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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#231

Post by M95D »

SirMaster wrote: post #199
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…

Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay. There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory. What's wrong with this? https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32…

That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.

Re: The Synology End Game

#232

Post by M95D »

procaryote wrote: post #216
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 tim…

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

I do. Read my other comments.

Re: The Synology End Game

#233

Post by dsr_ »

mosselman wrote: post #142
lostlogin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. To save some clicks: https://nas.ugreen.com/ https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro

Thanks for the links. What do you guys think about security concerns around minisform and ugreen being Chinese companies?

Regardless of source:

- your NAS should not be allowed to talk to the outside world

- you should wipe any pre-installed software and install your own OS

Re: The Synology End Game

#234

Post by edem »

tecleandor wrote: post #48

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

I have a DS 923+. These extremely old softwares you mentioned were always weird to me but everything worked fine so far. What I'm not happy about is the vendor lock in, and the abysmal virtualization / transcoding performance. I want a NAS that comes with a similar ease of use as the DSM, but can double down as a __very lightweight__ virtualization platform for my local test deployments and as a media PC that I can rely on. What would you suggest?

Re: The Synology End Game

#235

Post by edem »

plqbfbv wrote: post #126

I have used Synology NASes for a good 15y now, and the one I'm on will likely be my last (DS920). I have watched the software evolve from "quite good" to "very good" to "lets reimplement everything ourselves and close it off as much as possible". It's sad because back in the day, at least for me, the brand was the perfect UX in many regards: small form factor and low power, price-accessible 4/5 bay NASes, a couple CP…

What are the current options? I've been looking but I haven't found any. I have a DS923+ and it works fine, but I can already see what you are talking about.

Re: The Synology End Game

#236

Post by SirMaster »

M95D wrote: post #231
SirMaster wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay. There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory. What's wrong with this? https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32…

That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.

Really?

6.1 Electrical Characteristics

The maximum power requirements for the LSI SAS 9200-8i HBA under normal operation are as follows:

 PCIe 12.0 V = 0.74 A

 Power

— Nominal = 7.92 W

— Worst Case = 13.20 W

Seems like it uses just a little more than 1 large capacity HDD.

Re: The Synology End Game

#237

Post by tecleandor »

cyberax wrote: post #208
Shank wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit ( https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_... ). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS ( https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno... ) to act as a key vault…

You can move out the key from the device using KMIP. I have an implementation that uses a Go-based service to store it in Nitrohsm. I'll clean it up and post a release announcement on Reddit...

That'd be great, as the PyKMIP implementation wasn't very intuitive... (Nor Synology docs...)

Re: The Synology End Game

#238

Post by CamperBob2 »

M95D wrote: post #231
SirMaster wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay. There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory. What's wrong with this? https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32…

That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.

A few watts more or less is so far down any sane list of concerns when selecting a NAS solution, I can't believe it's dominating the discussion here.

Re: The Synology End Game

#239

Post by jmuguy »

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…

A lot of commenters don't seem to understand how much of a pain in the ass rolling your own NAS is. And then dealing with drive failures and expanding the storage pool, which is dead simple with Synology, but is completely hair raising (if not impossible) with other solutions.

Re: The Synology End Game

#240

Post by MobileVet »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #209
tecleandor wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For full disk encryption you need DSM >= 7.2 and you can either, store it locally (useless) or in a KMIP server. [0] As a KMIP server you use: - Another Synology NAS with DSM >= 7.2 - A KMIP compatible key server Except for the demo implementation that Synology uses (PyKMIP), all the KMIP compatible servers I've found have licenses in the tens of thousands a year. So if anybody has any suggestions to substitute PyKMI…

I remembered wrong. I’m fairly certain that Synology, at some point, allowed you to store the encryption vault on an external (USB) drive, but apparently not anymore.

You didn't remember wrong, I have mine stored on an external drive. I am using DS 6.x though
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