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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

#341

Post by Kirby64 »

ryao wrote: post #92
Kirby64 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TrueNAS isn’t nearly friendly enough for the average user. HexOS may fit that bill, although it seems rather immature. It runs on top of TrueNAS.

My doctor was able to switch from Synology to TrueNAS after I advised him to replace his failing Synology NAS with a TrueNAS box and I gave him a link to the TrueNAS documentation. He is fairly average in my opinion.

Like the other poster said, your anecdote says more about the doctor than the average user. TrueNAS documentation isn't the worst by any means, but it has far too many extremely low level controls accessible. It would be overwhelming to most users unless you stay very within a small window of basic functionality. If you're just using it for network storage, maybe it's fine... anything beyond that though is going to trip up many folks.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#342

Post by kstrauser »

m000 wrote: post #241
MortyWaves wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

…but still marketed for NAS users, alas.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#343

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#344

Post by Piraty »

ninkendo wrote: post #33
nodesocket wrote: post #3

My next NAS is going to be Ubiquiti UNAS Pro . 7 drive bays for $499. Can’t beat it.

Can you put a custom OS on it, wiping their software? I have a network rack in my basement (so, shallow depth, can’t fit a “full” depth server) and I’m looking for a dumb box of hard drives with otherwise simple/supported-by-linux hardware that I can use to build my own NAS. I don’t really want to use unifi’s software for it (plus it’s nice to just run plex/jellyfin/etc directly on the box) I currently plug a USB3 4-…

what i did is buy a 19" shelf and put a mini itx board and a few 5.25 cages next to it.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#345

Post by dml2135 »

Hamuko wrote: post #278
Zekio wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can run ZFS without the Unraid disk array in unraid these days

Doesn't that get rid of one of the biggest benefit of Unraid where you can mix and match drives, just like in a Synology hybrid RAID?

I think this is just the tradeoff you need to make. I’m not aware of a solution where you can mix-and-match drives but also get the write performance of a traditional RAID array.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#346

Post by transpute »

frontlodjkgi wrote: post #234
transpute wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

e.g. QNAP has rare hardware combo of half-depth 1U low-power Arm NAS /w mainline Linux support, 32GB ECC RAM, dual NVME, 4x hotswap SATA, 2x10G SFP, 2x2.5G copper, hardware support for ZFS encryption, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855 . In theory, one could fit an Arm RK3588 SBC with NVME-to-PCIe-to-HBA or NVME-to-SATA into half-depth JBOD case. That would give up 2x10G SFP, 2xNVME and ECC RAM.

Maybe it's just me, but rare harware isn't something I'd look for in a reliable storage system unless I had a really special need general hardware just couldn't be made to do

Per sibling comment, "unique" is a better descriptor than "rare". The NAS is made in Taiwan and has been readily available from Amazon or QNAP store.

The Marvell CN913x SoC has been shipping for 5 years, following the predecessor Armada SoC family released 10 years ago and used in multiple consumer NAS products, https://linuxgizmos.com/marvell-lifts-curtain-on-popular-nas.... Mainline Linux support for this SoC has benefited from years of contributions, while Marvell made incremental hardware improvements without losing previous Linux support.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#347

Post by buserror »

leptons wrote: post #201
kbolino wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think preventing alarm fatigue is a very good reason to fix issues. But 5% free is very low. You may want to use every single byte you feel you paid for, but allocation algorithms really break down when free space gets so low. Remember that there's not just a solid chunk of that 5% sitting around at the end of the space. That's added up over all the holes across the volume. At 20-25% free, you should already be loo…

No matter how many TB of online HD storage I have, hard disks are just a temporary buffer for my tape drives.

At home I have a 48xLTO5 changer with 4 drives (I picked for a song a while back! I actually don't need it but heck, it has a ROBOT ARM), and at work I'm currently provisioning a 96 LTO 9 tape drive dual-rack. With 640 tapes available :-)

I'm a STRONG believer in tapes!

Even LTO 5 gives you a very cheap 1.5TB of clean, pretty much bulletproof storage.. You can pick a drive (with a SAS HBA card) for less than $200, there is zero driver issue (SCSI, baby); the linux tape changer code is stable since 1997 (with a port to VMS!).

Tape FTW :-)

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#348

Post by horsawlarway »

timcobb wrote: post #293
horsawlarway wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, seems like they got roughly one hardware sale to him every 6 years or so. Which is along the same trend line I'm seeing for my purchases. That's pretty solid for hardware sales. My guess is that they've over invested in things like their "drive" office software suite, and don't know how to monetize it or recoup costs. I like Synology, but locking me to their drives is a hard "no thanks" from me. Next NAS wo…

Every six years is enough for apple and other companies who have other sources of revenue and have staked out this high quality niche. But androids, as an example, are more of an average 3 year lifespan if I'm not mistaken, which is closer to what Synology would probably want to achieve but cannot.

I don't think mobile is the right comparison. Those ecosystems are explicitly operating on the assumption that they will profit through the software ecosystem (app store revenue).

Synology seems to have gone entirely the other direction here. Most of their software is given away for free, but the hardware is being monetized.

Additionally - the hardware has different operating constraints. I think the big deal for Synology is that they probably assumed that storage need growth would equate to sales growth.

EX - Synology may have assumed that if I need to store 1TB in 2010, and 5TB in 2015, that would equate to me buying additional NAS hardware.

But often, HDD size increases mean that I can keep the same number of bays and just bump drive size.

Which... is great for me as a user, but bad for Synology (this almost single handedly explains this move, as an aside - I just think it's a bad play).

---

I'd rather they just charged for the software products they're blowing all their money on, or directly tie upgrades to the software products to upgrading hardware.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#349

Post by kbolino »

akx wrote: post #272
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drives blindly store and retrieve blocks wherever you tell them, with no awareness of how or if they relate to one another. It's a filesystem's job to keep track of what's where. Filesystems get fragmented over time, and especially as they get full. The more full they get, the more seeking and shuffling they have to do to find a place to write stuff. This will be the case even after the last spinning drive rusts out,…

Not quite, AFAIK? Drive controllers may internally remap blocks to physical disk blocks (e.g. when a bad sector is detected; see the SMART attribute Reallocated Sector Count).

Logical Block Addressing (LBA) by its very nature provides no hard guarantees about where the blocks are located. However, the convention that both sides (file systems and drive controllers) recognize is that runs of consecutive LBAs generally refer to physically contiguous regions of the underlying storage (and this is true for both conventional spinning-platter HDDs as well as most flash-based SSDs). The protocols that bridge the two sides (like ATA, SCSI, and NVMe) use LBA runs as the basic unit of accessing storage.

So while block remapping can occur, and the physical storage has limits on its contiguity (you'll eventually reach the end of a track on a platter or an erasable page in a flash chip), the optimal way to use the storage is to put related things together in a run of consecutive LBAs as much as possible.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#350

Post by transpute »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #265
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…

I have an old Helios4 board. Too bad they don't make them anymore - it's tiny, has ECC, and was purpose built to be a NAS.

Marvell CN913x in QNAP TS435XeU NAS is the SoC successor to Armada A388 on Helios4. Still available, building on Linux support for Armada.
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