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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#511

Post by whizzter »

fortran77 wrote: post #339
mapontosevenths wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement. It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.

You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?

Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of missing out on a webgui or installing something like FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days.

I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages.

RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that?

I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#514

Post by al_borland »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #389
al_borland wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Parachute Backup looks very promising, thanks. I’ll have to spend a little more time later checking it out and seeing if that’s the direction I’ll go.

I do have my NAS backed up to Synology’s cloud backup service. I don’t love it, and it seems expensive, but it was easy to setup at the time and gave me some peace of mind for that data. The big issue I see is that I feel like I’d be stuck buying another Synology to restore of my current one fails.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#515

Post by ddtaylor »

jacquesm wrote: post #179
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…

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

They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#516

Post by ArchD »

_joel wrote: post #421
ArchD wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.

https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...

This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption.

Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.

So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#517

Post by ddtaylor »

seanalltogether wrote: post #376
jacquesm wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding which seems like a baffling position to take given their audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265 and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology OS because they remove the transcoders.

This is why I don't use NAS from them. I don't understand why I would want to be limited in these strange ways. I have multiple NAS that I have created myself for myself, my family and my friends. If I want to have h264, h265, AV1, or whatever I just install it.

I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#518

Post by edem »

jacquesm wrote: post #179
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…

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 are the alternatives that you are considering?

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#519

Post by pdimitar »

jacquesm wrote: post #506
pdimitar wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.

Power consumption is a major draw (pun intended) to keep Pis and other SBCs of that kind of form factor employed.

Valid, thanks. But to what degree? The light bulb that runs 18h a day in the kitchen likely draws the same power that my mini form factor Optiplex 3060 does.

To me arguments like "2W vs 10W" are fairly meaningless.

I am much more concerned about data center power usages, especially in the age of LLMs.

Like that ancient German teacher I had that kept preaching we should stop using electric kettles because it's bad for the planet. While the 3 plants in her hometown amounted to ~83% of all power usage and ~92% or all pollution. Boy, was she unhappy when I did that research and pointed it out to her.

Pi-s / SBCs are I suppose very good for computing out there in the meatspace, where you might need a battery because sometimes power stops for 6 hours? Could be that.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#520

Post by ddtaylor »

markstos wrote: post #427
jacquesm wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet, either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct their course.

They probably concluded at this point it wouldn't mean much and they are somewhat right. Every day they fail to address the situation that apology needs to be a lot bigger and it can only get so big.
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