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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You'd be surprised. A single spinning rust drive can hit 200MBps for sequential access, so that's plenty to saturate its 1Gbps NIC.

However, in my experience with a Pi 4, the issue is encryption. The CPU simply isn't fast enough for 1Gbps of AES! Want to use HTTPS or SSH? You're capped at ~50Mbps by default, and can get it up to a few hundred Mbps by forcing the use of chacha20-poly1305. Want to add full-disk encryption to that? Forget it.

The Pi 5 is supposed to have hardware AES acceleration so it should be better, but I'm still finding forum posts of people seeing absolutely horrible performance. Probably fine to store the occasional holiday photo, but falls apart when you intend to regularly copy tens of gigabytes to/from it at once.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#442
Time to move on from Synology. They already showed their sociopathic middle finger to everyone. Now that they are walking it back they will just do the same thing they all do now. They will slowly reintroduce this restriction by removing a few compatible drive models at a time until its too inconvenient not to buy their drives.

I hope they go out of business even though I used to like their product.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#443

This is a mixed bag. As someone who worked in the storage industry for ~10 years, there are a lot of poorly defined behaviors that are vendor/model specific and I can see how its easier to just pick a particular model, test it and declare it the blessed version having done similar stuff myself. Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a…

They could have a list of supported vendors then.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#444
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat. It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity. Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.

Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe.

I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s.

I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#445

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…

What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive t…

>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical

As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#446
post #313

What is a good alternative that allows me out of the box with no extra hardware to install a plex server, connect to Mullvad VPN and start / monitor downloads directly from the NAS device web interface or mobile App?

QNAP's QTS/QuTS Hero are generally as "batteries included" as Synology's DSM in that respect. I threw 32GB of RAM in my TS-464 and run ~15 containers (as well as Plex, not in a container) on it with no problem.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.

And by guessing, we mean grasping wildly at nonsense .

There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts. I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#448
post #203

The decision to restrict 3rd party harddrives may be part of the reason why sales (allegedly) plummet, but i'm guessing lack of innovation also plays a big part. Synology has been resting on the laurels for years. They had a "hit" with DSM 6, then did mostly nothing for a decade, released DSM 7, and again, nothing but minor things since. On the hardware side of things, they're mostly still using decade old hardware,…

Their btrfs is using a very old branches with tons of change, which is probably a strong reason why they're locked on that old kernel. They need to do something about it urgently.

They're too busy using an EOL Docker engine that hasn't seen a security update in 16 months.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#449
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. It seems like they want to make sure NAS' are running NAS grade drives, instead of consumer grade (SMR) drives which can have serious issues when rebuilding an array after a drive failure. Customers buying inappropriate drives for NAS and then eventually blowing back on Synology, if a driver of this could be handled differently.

Just commented here to point out that this news story spreading is wrong (and that other IT news outlets have since corrected/retracted it), don't have any eggs in that basket, but: Discussions on their reasoning happened back when they introduced the extortion fees. No, it's not about NAS grade drives. They are just re-labelling existing NAS drive models, putting their own sticker onto it. The original manufacturers…

I'm not a customer of Synology. I don't agree with justifying forced purchase of a relabeled product.

They deserve the result of their decision and not understanding their customers - they could just start a separate enterprise line if they didn't have one already for whatever they wanted to force.

Enterprise brands like HP, etc, to my last experience, do sell white-labelled drives, but don't bar you from using those same drives yourself.

My lack of trust remains with the parts that will fail the most - hard drives.

Hard Drive manufacturers don't have the best history, whether it was Western Digital lying to their customers about CMR when it was actually SMR. That would be my reason for never accepting a forced labelling of a drive.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#450
post #326
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC is very helpful. Having used both, I can't help but notice how NAS' routinely run just fine without it.

>NAS' routinely run just fine without it. How do you verify your data to confirm that?

My first thought is the same way everyone's laptops and desktops and cellphones without ECC data do?

I'll share any more that come to mind.

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