell victim to this when Western Digital started selling SMR drives as WD Red, without labelling them as SMR drives.

So lots of customers thought they were buying a drive that's perfect for NAS, only to discover that the drives were completely unsuitable and took days to restore, or failed alltogether. Synology had to release updates to their software to deal with the fake NAS drives, and their support was probably not happy to deal with all the angry customers who thought the problem was with Synology, and not Western Digital for selling fake NAS drives.

If you buy a drive from Synology, you know it will work, and won't secretly be a cheaper drive that's sold as NAS compatible even though it is absolutely unsuitable for NAS.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#184

Post by bambax »

bob1029 wrote: post #23
xyzzy123 wrote: post #11

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…

> 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.

I currently store 10 TB on my NAS, and growing. The data is live, I access some of it every day, sometimes remotely. I have 3 rotating "independent" backups in addition to the NAS (by independent I mean they're made with rsync and don't depend on any specific NAS OS feature), stored in an old safe that would probably not be very effective against thieves but should protect the drives in case of fire.

There are no recurring costs to this setup except electricity. I don't think S3 can beat that.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#185

Post by franga2000 »

jjcob wrote: post #183

There is one argument for Synology doing this: There have been cases where hard drive companies mislead their customers. I personally fell victim to this when Western Digital started selling SMR drives as WD Red, without labelling them as SMR drives. So lots of customers thought they were buying a drive that's perfect for NAS, only to discover that the drives were completely unsuitable and took days to restore, or fa…

That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#186

Post by franga2000 »

razakel wrote: post #171
Renaud wrote: post #90

Synology isn't about the NAS hardware and OS. Once setup, it doesn't really matter as long as your config is reliable and fast, so there are many competitive options to move to. The killer feature for me is the app ecosystem. I have a very old 8-bay Synology NAS and have it setup in just a few clicks to backup my dropbox, my MS365 accounts, my Google business accounts, do redundant backup to external drive, backup im…

>kept a list of drives to avoid based on user experience Well, that sounds like a great way to get sued.

On what grounds exactly? You tested something, it turned out to perform below average, so you say you don't recommend buying it. Where's the crime?

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#187

Post by wetbaby »

jjcob wrote: post #183

There is one argument for Synology doing this: There have been cases where hard drive companies mislead their customers. I personally fell victim to this when Western Digital started selling SMR drives as WD Red, without labelling them as SMR drives. So lots of customers thought they were buying a drive that's perfect for NAS, only to discover that the drives were completely unsuitable and took days to restore, or fa…

Which WD drives specifically were misleading customers?

It's fine to have 'Synology supported drives' which guarantee compatability, but requiring them is absolute bollocks.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#188

Post by npunt »

Something I haven't seen emphasized enough with this move is that by obfuscating a drive's vendor and manufacture date, you won't know if your drives are from the same batch. This is important because if there's any manufacturing defects in a given batch of drives, the failures are likely to happen around the same time, greatly increasing the chance of losing data.

Basically, Synology drives are not only more expensive, they're also statistically speaking less reliable when building a RAID with them, negating the very purpose of the product. What a dumb move.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#189

Post by Dylan16807 »

bob1029 wrote: post #23
xyzzy123 wrote: post #11

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…

> 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.

> Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

Okay, I'm curious now. When you were talking about "a bunch of local disks", what size disk did you have in mind?

Right now the best price per TB is found on disks in the 14-24TB range.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#190

Post by iam-TJ »

dur-randir wrote: post #134
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…

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

To expand on this with an example. Adding a new device we'll call sdz to an existing Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Volume Group (VG) called "NAS" such that all the space on sdz is instantly available for adding to any Logical Volume (LV):

  pvcreate /dev/sdz
  vgextend NAS /dev/sdz
Now we want to add additional space to an existing LV "backup":

  lvextend --size +128G --resizefs NAS/backup
*note: --resizefs only works for file-systems supported by 'fsadmn' - its man-page says:

"fsadm utility checks or resizes the filesystem on a device (can be also dm-crypt encrypted device). It tries to use the same API for ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS and XFS filesystem."

If using BTRFS inside the LV, and the LV "backup" is mounted at /srv/backup, tell it to use the additional space using:

  btrfs filesystem resize max /srv/backup
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