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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

#191

Post by jjcob »

wetbaby wrote: post #187
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.

WD Red drives. They released a new version of their WD Red drive, and the only difference they stated in the specs was that it had more cache. So I thought, great, this is their updated model with more cache, it's going to be faster.

After some time, people started to post about problems with the new WD Red drives. People had troubles restoring failed drives, I had a problem where I think the drives never stopped rewriting sectors (you could hear the hard drives clicking 24/7 even when everything was idle)

Then someone figured out that WD had secretely started selling SMR drives instead of CMR drives. The "updated" models with more cache were much cheaper disks, and they only added more cache to try and cover up the fact that the new disks suffored from catastrophic slowdowns during certain workloads (like rebuilding a NAS volume).

This was a huge controversy. But apparently selling SMR drives is profitable, so WD claims the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives, and all is well. They are still selling SMR drives in their WD Red line.

Edit: Here's a link to one of the many forum threads where people discovered the switch: https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#192

Post by NexRebular »

doanchu wrote: post #175
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…

TrueNAS can do all those stuff for you.

Or OmniOS with Napp-It

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#193

Post by xmodem »

bambax wrote: post #176
razakel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just do it in reverse: a list of drives that they have tested and can confirm work well; at the end of the list they just mention that they cannot recommend any other.

This is in fact standard practise for many software vendors.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#194

Post by tolien »

franga2000 wrote: post #186
razakel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Seems to have worked well enough for Backblaze for years and years now. Another major vendor publicly announcing that make X model Y has shitty reliability is as much pressure on the storage duopoly as we're likely to get.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#195

Post by brynx97 »

coolgoose wrote: post #179
doanchu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TrueNAS can do all those stuff for you.

No it can't. Let's be honest Synology's OS is covering more than just storage, and no, spinning up a lot of 3'rd party docker containers that you need to maintain, secure and manage isn't as easy.

What can't TrueNAS do that was listed in the parent comment?

I'd rather have the flexibility offered by TrueNAS, in addition to the robust community. Yes, Synology hardware is convienent in some use cases, but you can generally build yourself a more powerful and versatile home server with TrueNAS Scale. There is a learning curve, so it is not for everyone.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#196

Post by TabTwo »

I'm not sure what customers Synology is targeting. Small office/home office (SoHo) was their original market, but these customers won't be willing to pay high prices per drive. Medium-sized businesses? They mostly move their infrastructure to the cloud, which probably leads to low sales volumes. Plus, they're very price-sensitive too. Large enterprises and corporations? This is the domain of established providers like NetApp. Synology might dream about the high prices that these major storage vendors can charge, but this market is difficult to enter without years and years and years of proven reliability in hardware and service.

I don't think this will work the way Synology imagines it.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#197

Post by benoau »

lostlogin wrote: post #170
benoau wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fundamentally I guess it feels like they have ground to a halt or even quietly retired the DSM line.

Let's look at your NAS for an example (it's actually worse for mine cause I always loved the Slims lmao).

DS1821 has no GPU transcoding because it uses the AMD Ryzen 1500B, what you've observed is this processor is just powerful enough to brute force some transcoding but it has no hardware transcoding:

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS1821+#specs

DS1821 successor was recently revealed to be the DS1825. So if your NAS died in a few months, that would be your obvious choice for a replacement. They decided to continue using the AMD Ryzen 1500B, which is now seven years old. TBD if they bother releasing it this year. In a few months they could call it DS1826 instead.

https://nascompares.com/2025/03/13/synology-ds525-ds1525-ds4...

Meanwhile DSM still lacks support for NVMe volumes, in fact there are still no NVMe-only models at all, you can't even install DSM to NVMe, they cut support for USB drives, they cut support for HEVC, and they almost never update docker and some of the other tools.

The hardware's going nowhere and the software's going backwards.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#199

Post by mschild »

_cenw wrote: post #104
mschild wrote: 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.

Absolutely. This particular setup is meant more for your bog-standard home NAS.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#200

Post by locusm »

mtillman wrote: post #118
locusm wrote: post #115

The only moat Synology have is their software. How far is Truenas from catching up?

In my opinion, truenas is already caught up if you understand hardware and networking basics. The more advanced you are, the more likely truenas is right for you until you’re eventually ready for a proper zfs+bsd. The other nice thing about truenas is it does what you tell it to do in my experience.

Synology have excellent backup apps for O365 / Google Suite - Ill have to see what latest Truenas has to offer.
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