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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

#231

Post by nicolas_t »

cm2187 wrote: post #140
kyrofa wrote: post #70

> When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon. In a way thi…

I agree, I don't buy spares, but when I have a drive failure, the first thing I do is an incremental backup, so that I know my data is safe regardless, while I am waiting for a drive. Also worth noting that I don't think I experienced hard fails, it's often the unrecoverable error count shooting up in more than one event, which tells me it's time to replace. So I don't wait for the array to be degraded. But I guess t…

Do you have a link to your script? Mostly I'd love to have a good dashboard for that data.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#232

Post by yurishimo »

spease wrote: post #225
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

> That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery. Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tec…

I don’t think anyone would care if Synology gave priority to their own drives. A checkbox during setup that says “Yes, I know I’m using these drives that have not been validated blah blah blah” would be plenty. That’s not what Synology did however and that’s the main reason everyone is pissed.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#233

Post by numpad0 »

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.

It can't be programmatically identified because manufacturers actively hide them. There are ATA commands for that, DM-SMR drives lie to it.

I wouldn't be sure why Toshiba M-prefixed 7K2 drives would be bad for NAS use cases. They're descendants of what were used in high performance SPARC servers. Hot, dense, obnoxious, but that's just Fujitsu. They're plenty reliable, performant, and perfect for your all-important on-line/near-line data! You just have to look away from bills(/s).

0: https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some-western-digital-wd-r...

1: https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seagate-guilty-of-undiscl...

2: https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#234

Post by frontlodjkgi »

transpute wrote: post #213
frontlodjkgi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's just me, but rare harware isn't something I'd look for in a reliable storage system unless I had a really special need general hardware just couldn't be made to do

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#235

Post by jitl »

asdswe wrote: post #228

I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.

Time is money, I would rather buy a NAS these days even though in the past I ran my own FreeBSD ZFS server NAS. Much cheaper use of my time to pay a 2-3x premium on hardware if it means I spend 4 hours on build and 1 hour on admin per year vs 12 hours build, 6 hours admin per year.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#236

Post by adam_th »

apetrovic wrote: post #208
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 (dr…

Unraid is brilliant if you're interested in BYO hardware. It can be setup with mix and match drives, supports docker and virtual machines. Realistically it's a bit more work than Synology to get up and running, but once it is, the only thing you really need to do is update the software from time to time

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#237

Post by m4r1k »

topspin wrote: post #223
m4r1k wrote: post #211

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.

That's understandable. It's a genuine betrayal. Synology, QNAP, et al. exist as a response to the traditional storage vendor lock-in, gouging and rent seeking.

Synology seems to have been on the wrong track for a while now: - They completely missed the NVMe transition. The vendor is still very much focused on the HDD world. Yes, NVMe/SSDs in the consumer space don't yet offer the same capacity as HDDs, but the technology is evolving rapidly. It feels like being a music executive in 2007 believing CDs were the future. - They dropped detailed S.M.A.R.T. access from the main UX, which is also the standard for NVMe health reporting. I personally run scrutiny, but Synology's built-in health reporting system in recent DSM versions feels not up to this fundamental task. - DSM updates around 7.2.2 negatively impacted H.265/HEVC codec support, affecting a large user base relying on their NAS for media [1]. - Synology is fundamentally a hardware company. While DSM is polished, their hardware is the centerpiece, and it has been lagging behind for a while now (NAS refreshes, CPU choices, Ethernet speeds, etc.). - Even package updates seem slower and further apart (e.g., Docker was stuck on 20.10.23 until relatively recently in the DSM 7.2.1 cycle).

I have had a Solaris ZFS filer that I've ran for a long time (due to historical reasons, I jumped on OpenSolaris when it came out and never had a chance to move off Oracle's lineage). I moved to Synology about three years ago b/c I was sick and tired of managing my own file server. Yet, I feel like at this point the cons of Synology are starting to outweigh the manageability advantages that drew me in.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1feqy62/synology_...

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#238

Post by fc417fc802 »

iam-TJ wrote: post #190
dur-randir wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

How are redundancy and drive failure handled? The only capacity mix-and-match scheme I have familiarity with is btrfs.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#239

Post by saltysalt »

asdswe wrote: post #228

I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.

Thanks for the OS recommendations! I'm a soon to be ex-Synology user looking for a new home (their killing of Video Station also irked me).

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#240

Post by m000 »

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.

TBF, the picture in TFA only shows rack-mounted Synology devices, where noise is not really a concern.

Synologoy SMB/SOHO NAS devices should not be affected by the drive lockdown (for now).

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