Had a Synology as my first NAS but switched to a custom diy box with intel i3 and unraid and never looked back.
Once it’s running its just a breeze.
The Synology End Game
241–250 of 360 posts
Re: The Synology End Game
#242But 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…
> I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient. > no video, no audio Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much. > lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports This eats power, conflicting with the rest of your requests. > Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a ras…
> Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient.
They are, but the motherboard is not, or at least not as much as an ARM board.
> Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much.
And it would boot... how? AFAIK, no UEFI system is capable of booting headless and very very few BIOS systems were.
> No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.
I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.
Re: The Synology End Game
#243A 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.
I find QNAP more annoying to configure. Even their enterprise server rack stuff has Multimedia shares on by default.
Re: The Synology End Game
#244Earlier 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…
The filename limit comes from ecryptfs ( https://www.ecryptfs.org/ ) which is what Synology uses for encrypted shared folders. As for full disk encryption, you can select where to store the key, which may be on the NAS itself (rendering FDE more or less useless) or on a USB key or similar.
My disk station uploaded 54gb to synology servers the other day before I had my router block outbound. Trash product.
Re: The Synology End Game
#245I’ve bought an Ugreen NAS right when they came out. Installed TrueNAS and it’s been rock solid and with a lot of hardware features Synology doesn’t offer all this time. There’s really not a lot of reasons to use Synology anymore (only thing I miss was the sync solution they had. It was indeed better than Syncthing and the likes).
Does UGreen support ECC memory? As far as I've read online, it's crucial for Truenas.
Re: The Synology End Game
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity prices and not wanting to turn it on and off all the time.
The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks. 10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this. In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day. Over the entire lifetime of the…
I've done the calculations just now:
10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more.
The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the electricity is a very significant portion of TCO. In fact, it's more than half, because I bought everything second-hand.
Re: The Synology End Game
#247Not 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 r…
I'd suggest separate systems for NAS and media serving.
I've a Ryzen Embedded system with lost of RAM as my NAS box and a small Intel N-series based system as my Plex server that pulls media off the NAS box.
Re: The Synology End Game
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Depends on what electricity costs in your place. It can be anywhere from 10 ct/kWh to 45 ct/kWh and that makes a huge difference at the end of the month.
Re: The Synology End Game
#249Earlier 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…
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.
I do that for one thing: Home Assistant, because it's something that I want to customize to provide the best experience for the whole household.
Everything else, I agree and Synology has delivered enough (such a lifetime of 10+ years with full updates) that I am not really happy to try my chances with something else unless the hardware dies.
Re: The Synology End Game
#250Not 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 r…
Truenas scale?