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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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

What argument are you driving at here? The smaller the free space, the harder it is to run compaction. The larger the free space, the easier it is. There are some confounding forces in certain workloads, but the general principle stands.

"Your free space shouldn't be very fragmented when you have such large amounts free!" is exactly why you should keep large amounts free.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#402
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I don't buy spares, but when I have a drive failure, the first thing I do is an incremental backup, so that I know my data is safe regardless, while I am waiting for a drive. Also worth noting that I don't think I experienced hard fails, it's often the unrecoverable error count shooting up in more than one event, which tells me it's time to replace. So I don't wait for the array to be degraded. But I guess t…

Do you have a link to your script? Mostly I'd love to have a good dashboard for that data.

Not the full script but can share some pointers.

Using smartctl to extract smart data as it works so well.

Generally "smartctl -j --all -l devstat -l ssd /dev/sdXXX". You might need to add "-d sat" to capture certain devices on linux (like drive on an expansion unit on synology). By the way, synology ships with an ancient version of smartctl, you can use a xcopy newer version on synology. "-j" export to json format.

Then you need to do a bit of magic to normalise the data. Like some wear level are expressed in health (start = 100) or percent used (start = 0). There are different versions of smart data, the "-l devstat" outputs a much more useful set of stats but older SSDs won't support that.

Host writes are probably the messiest part, because sometimes they are expressed in blocks, or units of 32MB, or something else. My logic is:

  if (nvme_smart_health_information_log != null)
  {
   return nvme_smart_health_information_log.data_units_written * logical_block_size * 1000;
  }
  if (scsi_error_counter_log?.write != null)
  {
   // should be 1000*1000*1000
   return (long)(double.Parse(scsi_error_counter_log.write.gigabytes_processed) * 1024 * 1024 * 1024);
  }
  var devstat = GetAtaDeviceStat("General Statistics", "Logical Sectors Written");
  if (devstat != null)
  {
   return devstat.value * logical_block_size;
  }
  if (ata_smart_attributes?.table != null)
  {
   foreach (var att in ata_smart_attributes.table)
   {
    var name = att.name;
    if (name == "Host_Writes_32MiB")
    {
     return att.raw.value * 32 * 1024 * 1024;
    }
    if (name == "Host_Writes_GiB" || name == "Total_Writes_GB" || name == "Total_Writes_GiB")
    {
     return att.raw.value * 1024 * 1024 * 1024;
    }
    if (name == "Host_Writes_MiB")
    {
     return att.raw.value * 1024 * 1024;
    }
    if (name == "Total Host Writes")
    {
     return att.raw.value;
    }
    if (name == "Total LBAs Written" || name == "Total_LBAs_Written" || name == "Cumulative Host Sectors Written")
    {
     return att.raw.value * logical_block_size;
    }
   }

  }
and even that fails in some cases where the logical block size is 4096.

I think you need to test it against your drives estate. My advice, just store the raw json output from smartctl centrally, and re-parse it as you improve your logic for all these edge cases based on your own drives.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, they are not the same thing. Yes, S3 provides much better durability. I just can't afford it. For my use-case I'm OK with un-hedged risk and dollars staying in my pocket.

I backup my nas to rsync.net, it’s very cost effective using borg backup.

$0.01/GB/mo, that does not seem better than Glacier, is it?

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are going to ignore that and leave bad reviews online, which will have compounding effects. SMR drives works in RAID until CMR buffer regions are depleted, and then RAID starts falling apart. This will undoubtedly create wrong impressions that Synology products, not the drives, are not trustworthy.

What if the device had a minimum benchmark feature that would test any new drive ? And fail the worst ones ?

SMR drives work like SSD: writes are buffered to CMR zone, consolidated into an SMR track data, copied into onboard cache RAM and written to SMR zone. SMR tracks has sizes of 128MB or so, and can be written or erased in track-at-once manners by the head half-overwriting data like moving a broad whiteboard marker slowly outward on a pottery wheel, rather than giving each rings of data enough separation. This works because the heads has higher resolution in radial direction in reads than writes; the marker tip is broader than what the disk's eyes can see.

This copy operation is done either while the disk is idling, or forced by stop responding to read and write operations if CMR buffer zone is depleted and data has to be moved off. RAID softwares cannot handle the latter scenarios, and consider the disk faulty.

You can probably corner a disk into this depleted state to expose a drive being SMR based, but I don't know if that works reliably or if it's the right solution. This is roughly all I know on technical side of this problem anyway.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#405
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I backup my nas to rsync.net, it’s very cost effective using borg backup.

$0.01/GB/mo, that does not seem better than Glacier, is it?

Except it’s not glacier speeds, there are no bandwidth costs, support is on a completely different level than aws (you can actually reach an actual knowledgeable human), and you can use anything that speaks ssh. They also have an expert price at 0.008$/gb/mo here https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#406

The reason I chose Synology over others was their SHR "filesystem", where you can continue adding heterogeneously sized disks after constructing the FS and it will make the most use possible out of the extra capacity in the new disks. When I researched it ZFS did not yet have the resizing feature merged, now it does, though I think it is still not able to use this extra space. I'm wondering if anybody has any better…

Same here, went with synology for SHR. However I did notice that the performance was substantially worse when using heterogeneous drives, which makes SHR somewhat less valuable to me.

SHR is just Linux MDADM and LVM.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#407
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 correct…

Locking non-approved drives does absolutely nothing for your case though.

They can sell "guaranteed to work" drives for people like you who don't want to go through all the picking process, while letting other people the choice to put any drive they want.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

I don't have one but I'd definitely take a tape changer if it weren't too expensive. It would be amazing to have 72TB of storage just waiting to be filled, without needing to go out into my garage to load a tape up.

LTO tapes have really changed my life, or at least my mental health. Easy and robust backup has been elusive. DVD-R was just not doing it for me. Hard drives are too expensive and lacked robustness. My wife is a pro photographer so the never-ending data dumps had filled up all our hard drives, and spending hundreds of dollars more on another 2-disk mirror RAID, and then another, and another was just stupid. Most of the data will only need to be accessed rarely, but we still want to keep it. I lost sleep over the mountains of data we were hoarding on hard drives. I've had too many hard drives just die, including RAIDs being corrupted. LTO tape changed all of that. It's relatively cheap, and pretty easy and fast compared to all the other solutions. It's no wonder it's still being used in data centers. I love all the data center hand-me-downs that flood eBay.

And I do love hearing the tapes whir, it makes me smile.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#410
I was just about to replace my 2 Drobo units with 2 of 4 bay Synology, my very early Synology single drive NAS is still working so thought I'd go for familiarity.

Read about this BS and thought it's bound to end with Synology branded drives costing much more than other brands as people won't have the choice. QNAP took my order instead.

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