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.
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.
> If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective.
This is not the perspective of actors working on longer timescale. For a number is agencies, preserving some encrypted data is beneficial, because it will be possible to recover in N years, whether any classic improvements, bugs found in key generators, or advances in quantum.
Very few people here will be that interesting, but... worth keeping in mind.
S3 or glacier? Glacier is cost competitive with local disk but not very practical for the sorts of things people usually need lots of local disk for (media & disk images). Interested in how you use this!
20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay for any data transfers.
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.
Do you have a plan on what you’re going to move to?
I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays.
I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I could install whatever I wanted on. I’m just not interested in having to halfway deconstruct a tower to get at 1 hard drive. Hotswap bays are all I want to deal with now.
At first I was going to balk but then I remembered I paid ~$1.5K for a 12-bay Synology (and again for the 12-bag expansion unit).
This is much larger I think (and it bugs me that it’s not an even number of drives, and the offset of the drives is unpleasant) but it’s rackable so that’s a plus.
The only thing I’d want to know is sound (and I’m sure I can find a YouTube video).
I’ve been looking for an excuse to go all-in on a Ubiquiti setup… Thanks for mention this, I wasn’t aware Ubiquiti had a NAS product.
Looks like their $300/4GB/1U/4bay and $500/8GB/2U/7bay half-depth devices with AWS-Annapurna SoC can run either NAS or NVR Linux. Bluetooth in a rackable device is unusual. OS might be replaceable with mainline Debian.
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.
Do you have some examples of the superior customer hardware options? I currently use 2x12 bay Synology NAS and one of my favorite parts of it is the hardware, the easy access to the hotswap hard drives.
If I could get that form factor, but with a custom NAS software solution, I’d be very interested.
Thank you for the link, currently my needs are more 3.5” high capacity drives, and less SSD storage (aside for a TB or 2 of cache. I just don’t need SSDs for my media collection, it seems like a waste when I can pick up 24-26+ TB drives for so much cheaper.
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.
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.
> If no one has a clue what is inside your blobs, they might as well not exist from their perspective.
This is not the perspective of actors working on longer timescale. For a number is agencies, preserving some encrypted data is beneficial, because it will be possible to recover in N years, whether any classic improvements, bugs found in key generators, or advances in quantum.
Very few people here will be that interesting, but... worth keeping in mind.
The point of encryption in this context is to defeat content fingerprinting techniques, not the focused resources of a nation state.
S3 or glacier? Glacier is cost competitive with local disk but not very practical for the sorts of things people usually need lots of local disk for (media & disk images). Interested in how you use this!
20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay for any data transfers.
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.
Do you have a plan on what you’re going to move to?
I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays.
I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I could install whatever I wanted on. I’m just not interested in having to halfway deconstruct a tower to get at 1 hard drive. Hotswap bays are all I want to deal with now.
My next NAS is going to be Ubiquiti UNAS Pro . 7 drive bays for $499. Can’t beat it.
At first I was going to balk but then I remembered I paid ~$1.5K for a 12-bay Synology (and again for the 12-bag expansion unit).
This is much larger I think (and it bugs me that it’s not an even number of drives, and the offset of the drives is unpleasant) but it’s rackable so that’s a plus.
The only thing I’d want to know is sound (and I’m sure I can find a YouTube video).
I’ve been looking for an excuse to go all-in on a Ubiquiti setup… Thanks for mention this, I wasn’t aware Ubiquiti had a NAS product.
Looks like their $300/4GB/1U/4bay and $500/8GB/2U/7bay half-depth devices with AWS-Annapurna SoC can run either NAS or NVR Linux. Bluetooth in a rackable device is unusual. OS might be replaceable with mainline Debian.
https://github.com/NeccoNeko/UNVR-diy-os/blob/main/IMAGES.md
If it can run Gentoo it might be a big energy savings vs my old off lease machine with ZFS …
There's also a QNAP 1U for $600, which adds M.2 NVME and optional 32GB ECC RAM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855
We need more Thunderbolt/USB4-to-JBOD 40Gbps storage enclosure options, for use with Ryzen mini PC or Lenovo Tiny.
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.
Do you have some examples of the superior customer hardware options? I currently use 2x12 bay Synology NAS and one of my favorite parts of it is the hardware, the easy access to the hotswap hard drives.
If I could get that form factor, but with a custom NAS software solution, I’d be very interested.
I don't think you'd get 12x too easily but one recent post here is AMD Hawk Point with 6x 3.5" drives + 5x M.2 drives + OCuLink + up to 128GB of RAM.
https://liliputing.com/?s=nas
Thank you for the link, currently my needs are more 3.5” high capacity drives, and less SSD storage (aside for a TB or 2 of cache. I just don’t need SSDs for my media collection, it seems like a waste when I can pick up 24-26+ TB drives for so much cheaper.