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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

#301

Post by abofh »

timcobb wrote: post #290
Shank wrote: post #275

I personally think that in 2025, you should treat the NAS as a purely storage product and buy your hardware from that perspective. TrueNAS or UniFi’s new NAS product fulfill that goal. From there, supplement your NAS with a Mac Mini or other mini-PC for storage-adjacent tasks. Synology’s whole business model (arguably QNAP’s too) depends on you wanting more drive bays than 2 and wanting to host apps and similar servi…

This is what I need to research, I don't understand why we need NAS hardware at all, aren't the controllers and drivers in an average box running Linux enough for the same software raid that Synology does?

You don't - similarly you don't need a Mac Book to run OS X (technically at least); You buy the full-flag NAS or MacBook because it's a bundled supportable quantity that reduces your cognitive load in exchange for money. Synology for an SMB or home lab is pretty good stuff and you don't spend (as much) of your time editing smb.conf, or configuring the core backup services or whatever. Some clickops and you're done - and you can do a lot - under the hood it's still Linux (or at least mine is), you can SSH in and do damage -- the hardware isn't "special", it's not necessarily substantially better than another system that could handle a similar number of drives in any measurable way.

I have a synology because I got tired of running RAID on my personal linux machines (had a drobo before that for the same reasons) - but as things like drive locking occur and arguably better OSS platforms available, I'm not sure I'd make the same decision today.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#302

Post by m4rtink »

apetrovic wrote: post #208
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…

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…

Some Intel N100/N105 board from Aliexpress with Fedora or Debian on top should be fine & much more flexible if you decided you want more than just a file server.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#303

Post by miek »

Synology provided more info to the owner of YouTube channel NASCompares, who then posted it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1k53gk0/official_...

It starts with "Synology's storage systems have been transitioning to a more appliance-like business model." As a long-time user, all of this collectively moves Synology from "highly recommended" to "avoid."

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#304

Post by op00to »

shantara wrote: post #276
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…

I’m running two Synology NAS devices, and I wouldn’t consider their app ecosystem to be their strong point. I started by trying to take advantage of the built-in Synology apps when I first got my NAS, but quickly realized how limited they are. Their bi-directional synchronization solution is so slow and archaic compared Syncthing! And the same is true for most of their software offerings. At this point, I’m happy wit…

Agree. Have a few Synologies and the apps are crap ware.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#305

Post by op00to »

freeAgent wrote: post #259
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…

As far as lists of drives to avoid, Synology could certainly do that, but we also already have Backblaze’s reports on their own failure rates. Synology also uses multiple vendors to produce “Synology” branded drives, so as the article states this may also lead to confusion about which Synology branded drives are “good” vs. “bad” in the future, even with seemingly identical specs.

The idea is not so much about which drives fail or whatever. It’s more that certain consumer drives have firmwares that don’t work well with NAS workloads. Long timeouts could be treated as a failed drive rather than a transient error by a desktop drive, for example.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#306

Post by nijave »

m4rtink wrote: post #302
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…

Some Intel N100/N105 board from Aliexpress with Fedora or Debian on top should be fine & much more flexible if you decided you want more than just a file server.

Or throw on TrueNAS or UnRAID if you want a GUI

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#307

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

A friend of mine who moved from Communist Russia to the US once explained to me the "tyranny of choice." He explained that, in the US, sometimes we get overwhelmed with many, many options.

To be quite blunt: After choosing my NAS, the act of choosing hard drives is actually harder and somewhat overwhelming. To be quite honest, knowing that I can choose from a narrower set of drives that are guaranteed to work correctly is going to really tip my scale in favor of Synology the next time I'm in the market for a NAS.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#308

Post by shantara »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #286
shantara wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m running two Synology NAS devices, and I wouldn’t consider their app ecosystem to be their strong point. I started by trying to take advantage of the built-in Synology apps when I first got my NAS, but quickly realized how limited they are. Their bi-directional synchronization solution is so slow and archaic compared Syncthing! And the same is true for most of their software offerings. At this point, I’m happy wit…

I would count supported third-party apps like SyncThing as part of the app ecosystem. You can add the SynoCommunity repository to your Synology and install SyncThing directly, which is pretty nice. It's a bit more convenient than how other solutions, like Unraid, handle this, where you manually configure a Docker container.

That’s true, but it’s only relevant for the initial setup. I wouldn’t think twice about giving up something so minor compared with the sheer anticompetitive nature of Synology locking down the devices.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#309

Post by webstrand »

ellen364 wrote: post #146
joshstrange wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a plan on what you’re going to move to? I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays. I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I co…

I've been mostly happy with a Terrmaster DAS attached to a mini PC running UnRaid. The bays are hotswappable and overall it's been solid. I say "mostly" happy because I almost returned it. The USB connection between mini PC and Terramaster would be fine for a few days and then during intense operations like parity checks would disconnect and look like parity error/disk failure, except the disks were fine. Eventually…

I had the same issue, same solution worked for me too.

It works well, but USB connection could be faster, and it bogs down when doing writes with soft-raid. I've been thinking about going for a DAS solution connected directly via SAS, instead. Still musing about what enclosure to use, though.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#310

Post by sumtechguy »

asdswe wrote: post #228

I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.

I am very capable of building my own. But the plug and play of it is really nice. I basically popped in some drives and had a share up and running in a couple of hours. The same sort with DIY was do a part picker list build it (1-2 days) and then pop the drives in then figure out how to configure it correctly (another day or so because I do it very rarely). Then at that point yeah for what I use it for they are equivalent. Other than now I get to keep track of the CVE's that syno is doing for me with the occasional patch. Now I could put a stripped linux distro or trunas or something like that and get the same. Possible and ease of use are also a spectrum to weigh against. When you are young you have all the time you need. When you are older you just want to put it together and serve some files and do something else, because I have done this 6 times already.

But there is actually one reason I am going DIY next time. 'uname -a'. They ship with very old kernels. I suspect the other utilities are in the same shape. They have not updated their base system in a long time. I suspect they have basically left all of the amazing changes the kernels have had over the past decade out. They are randomly cherry picking things. Which is fine. But it has to be creating a 'fun' support environment.

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