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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

#241

Post by m000 »

MortyWaves wrote: post #222
jjcob wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For future reference which WD drives are actually suitable for NAS? I remember someone saying you need to look for a specific more expensive type.

WD Red Plus -> CMR technnology, suitable for NAS

WD Red -> SMR technology, slightly cheaper, not suitable for NAS

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#242

Post by mappu »

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…

I have a mix of SMR and CMR drives in my NAS and it works perfectly (on mdadm). I understand ZFS hates it but what is the problem on Synology?

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#243

Post by kmacdough »

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…

This is an argument in favor of all anti-competitive walled garden moves. But we've seen time and again the degrading service and price gouging that ultimately comes. People have a right to use the things they own as they please. Companies don't have a right to protect their image that supersedes this basic human right of independence.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#244

Post by nicolas_t »

lostlogin wrote: post #219
benoau wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it's not officially supported you can use nvmes to run containers. I do this on my own nas and it works great. See https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1gobb14/guide_how...

That said, the person you're replying to is right. Synology has mostly stopped supporting their apps, they've removed features in cost-cutting features (media codecs), hardware is now hopelessly outdated and both kernel and docker are completely out of date.

It feels like any technical leadership completely disappeared and now only bean counters who don't understand the product or their target market are making decisions.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#245

Post by topspin »

gambiting wrote: post #82
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…

>>You should have spare drives on hand. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a home nas. I have one and I don't keep spare drives purely because it's hard to justify the expense.

I do. Also, I have an unopened 990 EVO Plus ready to drop into whatever machine needs it.

I'm not made of money. I just don't want to make excuses over some $90 bit of junk. So I have have spare wifi, headset, ATX PSU, input devices, and a low cost "lab" PSU to replace any dead wallwart. That last one was a life saver: the SMPS for my ISPs "business class" router died one day, so I cut and stripped the wires, set the volts+amps and powered it that way for a few days while they shipped a replacement.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#246

Post by Heliosmaster »

m000 wrote: post #240
formerly_proven wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

but that's the proposed change, that their Plus lineup which is generally targeted for SMB/SOHO/enthusiast market, will be working only with their drives

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#247

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

> The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected

I see this kind of arguments “X had to do Y otherwise customers would complain” a lot every time a company does something shady and some contrarian wants to defend them, but it really isn't as smart as you think it is: the company doesn't care if people complain, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this kind of move either, because it raises a lot more complaints. Company only care if it affects their bottom line, that is if they can be liable in court, or if the problem is big enough to drive customers away. There's no way this issue would do any of those (at least not as much as what they are doing right now, by a very large margin).

It's just yet another case of an executive doing a shady move for short terms profits, there's no grand reasoning behind it.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#248

Post by sokoloff »

m000 wrote: post #240
formerly_proven wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units.

I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement).

Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replacement of one failed drive. These were all BYOD, and the current drives are shucked WD reds with a white sticker (still CMR).

I happily recommended them prior to this change and now will have to recommend against.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#249

Post by netruk44 »

yurishimo wrote: post #232
spease wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Funny you mention that…

I have a DS1515+ which has an SSD cache function that uses a whitelisted set of known good drives that function well.

If you plug in a non whitelisted ssd and try to use it as a cache, it pops up a stern warning about potential data loss due to unsupported drives with a checkbox to acknowledge that you’re okay with the risk.

So…there’s really no excuse why they couldn’t have done this for regular drives.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#250

Post by m000 »

transpute wrote: post #116
lazide wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level compared to Synology (also with Apps). The number of times I’ve broken things on QNAP systems doing what should be normal functionality, only to find out it’s because of some dumb implementation detail is over a dozen. Synology, maybe 1-2. Roughly the same number of systems/time in use too.

> 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

Mind that these are ancient models that are dog slow for anything more than serving files. Not that they are fast in serving files...

I did the procedure on my (now 15yo) TS-410, mostly because the vendored Samba is not compatible with Windows 11 (I had turned-off all secondary services years ago). It took a few days to backup around 8TB of data to external drives. And AROUND 2 WEEKS to restore them (USB2 CPU overhead + RAID5 writes == SLOOOOOW).

Even to get the time down to 2 weeks, I really had to experiment with different modes of copying. My final setup was HDD RPi4 TS-410. This relieved TS-410 CPU from the overhead of running the USB stack. I also had to use rsync daemon on TS-410 to avoid the overhead of running rsync over SSH.

So, it's definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you go through the trouble, you can keep the box alive as off-site backup for a few more years.

Having said that, I have to commend QNAP for providing security updates for all this time. The latest firmware update for TS-410 is dated 2024-07-01 [1]. This is really going beyond and above supporting your product when it comes to consumer-level devices.

[1] https://www.qnap.com/en/download?model=ts-410&category=firmw...

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