Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

Post by freeAgent » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

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…

Post by Hikikomori » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

mappu wrote: post #242

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?

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

ycombinatrix wrote: post #129

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…

Fwiw I don't use a single one of their apps. I bought it for their hybrid raid feature.

Post by Hamuko » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 10:43 AM UTC

adam_th wrote: post #236

apetrovic wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by izacus » Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

pixelesque wrote: post #67

dostick wrote: post #12

Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space. The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensi…

Not defending them in any way, but I know with my Infrant (then Netgear unfortunately, who last year killed the products) ReadyNASs which also used mdadm to configure BTRFS with RAID5 in a similar way to Synology and QNAP, the recommendation was that you don't want your BTRFS filesystem to run low on space, because then it runs out of metadata space, and if it does that it becomes read-only, and can become unstable.…