by PeterStuer
3 subcomments
- I currently run 2 Synology NAS's in my setup. I am very satisfied with their performance, but nevertheless I will be phasing them out because their offerings are not evolving in line with customer satisfaction but with profit maximization through segmentation and vertical lock-in.
- Storing encrypted blobs in S3 is my new strategy for bulk media storage. You'll never beat the QoS and resilience of the cloud storage product with something at home. I have completely lost patience with maintaining local hardware like this. If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective. This feels like smuggling cargo on a federation starship, which is way cooler to me than filling up a bunch of local disks.
I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.
Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.
- I'm going to buck the nerds and say I wish Drobo was back. I love my 5N, but had to retire it as it began to develop Type B Sudden Drobo Death Syndrome* and switch out to QNAP.
It was simple, it just worked, and I didn't have to think about it.
* TB SDDS - a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three 'types' of SDDS I and a colleague discovered - "Type A" power management IC failures, "Type B" unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and "Type C" failed batteries. Type B units' SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.
- Synology became so bad, they measure disk space in percent, and thresholds cannot be configured to lower than 5%. This may have been okay when volume sizes were in gigabytes, but now with multi-TB drives, 5% is a lot of space.
The result of that is NAS in permanent alarm state because less than 5% space is free. And this makes it less likely for the user to notice when an actual alarm happens because they are desensitised to warnings.
I submitted this to them at least four times, and they reply that this is fine, it’s already decided to be like that, so we will not change it.
Another stupid thing is that notifications about low disk space are sent to you via email and push until it’s about 30 GB free. Then free space goes below 30 GB and reaches zero, yet notifications are not sent anymore.
My multiple reports about this issue always responded along the lines of “it’s already done like that, so we will not change it”.
Most modern, especially software companies, choose not to fix relatively small but critical problems, yet they actively employ sometimes hundreds of customer support yes-people whose job seems to be defusing customer complaints. Nothing is ever fixed anymore.
- I've no experience with Synology and have no opinion regarding their motivations, execution, or handling of customers.
However...
Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.
[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)
- I have a 8 bay nas from synology and i’m now considering a move out when i’ll have to replace my nas.
Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.
- I wish 1 or more HD manufacturers would get together and sell a NAS that runs TrueNAS on it. Or even an existing NAS manufacturer (UGreen, etc)
All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.
- Can you “btrfs send” snapshots in a raid array in DSM to a Linux server?
If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system.
I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.
- Hopefully they don't start pushing this change to older products. I don't want to have to replace my NAS, but if I ever do, it certainly won't be with another Synology product, even if they walk this decision back.
- Their hardware has been dogshit for years TBH, this year's upgrades were to like ~2020 tech and some of these models won't be upgraded again until 2030!
The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I've previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I'll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardware options that exist for NAS.
- I think they are on their way to exit the consumer market. Their linux kernel is old. And DSM dont update the kernel.
by AndrewDucker
1 subcomments
- What's better for running Plex?
Assuming I want 4 drives and something that can transcode multiple files in real time.
by nodesocket
5 subcomments
- My next NAS is going to be Ubiquiti UNAS Pro . 7 drive bays for $499. Can’t beat it.
Hacker News