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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#211

Post by tetris11 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #204
tetris11 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them https://forum.doozan.com/list.php

People seem very attracted to Synology because it requires very little thought & effort. FWIW the new Ugreen NAS run Debian. I don't know a ton about it, but it's be great if they could stay a little more up to date. This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus.

I'm attracted to them because you can find them secondhand on ebay for very cheap, and their power draw / performance ratio is quite decent compared to other systems.

I will say that the Ugreen NAS seems to offer more performance for less watts, so it's definitely something I will keep an eye on in the future if it pops up on Ebay.

> This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus.

It's not. My Synology is running Linux kernel v4, and I opted to use their "SHR" RAID configuration and can confirm that it's some weird BTRFS variant that is likely deadlocked due to the kernel.

The encrypted volumes I've made also look very much like the EcryptFS files I've been seeing on other setups.

I'm currently in the process of mainlining it to kernel v6 to reap the better power and idle / hibernation rewards, as well as just using a standard Ext4 FS with updates

Re: The Synology End Game

#212

Post by turtlebits »

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…

I switched to QNAP and it's been fine.

Re: The Synology End Game

#213

Post by exmadscientist »

plqbfbv wrote: post #131
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…

So much this. I left another comment that touched on this. I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months. I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it. Synology still scores ve…

Most of the other commenters do not seem to understand the difference between "low maintenance", "low maintenance by someone very skilled in the art", and "no maintenance".

Things that maintain themselves are amazing and I want more of them in my life. Anything that requires shell commands is out out out. That is for younger people.

Re: The Synology End Game

#214

Post by pjmlp »

postexitus wrote: post #206
pjmlp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAS also fail, and cloud backups can be taken away without notice. Hence why multiple copies.

sure, but NAS and cloud doesn't fail at the same time. Also NAS provide some redundancy in-house as well. Whereas BluRay is a single copy - even if you burn multiple copies, they degrade at the same rate.

That would be true if I would have done all copies on the same day, and never duplicated disks.

Re: The Synology End Game

#215

Post by kabdib »

i have maybe $15K in Synology gear. it's getting old and should be replaced with something with better efficiency

the replacement will NOT be from Synology

Re: The Synology End Game

#216

Post by procaryote »

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…

There are pci boards that let you hook up 4 sata ports to the pci3 on a raspberry pi 5. The drives will be a large part of the power draw, so if you want low power, going for 2 drives is probably better. That probably gets you into the 20-30 watt range

for 10+ sata ports you might as well get an x86 motherboard as it's going to draw lots of power anyway

Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time

Re: The Synology End Game

#217

Post by plqbfbv »

fooqux wrote: post #162
plqbfbv wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I left another comment that touched on this. I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months. I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it. Synology still scores ve…

I'm not sure I understand. Even a custom Arch install with samba, zfs, NFS, etc would be a "single setup, works forever" deal. It's not like what you configure is going to magically break if you don't look at it. And security could be an issue, but it's not like Synology is any better there with their old as dirt dependencies. Snark aside, TrueNas is probably your best bet. Maybe Unraid? Still, with all of these, it'…

A custom Arch install is what I have on my router.

There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching).

The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the next day on reboot. "But you should have read the changelog!", "But you should have tested the config files on updates!", "But you should have restarted the service!" ...: no, no I don't normally test every config file or restart every service after an upgrade, and I don't normally read Changelogs of all software installed on my machines. I shouldn't have to do that in 2025.

`zfs` is out of kernel, I've dabbled with that for a while until I understood if you want your machine to reboot 100% of the times, you'd better stick with in-kernel filesystems, no matter how worse featureset they have.

Sometimes stuff will just break on package upgrades without notice or warning, and you're left to pick up the pieces, normally in a hurry because your partner is screaming at you.

Compare that with Synology, where I have never, ever needed to login to click "run updates" or put it in "maintenance mode" to fix it. It updates itself, it boots at the set time, it brings up all services, runs periodic scrubbing, informs me via mail, shuts down at the specified time. It has a 2x-SSD mirror for cache, and I don't need to care about the disk layout and configuration, and the cache configuration, .....

It's literally a set-and-forget auto-upgrading box that I can just use instead of maintain.

I understand that Synology is not in good shape anymore, see my other top-comment :)

Re: The Synology End Game

#218

Post by procaryote »

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…

lots of things will autoinstall security updates nowadays.

Debian and unattended upgrades might need a tweak if you want it to actually reboot by itself, but I think the option is there

Re: The Synology End Game

#219

Post by bigstrat2003 »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #192
mkl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for a NAS. Speed is NVMe's benefit, but your network isn't fast enough to take advantage of it, which means you're paying through the nose for very low capacity. 24TB SATA drives are a way better deal for a NAS.

I run 25Gbps home from my ISP and to my desktop from my NAS I run also 25Gbps.

You need to understand that you are a very unusual case. Most people can't get 25 Gbps for a connection, it's 1 Gpbs at best. Most people, even most technical people, are not running a 25 Gbps home network. You have specific needs for speed and that's fine, but they are not commonplace and most people will be served just fine with SATA drives.

Re: The Synology End Game

#220

Post by bkazez »

tern wrote: post #22

I don't have any personal experience, but I passively follow video editor YouTube and everybody's talking about switching to a UNAS Pro[1], which integrates tightly with the UniFi gear people already love. I'm happy to see it—looks great, it's priced insanely well, and I can see myself switching from Synology in the future. In other news, I've been a fan of LucidLink[2] for awhile, which you can use to avoid needing…

I do video postproduction and am trying to archive/backup 100-250GB of large files per month. Ended up very slowly rsyncing to Synology NAS, confirming checksums with another script, using Synology onboard stuff to backup to AWS, and dealing with all the totally random hard drive noise.

If I want to work on one of these old projects, I have to download it locally so 4K editing works.

Meanwhile my old projects back when I used different software are impossible to open.

I have spent days setting up all this junk, HATE the Synology UI, and regret it all.

What’s the better solution? Just a bunch of RAIDs that I connect to with USB??

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