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Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

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Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#641

Post by anal_reactor »

hsjsjdnbdbdb wrote: post #640
jacquesm wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be a rather short-of-support conclusion based on the evidence available.

The evidence is based on what was given. If the parent cannot convince the team/management then there is something wrong. It could be confidence. It could be social standing. It could be that they are not explaining their viewpoint properly to the stake holders. If the parent is not gaining traction and blaming it on intelligence, likely, the parent can't see others viewpoints either and is not trying to bring the te…

It's not my job an as engineer to fight a broken decision-making process. If the manager sees that he repeatedly makes wrong decisions, then it's his responsibility to answer why, not mine. I'm him subordinate, not the other way around.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#642

Post by jacquesm »

beala wrote: post #596
jacquesm wrote: post #580

If you're looking for a really good alternative: Supermicro makes large chassis that will hold a fair number of drives (I have one that will take drives). They're usually sold cheap on ebay and other such sites when they're written off. If you're willing to replace a couple of fans and do your own software installation they're unbeatable for value-for-money, and they last just about forever. I've still got two Synolo…

How's the power consumption? Everytime I look at used server deals on ebay that seem too good to be true, the hidden cost is usually power. It's fairly normal for these systems to consume hundreds of watts idle, and $1/watt/year is a decent rule of thumb in the US (but much more in places like CA). And that’s not factoring in running the AC more if you’re in a hotter climate. I’m looking at a NAS build myself and am…

Depends on how you configure the whole thing. You could add another XEON and not spin down the drives and it would consume quite a bit of power, of you can put it to sleep and conserve but there is of course a spin-up price to that when you need it.

It will definitely consume a few hundred Watts, and when you pack it full of drives it will be more than that. But that's kind of logical. A Synology would not consume that much power but it would also be far slower and have less capacity.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#643

Post by gosub100 »

j45 wrote: post #621
gosub100 wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMR drives aren't defective though. They have a capacity and they are capable of storing at that capacity. They just can't keep up with the throughout requirements of a nas. And remember the WD SMR scandal was because they weren't being forthcoming about that limitation. I fully support Synology's move to lock it drives. I think it's the tech crowd that got it wrong... mostly. Synology should have sweetened the deal…

Incorrect. Western Digital deceptively sold and charged a premium for the WD Red drives sold as NAS drives that were CMR, when they were not. Western Digital didn't withhold anything about SMR being good or bad. Western Digital confesses some WD Red Drives use SMR without disclosure: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds... I know several folks who bought these drives as NAS drives, for NAS use…

deceptive? sure. defective, nah. evidence of deception in the market further instills why Synology made the right move initially.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#644

Post by Lammy »

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!

That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585048

https://www.auvik.com/franklyit/blog/vendors-clock-signal-fl...

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#645

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

reactordev wrote: post #329
pdimitar wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, education, right. I never had interest in the whole GPIO thing but I'll admit life has been pulling me in very different directions, hence this dropped off my radar. Thanks for the reminder. Thing is, I was aiming at servers. I've read many HN comments where people adore a Pi for some reason that I just can't see; they have to install custom kernels, get Pi hats, do some extra cabling, 3D-print cases, mount small…

On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write directly to frame buffers. I don’t need Linux. I don’t really need a kernel… Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box): Coffee table Digital Touch map. Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiP…

It's just an illusion. You're still running under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#646

Post by qmmmur »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #578
qmmmur wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just backup the entire photo library with kopia. Is that as good as what you do?

It depends. Do you use iCloud optimized storage, or do you download originals to your machine ? Kopia only backs up what it can see, and in case of iCloud optimized storage, it only backs up size optimized miniatures and not the original files. Second, I haven’t researched this, but iPhoto used resource forks and extended attributes quite extensively for its library, and if the same is true for Apple Photos, Kopia wi…

Interesting. I don’t optimise the storage so that’s not a huge concern but the extended attributes possibly is. Does Arq support s3 apis?

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#647

Post by dgacmu »

izacus wrote: post #609
dgacmu wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't, though. 1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality 2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy. I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but…

I looked at all of those and they came nowhere near the convenience and software that Synology provides. It's literally the "Why would you buy Dropbox when I can glue it together with rsync" level of ignorant comment, completely ignoring how behind most of those solutions like TrueNAS are in time cost.

I find that odd given that I literally run 3 Synologies and one TrueNAS - I've had the Synologies for over a decade and the TrueNAS for about three years now. They've all been great and do everything I want in a nas. Perhaps you are looking for more bells and whistles for something like DVR; I just do NFS + SMB and snapshots and remote backup.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#649

Post by ls612 »

coisnepe wrote: post #240
8fingerlouie wrote: post #162

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,…

As someone else mentioned here, I'd wager a large part of Synology customers were people who'd have had the technical ability to setup their own NAS server but didn't want to bother, instead electing a "setup and forget" solution. I know that's who I was when I bought my first Syno DS several years ago. A few months ago I realized I'd outgrown it so I looked into the next Synology solutions, and all I saw were overpr…

I literally built a NAS this past weekend and put TrueNAS on it and man has it been humbling learning to administer it. I’m able to get basic stuff working now after drowning in permissions hell for a day but I’m basically getting myself out of that by doing the linux equivalent of running more and more things as administrator in Windows until I stop getting errors. I might well have been a Synology customer before they did this nonsense but now I’m going to end up learning how to run a Linux server at least semi competently.

Re: Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

#650

Post by reactordev »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #645
reactordev wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a RPi I can control more aspects than I can a mini pc ITX board. I can boot straight to my program. I can write directly to frame buffers. I don’t need Linux. I don’t really need a kernel… Here are some examples of where an RPi outshines a mini-PC (though one can still achieve the same results, just putting the box outside the box): Coffee table Digital Touch map. Weather Station powered by a solar panel and a LiP…

It's just an illusion. You're still running under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

Only for initial boot into Linux. But yes, technically it’s step0.
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