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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#381

Post by ryandrake »

j45 wrote: post #291
reactordev wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to maintain and manage. The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.

I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#382

Post by stirfish »

teekert wrote: post #223
osivertsson wrote: post #51

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale. Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work…

I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent. It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free".…

What if you were to run your guest ssh in a container with the relevant volumes attached? I can't recall how the base ssh works with Synology DSM, but everything interesting I do with my NAS is done with containers.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#383

Post by ponooqjoqo »

osivertsson wrote: post #51

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale. Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work…

We shouldn't normalize referring to managers as leaders. Leadership didn't make this decision, management did.

High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#384

Post by pixl97 »

rickdeckard wrote: post #119
GolfPopper wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the latter without doing the former. Synology actively and painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives. Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. Bu…

There's a misunderstanding, I don't defend Synology's decision. I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales. Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes…

>especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision

As a life long customer support person I disagree.

Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#385

Post by jghn »

ryandrake wrote: post #375
jghn wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. About 10 years ago I wanted to set up a NAS to store a variety of things. I have the knowhow to hand roll just about anything I wanted, but I lacked the desire or time to do so. At the same time, the simple things were tying me to apps or otherwise putting me on rails. Instead I bought a lower end Synology & stuffed it with some HDs, and it's been pretty fire & forget while satisfying all of my needs. I'm ab…

> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!

Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.

Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#386

Post by procaryote »

nottorp wrote: post #281
reactordev wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd. For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't. But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... And three, the latest Pis have started to require ac…

If you use a couple of magnetic disks, the pi is fast enough. The disks will be the bottleneck. There are sata cards that allow up to four magnetic disks, and where you power that card which in turn powers the pi. It's very doable.

It's of course more work to set up than synology, and if you want a neat box, you have to figure that out yourself

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#387

Post by Jaepa »

b3lvedere wrote: post #229
AJRF wrote: post #48

They tried it though - remember that if you are ever trying to buy another. There are people at the company who wanted this and got greedy, and are only backtracking now because it negatively impacted them. Don't forgive them, and don't buy Synology.

Meh.. i do kinda forgive them. They tried, they lost, they reveserd their decision and hope to keep their customers (read:sales) happy. There are plenty of companies which would double or triple down their bad decisions and flatly tell the customer is the problem. Our customers usually want nice, but monitor/manageble NASes and Synology was quite acceptable. It got annoying when we could not put in any harddisk we'd…

They did that though. They have doubled down and told the users they were wrong & that this was a needed

Eventually relenting because of the consequences isn't a laudable accomplishment. Also it very much appears as they not really relenting, just trying to recover some PR

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Synology-only-partially-removes...

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#388

Post by procaryote »

deelowe wrote: post #208
reactordev wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.

Do you need it to?

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#389

Post by 8fingerlouie »

al_borland wrote: post #337
rolleiflex wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar, but slightly different story for me. I ended up buying it as an enthusiast ‘Apple-grade’ product where UX was there to do something I would be able to do on my own. Then they got high on their own supply and started to believe they can be as restrictive and up charging as Apple, forgetting that they’re still a product for primarily fairly technical people. Also, for all server needs I’m running a Raspberry P…

> I just pay Apple for iCloud monthly, I consider that to be money well spent. I use iCloud Photos for my photos, so I don’t have to manage storage on my phone, while always having access to everything. I quite like it. I also have a Synology NAS for other things. A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me to also backup my photos to the NAS, because I have no idea how Apple is backing things up. I might be…

Apple uses a mix of Google Cloud and AWS, as well as their own data centers. As for Google and AWS, they are using multi geographic redundancy, and I can only assume they do that for their own data centers as well. The data in the 3rd party data centers is encrypted.

That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data center, but in multiple data centers, so that if one data center completely vanishes, your data will still be available.

That being said, it's always good to make a local backup. I use a tool called Parachute Backup (https://parachuteapps.com) on my Mac to automatically export photos from Apple Photos to my NAS. It also works on "iCloud optimized storage", so it won't just backup size optimized photos.

I've tested it against Photosync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home) as well as a manual export of unmodified originals, and in a library consisting of 180k photos and videos, I had 300 compare errors, most of which were Live Photos, that are not exported identically.

Both Parachute and Photosync offers the ability to export unmodified originals along with AAE files, so that if you need to rebuild your Apple Photos library, everything including undo history is preserved (AAE files contains edits).

Tools like Synology Photos and Immich (and more) only exports the "latest" version, whatever that may be, meaning if you have edited the photo on your phone, that edited version is exported, and if you later restore from your NAS backup, there is no undo history. In other words, they apply the edits in a destructive way.

For backing up from the NAS to another location I use Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com), which also supports backing up iCloud Drive files that are cloud only.

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