As a Synology user, I don’t just feel a huge letdown by such a short-sighted company but I’m compelled to boycott them. And it’s not about the money but the major lock-in and nonsense decisions. My DS1821+ is full, no more purchases from Synology, no further expansions, and no good publicity.
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
211–220 of 415 posts
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#212Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.
I backed the Ugreen NAS on Kickstarter and I'm using it since.
The Hardware is great, it is build like a tank. But the Software is not there after almost a year. No iSCSI support as of yet and snapshots work in some weird way. I can only access snapshots over the WebGUI and I am not able to get a simple list of available snapshots.
Shoutout to openmediavault. Just yesterday I installed it on my DXP8800 and now it works like a charm. But to install another OS you have to deactivate the watchdog timer in the BIOS, otherwise it resets the NAS every three minutes. Press CRTL + F12 to get into the BIOS and look for something like "watchdog" and disable it.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#213Earlier 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
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build any NAS and chuck Debian on it if you didn't care about the OS and vendor software to begin with?
e.g. QNAP has rare hardware combo of half-depth 1U low-power Arm NAS /w mainline Linux support, 32GB ECC RAM, dual NVME, 4x hotswap SATA, 2x10G SFP, 2x2.5G copper, hardware support for ZFS encryption, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855.
In theory, one could fit an Arm RK3588 SBC with NVME-to-PCIe-to-HBA or NVME-to-SATA into half-depth JBOD case. That would give up 2x10G SFP, 2xNVME and ECC RAM.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
....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.
It makes more sense but it's not true for the modern CoW filesystems that I'm familiar with. Those allocate free space in slabs that they write to sequentially.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#215Synology 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 (dr…
The problem is that a lot of competitors don't necessarily have great software. For example QNAP on the hardware side is supposed to be good, you have more bang for the bucks in term of performance but they had several major CVEs that really call into question their security practices. I have a friend who is running Unraid on QNAP and is happy though.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#216Can you “btrfs send” snapshots in a raid array in DSM to a Linux server? If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system. I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.
you really use btrfs send? found it so limiting i assumed only host providers will be using this when btrfs finally have integrated encryption of rest data. always just rsync/scp things and it is less problematic and faster on my weekend tests.
How do you transfer snapshots with rsync?
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#217There 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…
buying HDDs these days currently feels a little like navigating the dark web.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#218Synology 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…
On the other had, they have also slowly destroyed their app ecosystem. The photo solution is much worse than it used to be both in terms of features and the now removed support for media codecs. Video station has pretty much been dead for years.
At this point, I'm not that convinced that there's anything that synology offers that isn't handled much better by an app running on docker. This wasn't true 10 years ago.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.syn…
I would like to use ssds for running containers, this is a good point. The elderly cpu is more than adequate for my needs but as you say, an upgrade, ever, would be nice.
I guess I’ve avoided these issues by accepting that solid state storage in a NAS is still too expensive.
My ultimate would be the Synology with an Apple silicon heart. One can dream.
Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move
#220I'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…
Like the adjacent comment mentioned it's mountable in linux, so I wouldn't call it a lock-in in the normal way https://zarino.co.uk/post/synology-shr-raid-1-ubuntu/
Not sure why people are saying SHR is proprietary in some of the comments I read, it's effectively a wrapper for mdadm — though I suppose the GUI itself could be called proprietary.