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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#251

Post by M95D »

SirMaster wrote: post #236
M95D wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's 2-3 times more than the drives. All 8 HDDs consume 4W in sleep, and they sleep more than 80% of the time (all night, all day while I'm at work, they only start 2-3 hours in the evening).

Re: The Synology End Game

#252

Post by whalesalad »

Anyone know of something equivalent to the HL-8 from 45homelab but more affordable? The price ($700) is obscene for a barebones chassis that is just a backplane w/o cpu/mobo/ram/psu: https://store.45homelab.com/configure/hl8

The Unifi UNAS Pro looks pretty cool (and my entire rack is Unifi) but I want more control over the OS and would prefer to run TrueNAS: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/unas-pro

I am shopping to replace a DS918+ that has been in service for almost 8 years. Honestly it's been rock solid without a single hiccup - even upgraded the entire pool disk-by-disk a few years back without problems. But I was already losing interest in Synology's OS and after their recent shift to locking down drive options that is the nail in the coffin so I wanna build my own.

Re: The Synology End Game

#253

Post by whalesalad »

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…

rpi sux for longevity - be prepared to mirror and replace the SD card often

Re: The Synology End Game

#254

Post by Marsymars »

joshstrange wrote: post #106
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…

This. I came to Synology after years of managing regular Linux (Debian) servers, then Unraid, and then Synology. Synology was the most expensive thing I’ve used but I also _never_ think about it. The same could not be said for previous setups. I want a stupid-easy NAS, plug-and-play, hotswapable bays. I’m not interested in having to shut down a tower and open it up to swap/add drives. I have 2x12-bay Synology’s and I…

I have a similar lack of interest in opening up a tower to swap drives. QNAP has some nice JBOD enclosures. If you don't want any 2.5" drives their biggest enclosures are 8-bays, so you'd need an ATX tower with three available PCIe slots to run all the SFF cables for 3x8 drives. You would need to manage your own software stack with Unraid or w/e.

Re: The Synology End Game

#255

Post by Marsymars »

lan321 wrote: post #165
FredFS456 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.

Add to that Aoostar. It's quite comparable to the Minisforum n5 Pro, a bit cheaper - Max 48GB*2 DDR5 ECC - 8 core PRO 8845HS - 25W with nothing, doing nothing, realistically 50W - 25G combined network - 5 M.2 (3x2 and 2x1 lane) and 6 HDDs - Oculink https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-a...

> It adopts the enterprise-level PRO 8845HS processor instead of the ordinary consumer-grade 8845hs, which enables this computer to run stably even when it remains powered on for an extended period without being shut down.

Well that's certainly a claim.

Re: The Synology End Game

#256

Post by M95D »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #238
M95D wrote: post #231

Earlier 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.

It's nice to be rich and not care, isn't it...

I calculated that over the entire lifetime of my current system, the energy will cost me more than the system itself, all 10 HDDs included, and it's only 50 W or so.

Re: The Synology End Game

#257

Post by Marsymars »

M95D wrote: post #104
justincormack wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you want? The N100 is 6W in theory not sure if you can downclock it or how good the power control is. Problem below that is that is mostly mobile phone type CPUs and they dont have much IO. Drives in a NAS are going to consume a bit of power too so its not really clear how low you can go.

I want less power and more storage. I want less than 10W idle for the whole system, maybe except HDDs, but even those will be in sleep much of the time. x86 boards are mostly ATX-powered and I don't think any ATX power source can go that low and still be efficient (not draw 20W while powering a 10W system). And yes, mobile phone CPUs are good enough. I'm using a Turris Omnia now and Marvell 385 is OK, except I have t…

> I want less than 10W idle for the whole system, maybe except HDDs, but even those will be in sleep much of the time. x86 boards are mostly ATX-powered and I don't think any ATX power source can go that low and still be efficient (not draw 20W while powering a 10W system).

If you look at some industrial boards (e.g. from ASRock) they're DC-powered. I haven't actually measured the power draw on mine - I'll try to remember to do so next time I power cycle it.

Re: The Synology End Game

#258

Post by Marsymars »

M95D wrote: post #242
proxyon wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

> 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.

The N100 on its own can go quite low - my N305 system idles around 5W. (But laptop, so zero SATA ports.)

Re: The Synology End Game

#259

Post by Marsymars »

iamshs wrote: post #69
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…

Low power and reliability is why I want to just use my Mac Mini M4 + DAS as storage solution among 15 people. I am not sold on it because Mac Mini has lots of life in it to be solely devoted to this use case.

Which DAS? I looked at that as an option but didn't narrow down a top pick for Thunderbolt JBOD DAS units.

Re: The Synology End Game

#260

Post by benoau »

Marsymars wrote: post #247
edem wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but these days you can easily have one system with 10 - 20 cores so you should be able to handle both workloads very well.
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