Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move • Hacker News Board

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#201

Post by leptons » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:35 AM UTC

kbolino wrote: post #22

dostick wrote: post #12

Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensi…

I think preventing alarm fatigue is a very good reason to fix issues. But 5% free is very low. You may want to use every single byte you feel you paid for, but allocation algorithms really break down when free space gets so low. Remember that there's not just a solid chunk of that 5% sitting around at the end of the space. That's added up over all the holes across the volume. At 20-25% free, you should already be loo…

No matter how many TB of online HD storage I have, hard disks are just a temporary buffer for my tape drives.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#202

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:35 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #188

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 expensi…

I still love the example some here may recall, where HN itself was hit by this with two disks within a RAID array AND THE BACKUP SERVER all failed within hours of one another:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148>

Resulting in, FWIW, my top-rated-ever HN comment, I think:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048149>

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#203

Post by darkwater » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:39 AM UTC

I built my own NAS loosely following this tutorial [1] (mostly for the bill of materials), currently with just 3 4TB disks. Installed NixOS w/ ZFS + K3s on it (I want to use it as a learning playground as well), and deployed a lot of software on it using TrueCharts helm charts, or some other random/self-written charts, and deployed with ArgoCD. Yes, I don't have a nice UI or a nice cloud integration, I have to do almost everything by hand but it's a side-project in itself and fun. For example, now I'm playing with a Postgres operator to manage the databases resources.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNMtmUOCtwI

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#204

Post by atoav » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:40 AM UTC

As someone who was in the marekt for getting a Synology, this has moved Synology onto my "do not trust and avoid"-list.

It is very hard to get of that list and I will warn everybody wbo asks me about tech advice (so literally everybody in my vicinity) about vendors on that list. Good luck Synology.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#205

Post by magicalhippo » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:41 AM UTC

pixelesque wrote: post #67

dostick wrote: post #12

Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensi…

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.…

ZFS has a similar limitation.

It tries to mitigate this by reserving some space for metadata, to be used in emergencies, but apparently it's possible to exhaust it and get your filesystem into a read-only state.

There was some talk about increasing the reservations to prevent this but can't recall if changes were made.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#206

Post by formerly_proven » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:44 AM UTC

franga2000 wrote: post #185

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

For a BYOD product it would be fine to add a blacklist of DM-SMR drives imho. Or have a big red banner and a taint flag.

But that's not what Synology did.

Also, if the image on the Synology page is accurate, they are relabeled Toshiba drives. Which doesn't really seem a good choice for SMB/SOHO NAS devices, because the Toshiba "Machine Gun" MGxx drives are the loudest drives on the market.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#207

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:46 AM UTC

jjcob wrote: post #191

wetbaby wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rew…

> the problem is just that NAS software needs to be made compatible with SMR drives

That's half of it ... maybe? Last time I looked drives that offer host managed SMR still weren't available to regular consumers. In theory that plus a compatible filesystem would work flawlessly. In practice you can't even buy the relevant hardware.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#208

Post by apetrovic » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:47 AM UTC

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…

What are "competitive options"? It's a genuine question. Before Synology, I had some DIY server in a Fractal Design case, and noise and, to be honest, bulk were a problem. Also, maintenance of the server wasn't funny.

I switched to Synology about six years ago (918+). The box is small, quiet, and easy to put in the rack together with the network gear. I started with 4TB drives, gradually switched to 8TB over time (drive by drive). I don't use much of their apps (mostly download station, backup, and their version of Docker to run Syncthing, plus Tailscale). But the box acts like an appliance - I basically don't need to maintain it at all; it just works.

I don't like all this stuff with vendor lock-in, so when the time comes for replacing the box, what are alternatives on par with the experience and quality I currently have with Synology?

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#209

Post by sersi » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:52 AM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #206

franga2000 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For a BYOD product it would be fine to add a blacklist of DM-SMR drives imho. Or have a big red banner and a taint flag. But that's not what Synology did. Also, if the image on the Synology page is accurate, they are relabeled Toshiba drives. Which doesn't really seem a good choice for SMB/SOHO NAS devices, because the Toshiba "Machine Gun" MGxx drives are the loudest drives on the market.

I had some 12TB WD ultrastar that I happily replaced with some Toshiba MG09ACA18TE. To my ears at least the toshiba sound signficantly more bearable than the ultrastar were (lower pitch so less disturbing). Due to living in a small apartment my NAS is in my living room so noise matters.

That said, I've since added an ssd and moved almost everything to the ssd (docker, the database and all apps) and it's much nicer in term of noise.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#210

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 8:55 AM UTC

kbolino wrote: post #34

j1elo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5% of my 500 GB is 25 GB, which is already a lot of space but understandable. Not many things would fit in there nowadays. But 5% of a 5 TB volume is 250 GB, that's the size of my whole system disk! Probably not so understandable by the lay person.

This is partly why SSDs just lie nowadays and tell you they only have 75-90% of the capacity that is actually built into them. You can't directly access that excess capacity but the drive controller can when it needs to (primarily to extend the life of the drive). Some filesystems do stake out a reservation but I don't think any claim one as large as 5% (not counting the effect of fixed-size reservations on very smal…

> sare capacity and the impact of (not) keeping it open is more about relative than absolute sizes

I don't think this is correct. At least btrfs works with slabs in the 1 GB range IIRC.

One of my current filesystmes is upwards of 20 TB. Reserving 5% of that would mean reserving 1 TB. I'll likely double it in the near future, at which point it would mean reserving 2 TB. At least for my use case those numbers are completely absurd.