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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

#391

Post by nerdjon »

bluGill wrote: post #314
nerdjon wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of a market is there really for those apps? They are competing against most consumers accepting the ease (and significantly cheaper) of cloud based storage. We (in the tech space) can scream privacy and risks of the cloud all day long but most consumers seem to just not care. I have 2 Synology NAS and the only app that I actually use is Synology Drive thanks to the sync app, but there are open source alterna…

Without the apps they have even less market though.

While true, that assumes that the engineering effort is worth whatever extra market they are getting from it.

I just can't imagine there is that many people that would bother with a "private cloud" that may not already have a use case for a NAS at home for general data storage.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#392

Post by gh02t »

donatj wrote: post #330

Is there a good alternative these days for someone that only really wants network attached storage , e.g. some drives in a box, easy RAID setup and local network access via SMB? I use my server for everything you'd use NAS Apps for. I have an aging Seagate NAS and had been eyeing Synology but this gives me pause.

Depends on your skill level. TrueNAS is pretty great at core NAS functionality and its apps situation is also pretty good now that it's stabilizing after working through some growing pains, but it's also not as easy to use as Synology. I've used it for years (since it was still called FreeNAS) and personally wouldn't consider anything else. They offer their own hardware that is not badly priced, or you can load it up for free on your own generic DIY hardware (which will typically save you quite a few bucks over buying any all-in-one solution). Unraid is another good option for DIY that is easier to learn, though not free. Rolling your own from scratch on top of Debian or something also isn't particularly difficult if you're experienced with Linux, and running apps through Docker with something like Portainer.

For more direct competitors to Synology in terms of maximum easy user experience there are some decent options out there like QNAP, ASUStore, etc. Youtube is a good place to look for reviews that go in depth to compare.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#393

Post by m463 »

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…

Maybe this will backfire like the keurig DRM coffee pods?

https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7986327/keurigs-attempt-to...

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#394

Post by Marsymars »

NL807 wrote: post #86
Marsymars wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. You can use an odroid H4 or any cheapo Alder Lake-N laptop for your Plex server, and any NAS solution to store the media.

>You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. Why not? If you are not going to do transcoding, Plex should sit fine on a NAS.

You got different replies from others, but my 2¢ since you were replying me - if you're not doing transcoding, then I agree, Plex on a NAS is fine - it's basically just a wrapper around some shared files in that case. (The post I was replying to did specify that they were doing transcoding.)

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#395

Post by Marsymars »

int_19h wrote: post #181
NL807 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You’re really best off not trying to lump together your Plex server and your NAS on the same box. Why not? If you are not going to do transcoding, Plex should sit fine on a NAS.

Even if you do transcoding, it's still fine so long as it has supported hardware for HW-accelerated encoding. Which doesn't require all that much - even fairly basic Synology models can do H.265.

Some do, but the models with HW-accelerated transcoding have been shrinking - it's only the "prosumer" models that have Intel Quick Sync (with no guarantee that refreshed products will maintain it) - the lower end models have ARM processors without HW-accelerated transcoding and higher end models have Ryzen processors without GPUs.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#396

Post by Marsymars »

lostlogin wrote: post #178
benoau wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "just Plex" - more specifically anything except Synology's own suite of apps - any Mac, Windows or Linux computer or headless docker server will provide the same experience with a ton of better options, like installing to a NVMe without shenanigans for a start!

How do you install an nvme in a Mac? How do you expand the storage to 100+ TB? The web gui is nice to use, what does Windows/Linux or the Mac offer? I’d prefer a Mac option, but I don’t believe there is a good one.

Upside of Mac is good Thunderbolt support. A ThunderBay 8 (or comparable) gives you 8 SATA bays. The baseline Mac Mini supports up to 18 such Thunderbolt bays via chained Thunderbolt. (Can also get nvme thunderbolt drives.)

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#397

Post by fc417fc802 »

kbolino wrote: post #355
fc417fc802 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sare capacity and the impact of (not) keeping it open is more about relative than absolute sizes I don't think this is correct. At least btrfs works with slabs in the 1 GB range IIRC. One of my current filesystmes is upwards of 20 TB. Reserving 5% of that would mean reserving 1 TB. I'll likely double it in the near future, at which point it would mean reserving 2 TB. At least for my use case those numbers are compl…

We're not talking about optical discs or backup tapes which usually get written in full in a single session. Hard drive storage in general use is constantly changing. As such, fragmentation is always there; absolute disk sizes don't change the propensity for typical workloads to produce fragmentation. A modern file system is not merely a bucket of files, it is a database that manages directories, metadata, files, and…

Yes thank you I am aware of what fragmentation is.

There are two sorts of fragmentation that can occur with btrfs. Free space and file data. File data is significantly more difficult to deal with but it "only" degrades read performance. It's honestly a pretty big weakness of btrfs. You can't realistically defragment file data if you have a lot of deduplication going on because (at least last I checked) the tooling breaks the deduplication.

> If your free space is spread across the volume in small chunks, and at 95% full it almost certainly will be

Only if you failed to perform basic maintenance. Free space fragmentation is a non-issue as long as you run the relevant tooling when necessary. Chunks get compacted when you rebalance.

Where it gets dicey is that the btrfs tooling is pretty bad at handling the situation where you have a small absolute number of chunks available. Even if you theoretically have enough chunks to play musical chairs and perform a rebalance the tooling will happily back itself into a corner through a series of utterly idiotic decisions. I've been bitten by this before but in my experience it doesn't happen until you're somewhere under 100 GB of remaining space regardless of the total filesystem size.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#398

Post by sokoloff »

Melatonic wrote: post #387
sokoloff wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the article, it’s all “Plus” models from 2025 on, which definitely includes desktop 2-8 bay units. I have been a happy enough Synology user since 2014, even though I had to hardware repair my main DS1815+ twice in that time (Intel CPU bug and ATX power-on transistor replacement). Other than two hardware failures in 10 years (not good), the experience was great, including two easy storage expansions and the replac…

So basically buy one of the older models now ? Will new firmware updates to everything before this require the Synology branded drives ?

Seemingly not, at least not for the moment, based on the experiences of people migrating arrays [successfully] from older units and the massive backlash that would result if they trashed currently working arrays.

If you’re going to buy a DSM unit, I’d definitely buy a 2024 or earlier model. But even as an overall happy user under their old go-to-market approach, I can’t recommend them now.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#399

Post by fc417fc802 »

kbolino wrote: post #370
fc417fc802 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes more sense but it's not true for the modern CoW filesystems that I'm familiar with. Those allocate free space in slabs that they write to sequentially.

Also, CoW isn't some kind of magic. There are two meanings I can think of here: A) When you modify a file, everything including the parts you didn't change is copied to a new location. I don't think this is how btrfs works. B) Allocated storage is never overwritten, but modifying parts of a file won't copy the unchanged parts. A file's content is composed of a sequence (list or tree) of extents (contiguous, variable-…

Which is exactly why you periodically do maintenance to compact the free space. Thus it isn't an issue in practice unless you have a very specific workload in which case you should probably be using a specialized solution. (Although I've read that apparently you can even get a workload like postgres working reasonably well on zfs which surprises me.)

If things get to the point where there's over 1 TB of fragmented free space on a filesystem that is entirely the fault of the operator.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#400

Post by kbolino »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #397
kbolino wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about optical discs or backup tapes which usually get written in full in a single session. Hard drive storage in general use is constantly changing. As such, fragmentation is always there; absolute disk sizes don't change the propensity for typical workloads to produce fragmentation. A modern file system is not merely a bucket of files, it is a database that manages directories, metadata, files, and…

Yes thank you I am aware of what fragmentation is. There are two sorts of fragmentation that can occur with btrfs. Free space and file data. File data is significantly more difficult to deal with but it "only" degrades read performance. It's honestly a pretty big weakness of btrfs. You can't realistically defragment file data if you have a lot of deduplication going on because (at least last I checked) the tooling br…

If compaction (= defragmentation) runs continuously or near-continuously, it results in write amplification of 2x or more. For a home/small-office NAS (the topic at hand) that's also lightly used with a read-heavy workload, it should be fine to rely on compaction to keep things running smoothly, since you won't need it to run that often and you have cycles and IOPS to spare.

If, under those conditions, 100 GB has proven to be enough for a lot of users, then it might make sense to add more flexible alarms. However, this workload is not universal, and setting such a low limit (0.5% of 20 TB) in general will not reflect the diverse demands that different people put on their storage.

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