Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB Synology has introduced its first-ever list of validated disks and won’t allow other devices into its enterprise-class NAS devices. And in a colossal coincidence, half of the disks allowed into its devices – and the only ones larger than 4TB – are Synology’s very own HAT 5300 disks that it launched last week. Seeing as …
Apple were one of the original culprits with this. Without the use of Resedit, Apple supplied formatting tools would only recognise a preset list of devices or devices with an Apple firmware. The exception as the version of HDSC Setup that came with A/UX - that would recognise anything your threw at it, otherwise it was dabbling in the dark arts of Resedit, or the use of 3rd party formatting tools.
If there is an effective monopoly then it is unlawful to use that monopoly to gain another monopoly for a different product. Monopolies broadcast their crimes by saying their thingumybob comes with a free widget. The widget is not free, it is bundled. You pay for it whether you want it or not because they are the only supplier for the thingumybobs you need. Other widget manufacturers lose sales and go bankrupt because everyone already has enough widgets.
The other monopolist racket is to announce that Banana equipment is so superbly designed that nothing but Banana-made ancillary gear is good enough to use with it (so in fact, nothing else will work).
Translation: We've found a nifty way round the anti-monopoly laws, so we're making you pay double price for all the add-ons you need.
If you choose to buy a synology NAS with these restrictions, you're free to not buy (big) disks for it. If you buy square pegs you don't get to sue anyone because they don't fit your round holes. You can do some things to make them fit, but neither the peg seller nor your hole vendor are responsible if that causes it to catches fire.
If anything, it feels to me like synology made their product, put bigger disks in it, and realised their product Does Not Work with the extra resources necessary to support those extra blocks. Which by the time they got to product release time were very much common, and the only way to make it work was to make drive firmware that works with their software, because there's nothing in their software they could sensibly change instead.
Ink jet carts anyone? No there isn't. There is the opposite. If they equip their boxes with something that call DRM, reverse engineering it or bypassing it becomes a Federal crime (in the US and similar levels elsewhere). Not only do they box you in, they make the escape something you can be hauled into court for.
this one.
I'm not sure going proprietary is gonna bring them much vs. the already crowded competition.
Shame really, as their DSM software is top notch and allows of upgrades.
On my venerable DS411, I went from:
- 2 X 2 TB to
- 2 X 2 TB + 2 X 2 4TB, to, last christmas
- 4 X 4 TB
without even saving data outside of the box !
I test-drove a Synology DS620slim, selected because of its small size while still taking 6 drives (2.5" ones only), and returned it after trying to come to grips with its approach to security: at the file level all data is readable by everyone, and only when accessing the unit through FileStation the data is seen as having the proper protections. This is since DSM 6.something.
After trying to incorporate this idiosyncratic security implementation into my data storage I considered it beyond unusable, returned it and decided never to let any Synology gear soil my network again. I then built a small box based on a mini-ITX board, hotswap disk trays, ran up a Debian installer and laid down ZFS on those 6 disks. Took me less time (excluding data transfer) than I had spent wrestling DSM. It's not as small as that DS620 box, but that's the only downside.
This disk malarkey reeks of the same hubris.
Er what? I have 2 Synology (a 4 bay and 2 bay backup) and you can lock down everything quite easily. From access rights through users and groups, permission controls to folders and the various tick boxes to permit access for services, DNS. The firewall for the usual ports, and even which apps to allow.
There are tons of online videos (SpaceRex comes to mind) that helped me.
... using the GUI, and accessing the NAS via its standard network file systems.
However, if you connect via ssh/rsync, the file system permits every account on the box to read and write any file. I've tested this extensively and have tried to get that behaviour to cooperate to no avail. It's also commented on in various NAS fora.
If Synology thinks they can ditch a standard rights implementation because it apparently makes their life easier in some way or whatever, then fsck them
"...if you connect via ssh/rsync, the file system permits every account..."
Are you making this up? How do you even setup SSH like that? I thought at least the global concept of "user" was implied, but then again I've never tried to break SSH into what is essentially a userless state. I mean some daemon/mod to 777 EVERYTHING works, but that would be an obvious intentional no-no.
I won't buy QNAP/Synology/etc. as it's too easy to setup myself, so while I admittedly don't have experience with their products, this sounds absolutely nuts. _IF_ this is true, people going on about their "DSM" are clearly not RTFM'ing... but this seems strange.
Are you making this up?
No.
I enabled ssh login to the DS620 for two accounts that had files stored via NFS. Those NFS shares worked correctly; account A could not read or write files belonging to account B. Going in via ssh (a prerequisite for rsync access with key authorization) B's directories were wide open and A could change, move and delete files. And vice versa, of course. All the steps to get there were done by the manual, so it wasn't a case that I somehow mangled all kinds of settings allowing this. I even zapped the install, redid setting up two NFS shares only, copied some bog-standard user dirs for them, and found exactly the same lack of protection at the FS level
Maybe this could have been solved by setting ACLs, but when a bog-standard Linux install already disallows even browsing other's directories unless explicitly changed to be permitted, applying ACLs would be like plugging a leak that shouldn't be there in the first place. Additionally those ACLs should be set so that any file or dir added via ssh/scp/rsync would inherit them, as well as making sure they don't get wiped accidentally when some directory is overwritten. Or propagated to other systems when files are copied back, interfering with security settings there.
Tl,dr: Too much faff to deal with Synology's idiosyncracies.
Stoneshop is correct, overunder, however I don't see this as being any different to having physical access to a PC/server etc - pop drive out, or boot in single user mode/via "live CD" etc.. all is there for the taking.
In my job it's the done thing now to get Bitlocker up and running in case a laptop goes walkies, but I'd imagine the majority of machines are unencrypted with the users thinking their password is enough.
Same with a Synology box - can't speak for others - but to make it not so, there's encryption on there too. If you've sensitive stuff just switch it on. Some limitations come into play re: filenames but using it will ensure no-one gets access by working around DSM.
I don't see this as being any different to having physical access to a PC/server
I do, as this can affect files in other's accounts during normal operation and without having physical access to the unit and its disks. Just bog-standard ssh/rsync remote access,
And encryption doesn't help there; it's up and running, and the filesystem is unlocked at that point.
Just bog-standard ssh/rsync remote access,
Fair enough. Synology is designed to present Network File Systems, not direct filesystem access. It does this very well. Of course, it does run Linux and does have a native filesystem (ext4 or btrfs) and can be accessed via ssh.
It sounds like your requirements are better solved with an SSH server with gobs of attached storage, not a regular NAS. You could, of course, host the gobs o' storage on a NAS and attach it (NFS or CIFS or iSCSI) to your ssh server. I do this with Synology and a Raspberry Pi.
I'm not sure what you did wrong but it does of course support the course level of file permissions you are talking about. On top of that it has ACL's and fine grained authorization. I'm guessing that you just missed the option to turn it on.
They are very good bits of kit. You just set them up and they look after themselves. I have mine set up to send me a health report every month and do an extra "cold" backup every 3 months. For me the cold backup intentionally fails because the cold backup device isn't powered on or accessible. The failure notification is my prompt to turn it on for the duration of the backup retry. Other than that I don't need to do anything to keep it running.
They are very good bits of kit. You just set them up and they look after themselves.
So does my nas4free. At the time it was cheaper than any Qnap or Synology 4-bay NAS as HP was having one of their offers on Microservers.
It does not restrict what disks I can shove int into the ZFS pool.
"It's not as small as that DS620 box, but that's the only downside."
I've never found size a problem. The only time it's an issue is when I have to replace something that is the tinyest of the tiny. The rest of the time, if a box is twice as big, I've had plenty of room to fit it somehow. The upside is that most larger units are easier to work on and the power supplies run cooler and longer since they are given room to breathe and have a properly sized fan.
"It's their DSM software and everything that comes with it is what attracts customers. Otherwise it'd be just a dumb commodity NAS."
What's the justification for Super-Duper-Fancy DSM Coming At YOU!!!... for a tiny NAS...?
OpenMediaVault (Debian based) wound up being great as when your NAS is Debian based, everything is supported and support is everywhere!
"when your NAS is Debian based, everything is supported"
Except weirdly a cheap 4-Port SATA RAID (maybe 'RocketRAID'?) card I had, which worked fine with OG FreeNAS (back when it was BSD based), but which had no linux support whatsoever.
IIRC I stuck with FreeNAS for a bit longer, then went back to just using DAS for simplicity.
With DAS you still need a OS, but yes, I'm thinking of going this way for home "media" usage myself. Crazy thing is though, there really isn't any dedicate DAS chassis. Most people just use whatever a NAS would use, which in general means either winding up with extra space for a motherboard you won't have or having to DIY/3D print something to utilize the extra space.
The argument for NAS over DAS, in my opinion, is that if you have data that cannot be replaced like photographs, you're better off storing them with the least amount of access as possible. An accidental delete is no different than overexposing a film negative, it's bye bye forever.
With the price of used HBA's and SAS cables, DAS on NAS is another home option, even if you have to mind the SATA 30" (?) cable length maximum it's still a smaller footprint. Then again there really isn't any DAS chassis to buy off shelf so...
With DAS you still need a OS, but yes, I'm thinking of going this way for home "media" usage myself. Crazy thing is though, there really isn't any dedicate DAS chassis.
I'm thinking of sticking a Pi4 in some 4/5/6 bay expansion box, or initially just on top for testing. Sure, you won't get blistering speeds, but I reckon it'd be fast enough for serving as central storage.
The replacement for that DS620slim is a SuperMicro X10SBA Mini-ITX in a Silverstone CS01S-HS case (6 extenally accessible hotswap trays, plus two more internal (which I'm not using as there are just six SATA ports on the X10SBA)). I've also built a rackmount server to fit in a 40cm deep wallmount network 19" rack, same mainboard and a disk bay holding 6 2.5" drives in a single 5.25" HH chassis. That one has been running fine for several years now.
Seems to me, they'll test the drives as they can and the list will get bigger. I also strongly doubt they would be so dumb as to set this limit on consumer grade RAIDS like yours.
The major cause of drive failure though, in the Synology raid was their own settings. Their anti-virus essentials, by default, checks every file, every time, not just new or modified files. Have that on a daily scan and it is absolutely thrashing the drives. Checking the same files over and over again.
Coupled to large file sizes and small RAM on their RAIDs it thrashes the swap disk partition too. Antivirus essentials seems to load the whole file into RAM, causing paging to disk.
Make sure Antivirus essentials is set to smart scan.
DS411 can do a RAM upgrade I think. Some people do that, and it makes the scan a lot faster.
One other note, from a long time user/thrasher of Synology kit:
If your model is based on an Intel chip, you should know there's a fault in that Intel processor. You might need to solder a resistor across a couple of pins to fix it if it fails to boot. Intel's internal clock degrades and the fix is to slap a hefty pull up (down?) resistor across a couple of pins in the motherboard to make it sort of work again.
So if your raid dies, and its an Intel based one, Synology did extended warrantee on them, and if its out of extended warantee, crack it open and get the soldering iron out.
I did the soldering iron thing myself, because I wasn't willing to lose the RAID for a weeks required to send it away and get them to fix it.
> Seems to me, they'll test the drives as they can and the list will get bigger
Then they need to sack their PR people. Really there's no excuse for an enterprise NAS not to ship supporting at least the 2nd biggest current size of disks. I'm not going to buy a 16 slot chassis to give me the same capacity I could get with an 8 slot and bigger disks, or realistically, a 4 slot that gives most of the same resilience. I'd rather buy a pair of 4-slot chasses and 8x 12TB disks than a 16-slot chassis and 16x 4TB. That would give more more capacity and more resilience in every way. And when I need more capacity in 18 months, even bigger disks should be available.
There's literally no excuse for not having tested 8TB disks - a very quick google tells me seagate released an 8TB NAS drive 5 years ago, they should have been in the test schedule since project inception, and much more current ones in test for the last year. They may increase the compatibility list, but if they do, I'd attribute it entirely to industry pushback. And if the performance sucks on them, that's on synology.
"I'd rather buy a pair of 4-slot chasses and 8x 12TB disks than a 16-slot chassis and 16x 4TB."
In what RAID config?
I'm not sure I'd trust the larger drives not to shingle to achieve the extra capacity. I sort of regret even using 6TBs drives in one of mine because some of WD drives were shingled and since they don't mark which drives are shingled, I had no way of definitely telling till I put it in and initialized it.
Seagate and Toshiba are being super vague about admitting it too, but they do it too:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/29/wd_class_action_lawsuit/
"Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays"
In what world is Synology an enterprise NAS? They are a best a SMB option, same goes for the TrueNAS/FreeNAS stuff. Whole different sport. Maybe they want to look more enterprise like by adopting enterprise things like custom firmware?
I can't think of any time a supported enterprise storage system would have any storage in it ever other than from the vendor of the system. Same goes for every other component in the system.
So I can certainly see why users would be upset since Synology is not an enterprise system, never has been, probably never will be. Same for Qnap and others in that group of products(can't name any others since well I don't use 'em). Maybe some think they are enterprise because they provide a rackmount version of their product or something (I'm guessing they do).
It's the ATOM clock fiasco. A specific generation of units DS-1815 among them, I happened to own two. Syno replaced free of charge with a rapid swap. I cannot complain.
Cisco on the other hand . . . it took us about a year to swap out 23 routers with the same "Clock" problem. YMMV
.Seems to me, they'll test the drives as they can and the list will get bigger. I also strongly doubt they would be so dumb as to set this limit on consumer grade RAIDS like yours.
From the article:
The new policy applies as of the release of three new Synology NAS appliances intended for enterprise use and will be applied to other models over time.
..I wouldn't be so sure.
If (big if) they only apply this to these new (& future enterprise models) then it's not really an issue and as long as this stays in the enterprise grade boxes I'll give them an 'ok pass' as it is more or less the default position of all the other e-class storage vendors. Reliability & vendor support really does matter here, who wants to be on a support call getting a "Your disks are naff, we can't help"
Applying "From version X.xx only approved disks will be supported" to existing kit will annoy owners with a large unscheduled expense and a tedious job swapping out the disks.
Applying it to consumer/SOHO grade boxes would be both barrels to the easy rolling upgrade with 'whatever is the best disk for me now' being replaced with simple X-Gb disk = £X
Patrick from Serve The Home covered this move by Synology recently. His take was that it is not unusual in the enterprise sector for this to occur as the likely buyer of this kit wants one neck to wring if there's a problem rather than a bun fight between storage and device manufacturers over who's to blame.
The other point he added was that it would be advisable for them to add one more manufacturer to the list of compatible drives else you can get supply chain issues for drives especially if there's another Thai flooding event.
He did also note that this move likely doubles their revenue from the sale of one of these devices when considering filling it with the larger drive size.
Synology has been trying to move up in the NAS space, to more enterprise oriented customers. Those customers are used to the likes of HPE, IBM, Dell, NetApp, etc . All of those only allow hard drives that use their own firmware and hardware revisions. Adding this 'capability' to their own lineup is a necessary step to move up in the foodchain.
I agree that for smaller devices (home/Small business, 2 to 8 bay), this may be overkill. But for larger devices , controlling the complete stack is really , really important. It will lower the support nightmare, and will allow you to provide additional support levels that you can't give as long as you don't control the drives installed in your devices. Furthermore, having your own firmware allows you to react faster if and when issues crop up.
Actually Synology is not the first of the 'small' NAS vendors going down that route : Buffalo has been doing this for a long time. And i suspect QNAP may not be far along, if they are really serious to go after the enterprise market.
Posted anon as i do work for a competitor.
QNAP have always had a compatibility list. This QNAP list is probably aimed primarily at the Home/SMB users to stop them putting in non-NAS SATA drives into RAID setups and causing issues further down the line due to SMR/TLER/RAID rebuilds and dead drives.
I suspect that this won't be an issue for the Enterprise customers that Synology are aiming at anyway, and the non-Toshiba vendors will catch up anyway.
Having a compatibility list is perfectly understandable and acceptable, forcing customers to choose one type of drive is not.
Synology is not in the business of making drives. It can most definitely say which drives are preferable, but it is not credible when it states that only "its" drives are acceptable.
A compatibility list is clear - you purchase an element of the list and you can expect proper performance and reliability. You purchase outside the list and you're on your own. We know the rules.
Synology has a deal with Toshiba, fine. Point us to that fact and wax lyrical about how that specific range of Toshiba drives are the best, fine. Don't put your name on it and pretend that they're the only ones that work.
You're not a disk maker. Stop pretending you are.
QNAP dont exclude druves if they arent on the list. I put ironwolf drives into the qnap array before they were on the list. They worked fine. A firmware uodate later and they were fully supported.
A shame on the synology front, we use out aging 4 bay rack as a sharepoint backup. There would be no way I would buy something this cheap with vendor lock in.
You're not a disk maker. Stop pretending you are.
To be fair this is not exactly new. Most large computer vendors released their "own" disks with their own firmware. As an example Sun was shipping its own disks that were all manufactured by others. Same goes for other vendors.
Granted, Sun (again as example) didn't spit on you if you stuck botgt standard Seagate instead of its "own".
Same with Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM ... just about any drive into a manufacturer rack server or storage chassis.
Until they were flogged to Hitachi at least IBM has a very reputable Hard Disk. business. Even today you can still buy Ultrastar drives from WD who now own HGST.
HP had a drive business too but niche x10 penetration.
I can see both ways ... and not like most SAN/NAS manufacturers don’t do broadly same.
I have noticed over time a narrowing of NAS drive choices on the approved lists for consumer/entry-business DS’s.
That being said my DS413J at home keeps chugging away with 12Tb of SHR love on 4x4Tb WD Red drives (now not on the comparability list). Shame DSM now deprecated (but still supported) for it... but no pressing need to upgrade
though would love a DS420+
There are a few devices that I’ve bought that left me feeling ‘Wow - that was money well spent. Why didn’t I buy that sooner’. My Synology was one. That was more than ten years ago - so I hardly think that they’re newcomers to the business.
That said, it does seem somewhat foolhardy to restrict your users in this manner, particularly in the enterprise space. Sure, say these are the certified spinners - but you can use others if you really want to. I worry about the longevity of the device if they enforce this certification rule.
To be fair, I would say that most enterprise users would also use the recommended kit alongside it, particularly if they then make it a condition of full support/warranty. In my line of work, we wouldn't be buying kit and speccing it away from what the manufacturer endorsed. Particularly because if we ran into problems with it, the first response from any support bod would be "we don't recommend those disks, try these and see if that resolves your issue".
Never used Synology(I do have a 4-bay Terramaster whose software I declared unusuable after about 1 hour and fortunately was able to easily replace it with Devuan running on a USB connected SSD been running for a year now at a colo for my personal offsite file storage) but I would imagine they got tired of getting their support burned by customers (often not their fault) SMR drives or something.
Yes my DS413J is still chugging away after 8 years. Only change is going from a potpourri of 4x assorted 1 and 2Gb drives (begged, borrowed, stolen) to 4x4Gb WD Red NAS drives.
Only gremlin ever was lost the RAID 5 array once to a loose drive cage (after preventative maintenance/cleaning ... aaagh!) - even Synology could not recover the corruption. But reinitialiaed, backup restored and quickly back in service. Backup, backup, backup !!!!
My HP server whilst preferring HP branded drives, will (for the most part, we don't talk about that one NetApp drive) take drives from anyone. It just complains that it can't update the firmware but otherwise behaves as expected.
I'd be disappointed if they pulled something like this as I tend to buy and stockpile anything I can get hold of that fits the budget (currently I've 10*600Gb drives ready for failures, all box fresh and unsealed bought for £15 Inc shipping.) if I was forced to only use Synology drives I think I'd look elsewhere.
(For the record, the drives sell at £160 normally, £240ish for official HP ones. If I was a normal IT purchaser I know which one I'd buy)
"...My HP server whilst preferring HP branded drives, will (for the most part, we don't talk about that one NetApp drive) take drives from anyone. It just complains that it can't update the firmware but otherwise behaves as expected..."
Depends on the server (and I believe firmware version) and the disk itself.
On the DL380 Gen8, for example, you tend to get the behaviour you mention if it's a SATA SSD, though I may have just got lucky with the one I lobbed in at the time.
On many HDD's though, it cannot read the temperature properly. And having done this, immediately ramps all the fans up to 100% where they then sit. The damn things sound like jet engines when that happens.
I will caveat that with this specific server being my test lab/home server so it has a) been a couple of years since I last added disks and b) hasn't had any recent firmware updates (I don't know what level everything is at, off-hand but I did run the SUM when I installed it which was in 2018).
Ahh. Mines a DL380 gen6. I've also got a SAS SSD in it which whilst not reporting the temp at least doesn't go mental on the fans (it's down in the basement anyway so not really where you'd hear it). As for firmware, it's on the latest I can get my grubby hands on though now unsupported I'd guess.
I've had it spin upto full blast a few times but usually that's because a drive failed and it freaked out over this (It was expected, I bought the drives cheap knowing full well they'd not last that long... But 2 years later only 3 out 17 have failed so not a bad turn out)
The article refers to a new range of enterprise devices.
I have a DS413 and just took a look at the compatibility list. It's very long but the compatible drives are seperated by use case: enterprise, surveillance, desktop and so on. Even for this device Synology warn that manufacturers may update firmware without notice and thus disks may no longer be compatible.
I can think of several reasons why a storage device manufacturer may wish to tighly control the disks used. Maximising sales of their own disks is just one of them.
From memory HPE disk arrays simply won't allow you to add a drive that isn't on the list and even then you have to install the specific firmware. 15000 RPM dual-activator SAS drives are expensive and are behind the leading edge in term of capacity but I accepted that as the price of performance and reliability. Maybe Synology customers will feel the same.
For SOHO use a more relaxed approach may be appropriate. I seem to remember reading a hugely complicated set of procedures for replacing the HDD on my old 2009 iMac. I ignored them and just wacked in any old 2TB drive. Worked a treat, as does its current 512GB SSD.
Yeah, I just looked at the current compatibility list, which includes the warning:
Always install enterprise-level drives on the FS/SA/UC/XS+/XS series models.
It is highly recommended to use enterprise-level drives on your enterprise-level servers to ensure optimal performance.
This seems to give some indication of what Seagate consider Enterprise drives. If you look at the DS1621+ (my latest NAS) the drives are ordered by class which appears to be the manufacturer's designation of the drive. Classes include Enterprise/Enterprise NAS/NAS/Surveillance etc. If you look at the DS1621xs+ you see only Enterpise and Enterprise NAS.
I think the warning gives an indication of which models might be subject to this restriction. Of course the critical question is whether the restriction will be enforced by the device or simply by not offering warranty and service support if unblessed drives are used. Explicit rejection would play havoc with a second hand market.
The other problem with compatibility lists is that absence from the list does not necessarily mean the drive is incompatible. It could be untested or simply rejected for business reasons or any other excuse. My 18TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro disks are not on the list for either DS1621+ or DS1621xs+ even though all the smaller Ironwolf Pro disks are ll included. There is a toggle to show incompatible models - a list of two not including the Seagate so I assume it is simply too new to have been tested yet.
These are sata drives at the end of the day. Not even nearline sas or enterprise SSDs. Id be interested to see which enterprise is going to run these arrays as iscsi targets with sata drives. Most people i know use these as NVR targets, backup nfs endpoints and reverse google or sharepoint backups. Ironwolf drives are good enough.
These kind of restrictions don't really affect large enterprises who can just order a shiny new system ready populated with all the right disks.
The problem comes a few years later for smaller companies trying to use and maintain second hand kit on a shoestring budget. I don't see what the manufacturer hopes to gain by screwing those people over.
You do realise that more than likely Toshiba 'tweaked' the firmware to Synologys spec and then put Synologys name on it. (Firmware & Hardware).
Toshiba will already know how to change the performance of the HD's to match different usage patterns as the difference between 'Consumer/Prosumer/Enterprise' is more down to firmware changes than hardware AFAIK.
(This of course ignores the usual boost in caching memory that Enterprise HD's tend to get)
I'd be interested to know how genuine that is. "The Taiwanese network-attached-storage vendor told us the drives are Synology-branded Toshiba kit, though it has written its own drive firmware and that the code delivers sequential read performance 23 per cent beyond comparable drives"
I wouldn't be best pleased if I were Toshiba and someone claimed they had improved the performance of their OEM drives...
Very true. Although they also say it's entirely their firmware code that's the reason behind the 23% improvement on sequential read performance - from that you could reasonably infer that without Synology's apparent magic fairy dust, that 23% improvement doesn't exist. I'd be questioning Toshiba's firmware coders if that was genuinely the case - even though I know that Synology likely didn't write a single line of firmware, it was Toshiba. And perhaps it's prioritised sequential read performance. Although arguably, I wouldn't say sequential read performance is the priority for a RAID array, but who knows.
For a NAS, it might well be -- RAID gets you fail-over capability, but you need a lot less random-access capability when you're storing files instead of databases, so you can spend it on making big reads and writes faster. SANs are designed to fetch and write that 4K block in the absolute lowest possible time. And technically they kind of are the same thing, but since they have two different names and niches they get optimized in two different ways.
I have a DS414 and a ds1819+ at home, they work a treat
I have gradually added drives and swapped out smaller drives for larger as i need the space.
The thought of having to replace 8 hard drives at one time just for some extra space would be a nono for me, i just use SHR instead of Raid 5. Slightly less performance probably but easy to use.
This is normal if you are serious about trying to provide enterprise level kit. You are selling kit with a support contract and with performance & reliability expectations
I had 10+ years at an enterprise storage vendor. Disk drive validation by our engineers took a lot of time & resources. It would usually take a couple of firmware revisions before a new drive actually worked satisfactorily. To quote the guy in charge of testing new drives/firmware - "You'd be amazed by the new and creative ways the disk drive manufacturers find to screw this up"
I used to be the chump a former employer got to validate hard disks (and environmental testing on them). It never ceased to amaze me how OS drivers based on PATA (and later SATA) specs would fail to work with some drives, yet Windows & Linux machines worked just fine. Report findings back to the driver guys, who'd contact the HDD manufacturer & be told "oh yeah, use THIS register, not the one in the book!". Standards? They might've heard of em! Hence the need for all this validation. Can't say I blame Synology at all here
I worked on Research Machines computers back in the day. You could only use their "customised", and very expensive, hard disk drives in their machines. They said it was to ensure reliability (joke here somewhere) but, in reality, it ensured a massive bottom line boost. Fearing loss of support the schools fell into line.
When the schools were allowed to spend their - now shrinking - IT budgets without supplier constraints they woke up and smelled the coffee.
Research Machines' (now RM Education) revenues bombed from 2011 so they canned a lot of employees (sour grapes moi?) and their hardware supplies in 2013.
Wow lots of people defending this
Whats the fucking point of standardisation, does anyone know because it looks like the muppets forgot
This is no different than what printer manufacturers do
The HDD is becoming the printer cartridge
Dont allow these cunts the room to manoeuvre ffs!
Stop giving them money...
If Synology were selling these at a premium price I would agree, but they shouldn't be any more expensive than Seagate or WD RED PRO's. I've used the Toshiba Enterprise drives (which these Synology drives are) for the last few years after being let down badly by WD a couple of times, and the Tosh's have never had a problem. Cheaper than Seagate and WD 'Pro' drives as well.
It doesn't matter what the price is now. It mostly matters
what the price will be a few years later. If one of the disks that you got for a market price dies three years from now, and you can still get disks for the market price, but the only functional ones have now become a lot more expensive, then you'll have to pay for that because you've locked yourself in. They could decide to increase the price if many people accept your argument and buy the NAS boxes because the disks are cheap today.
Now let's ask whether there's any technical reason that the disks have to be from the manufacturer. Is it because they need the disks at a certain speed? No, the speed of the disks matters to the user, not the system. Is it because they need a different connector? No, it's SATA. Is it that they'd have to replace subpar drives? No, those are user-supplied and don't come under warranty. Because certain features only work on some disks? No, the entire point of their equipment is that it does the management on dumb disks. Because they don't have enough space to store custom drivers? No, there are standards, they've had that code in previous devices, and they have plenty of processing and memory.
If their disks are wonderful disks, they can advertise and sell them. If the price comparison is as you state, they'd likely be successful. They could probably get a bunch of business from customers buying NAS boxes and disks together, since that means a single place for warranty claims and support requests. They don't need to lock down the system to get that business advantage. Nor do their customers need to be forced into the option since many will do it anyway and, if it is better quality, many others will follow.
Lets face it, the world is fucked, its run by morons and has been for a long time
Gone are the days when a company would create a product, sell product, and start the whole process again
Now we see companies make products and then try to ensnare their ‘customers’ like the animals they’re seen as.
Wishing for a city-wide asteroid to finish us prats off, we’re fucken muppets, the whole shebang
::puts on asbestos underpants and wades into the fray::
This is not new or surprising behavior; ALL the enterprise storage companies do this. ALL OF THEM. And you know what? the end user business nominally does not care. What the business does care about (at least the one I work for) is data integrity, survivability, and the almighty support contract with the reassurances that it provides.
We have a couple QNAP appliances at [RedactedCo] for 'archival' purposes- it's data that the business wants to keep even if they hardly ever access it. those appliances shipped with no drives in them, so we populated them with 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives, which are on the HCL. We've had one drive fail so far, and it was a week or two for us to get Seagate to ship us a replacement. If the same thing happened on our Netapp or Nimble? A drive would have magically appeared by courier that day or overnight. The qnap appliances..... are not *quite* enterprise grade, but they would certainly work for a small to medium business, or for specific use cases.
I see this as Synology making a play to establish a foothold (or strengthen an existing foothold) in the already cutthroat enterprise sector, and TBH, if they are able to compete with the 'big boys' on support and service and some other offerings*, I'd welcome them with open arms.
* I.e., ship an 'enterprise' version of their firmware with most of the additional cruft and bloat disabled unless the storage admin specifically wants it enabled- that's one of the few gripes I have with the QNAP kit- It's a box of storage for us, we don't need a bloody app store, a three ring circus, and dancing bears with it..
And that's exactly how it is and how it should be.
ElReg has devolved into a neverending search for outrage. The same people foaming at the mouth now will be the first one to whip a vendor for not "having better quality standards" and "better testing and validation of components".
"We've had one drive fail so far, and it was a week or two for us to get Seagate to ship us a replacement. "
That's a danger of relying on one company to ship you a replacement. Yes, it would have been done under warranty for no cost, but if you needed to be back up and running in short order, it would have been faster to get the drive from what ever supplier was quickest and not worry about how long it takes Seagate to ship a replacement. It's not like having a spare HD around isn't a good thing.
Beancounters analyze things to spend the least amount of money, but they don't take an engineer's view on risk. I do a cost vs. pain graph on many things. If it's pretty cheap to have a spare, even if it's only a minor sting, I'll get it. If it's going to be very painful if a piece of gear goes down, something like the company grinding to a halt until it's fixed or there is an ugly workaround, the cost might not be such a big deal. A car maker is willing to pay to have a Lear jet ferry parts from a supplier as the cost of the production line going/staying down far exceeds the cost to hire the jet.
Untwist your panties everyone.
And you Simon? Seriously? You can do better.
Their consumer gear continues to accept all drives. It is their enterprise gear that requires specific drives with optimized firmware.
Do you really suggest that in the storage industry, which is the most fucked up competitive industry in IT since forever, nobody came up with the idea to use unmodified off the shelf components and make it work successfully? That somehow this bunch of cutthroats collectively agreed to keep this secret from the public?
Why don't you all join Qanon, they make more sense.
I really hope you are reading the full article. The thrust is that, according to storage world people we've spoken to, it is unusual for a NAS box vendor to insist on its own branded drives above a certain capacity even in an enterprise environment.
And as the article says: If Synology really can deliver the performance improvements it claims its drive firmware enables, being locked into Synology drives may be a sound decision.
It's a nuanced issue.
C.
Umm . . .
"The thrust is that, according to storage world people we've spoken to, it is unusual for a NAS box vendor to insist on its own branded drives above a certain capacity even in an enterprise environment."
Specifically which "Enterprise" NAS vendors? EMC? NetApp? Nimble? IBM? (AIX is also different from iSeries && their storage systems) I was not aware I could throw an "off-the-shelf" drive in my FAS or grab some cheap MLC flash drives and stick them in my AFF?.
A whole bunch of people with opinions, gotta luv the web. The people that buy truly "enterprise" storage (like us) could give a crap about the brand of drive, but the system we bought better work as advertised, and we WILL have full maintenance on it for the entire time we own it. When we get rid of it, if it hits the aftermarket, that's on you if you buy it and can't get drives for it. I know the older IBM storage drives were formatted with additional ECC for starters.
We are expressing opinions on things that the people who would be buying this high-dollar stuff (like me) don't care about. I buy storage from the vendor a shelf or so at a time with maintenance. I'm looking for IOPS, and reliability, not saving a few bucks on a couple of WD's I found on sale at Newegg. This will not affect their small business and consumer boxes. It remains to be seen if they can get someone to replace an aging NetApp with a Synology... But I haven't seen 'snapmirror' for a Syno yet, nor have I seen a simple way to schedule snapshots and/or recover them. I'm spending $500K on all flash storage, I want whatever the vendor is willing to support in it, and I don't care who's sticker is on it as long as I can call if there is a problem and get it replaced/fixed.
So the real discussion is how can they compete in that space?
Hmmm ... we noticed a change that Synology has not publicly disclosed - at a time it is pumping out a ShinyHappy press release about how great its new NAS are and the fact it has shiny new disks, too.
The story therefore provides information not available elsewhere. Not sure that's me being overwrought even if the practice of requiring certain disks is not uncommon.
I'm not personally thrilled about this change, but I can see why it makes sense. We've sold and maintained a ton of Synology units. In the ones we don't spec or sell, people will just throw the cheapest garbage hard drive they can in them with literally no regard whatsoever for fitness of purpose. This has become more and more important as higher recording densities have pushed manufacturers into producing more and more specialized firmware to optimize performance for specific tasks (standalone, general-purpose RAID, drives that mostly do sequential writes for things like DVRs, write-once/read-rarely applications, etc). The wrong drive will run relatively poorly and will likely fail early, and who is the customer going to blame? Themselves, for choosing the wrong drive? Guess again.
We'll see how well Synology handles this. Their branded SSDs are a decent value for what they are, and if they follow the same practices with HDDs then I'm ok (not thrilled, but just ok) with this unless supply constraints start interfering with rollouts.
In response to swarms of people running Xpenology in a VM and bypassing the need to buy a Synology NAS?
I quite like Synology kit but can't stomach the price for the spec of it. You can achieve way better specs for way less money using Xpenology and it's just as reliable.
In my personal lab, I have a repurposed Primergy RX2540 M3 running ProxMox with 24 cores, 48GB RAM, 6 nvme drives (ZFS RAID on ProxMox and 8x 4TB WD Reds (hardware RAID 10) and a pair of 10gbe NICs load balanced. XPenology is running as a VM. Obviously the bottleneck is a the storage and there's added overhead with the hypervisor, but given the spec, probably nothing significant. The whole thing is driven by two Platinum PSUs and the whole rig sips 103W average. I could probably get it lower.
It absolutely flies. The startup and shutdown of the Synology software is almost instantaneous compared to an actual appliance which can take 20 minutes.
It's so fast, I mounted a share on the wife's machine and she can't tell it's a network drive.
You simply cant buy a Synology that high spec as far as I'm aware. The DS1819 which might just be in reach of some mortals in terms of price is a quad core with a base 4GB RAM.
If they offered it, I'd totally pay a license fee for the software (as long as the license cost is fair)...just no thanks to the massively marked up hardware.
I've dabbled with XPenology. I own 4 RS and DS units personally/on the side. At work we use a couple of RS units for mass storage of non-critical data (Call logs, recordings, videos, marketing materials, deprecated machine snapshots, blah). We also use a (growing) number of the small 1U RS units for surveillance in our offices, very nice, join it to the domain, grant office access by group, etc. About the same money as the other BS, and you don't need a custom plugin for your browser to watch a video. Our phones are on our private network and MDM so DSCam works like a champ.
I also rolled my own, in fact I just put together a bad-ass 1U box for my 1/4 rack to replace a 2U unit. I want to play some hyper-converge games, maybe with gluster. Running a Ryzen 3600 on an ASRock Rack Mobo, I have 14 2.5 drive bays and 64GB of RAM. It's running Bullseye + MD/LVM. I slice the disk on all my homebrews into 1TB chunks (EFI parts) and array across chunks on different disks. This improves stability on rebuilds, then stack the md/pv's onto a big vg and slice it up into smaller LV's. Gives you lot's of flexibility.
But I'd love to build a bad-ass server for DS-Video & friends. DS1815+ is not that great at a couple of streams requanting, so I run Emby and Plex (Both lifetime paid) on a seperate server and use the 1815 as the backing store. The LV management could be better, but I broke it into music, tv-a-n, tv-o-z, movies and I have about 50TB of space. It also holds the DC backups on a seperate LV's. It'd be nice to have this on something with more guts using legit licensed software.
AS Rock Rack also makes a very slick c3758d4i-4l, atom board (w/cpu). It comes with 12 SATA ports and is suprisingly performant. I have it port-channeled 4x1g to a managed switch with the old rust from the syno, about 20T, and it will actually quant down a pair of video streams and not fall over. 8 actual core's will requant to 1080p @ 1G/hour at 1.2x. I think syno has a similar spec, might be the 3558, the extra cores matter if you want to serve video. Plan is to replace this with the new one, and play again at XPEnology.
The Syno software set is amazing, but they really lack the high-end "enterprise" tools. Our NetApp reported a disk failure on Sunday! An hour or so later it reported it finished rebuilding from the "hot spare". The replacement drive arrived Monday. We didn't have to do *anything* until now, but the system is currently back to 100%. My cohort will take the drive over to our DC tomorrow, there will be a blinking red light on the drive he will replace. It will take longer to walk to our cage, than to swap the drive. He will sign on the interface, answer the alert, and put the new drive in the hot spare pool for the aggregate. This thing can handle a THREE DRIVE failure.
Synology can't quite match that. When it can, I'll call it "enterprise". When my "enterprise" sh*t breaks the only reason I know is because we got an alert. Nobody on the other side of the hardware will ever see anything!
Our NetApp reported a disk failure on Sunday! An hour or so later it reported it finished rebuilding from the "hot spare". The replacement drive arrived Monday. We didn't have to do *anything* until now, but the system is currently back to 100%. My cohort will take the drive over to our DC tomorrow, there will be a blinking red light on the drive he will replace. It will take longer to walk to our cage, than to swap the drive. He will sign on the interface, answer the alert, and put the new drive in the hot spare pool for the aggregate. This thing can handle a THREE DRIVE failure.Synology can't quite match that. When it can, I'll call it "enterprise". When my "enterprise" sh*t breaks the only reason I know is because we got an alert. Nobody on the other side of the hardware will ever see anything!
... And that, my friend, is why enterprises are willing to pay 5-6 digits for enterprise storage. Because the business does not need to care that a drive failed, because the hardware had one waiting in the wings, and could have tolerated a second failure during rebuild.
I have a DS918+ which has served me quite well for the past two years.
Synology's software is easy to use, but lately I've realised I am slowly (but surely) moving away from Synology's own packages and over to docker. One problem is with runtime versions. Synology's own packages use older runtimes (I think I had three different versions of python at one point) and it struck me that docker was just easier and felt a lot cleaner.
I enjoy their filesystem though. I've already replaced two drives in order to gain a bigger volume, and I was able to do that without offloading anything. I'm keeping an eye out for alternatives though (https://serverfault.com/a/272835/ is one thread I'd love to see some more in depth answers to).
Its caching strategy looks a bit cumbersome to me. I have a few things running that would benefit from the m.2 drives I added, but Synology enforces those to be designated for its own caching purposes. I suspect I could do better and actually help the thing hibernate during the night.
The way it handles its volume baffles me. I believe that I have to create shares off its root. I can't create my own hierarchy and share something deeper down.
Another quirk is the lack of WireGuard support. There are some workarounds, but nothing official at this point AFAICT. Isn't their OS based on Linux? Why does it feel like they're lagging behind?
I suspect I, at this point, might be better served by FreeNAS. Assuming I could still get a dynamic RAID like SHR up and running.
Lots of comments about consumer DS range, and FreeNAS etc...
This is for 3 enterprise NAS which when you pay a premium, you expect to just work and have a support structure around that.
Synology certainly don’t have the support structure yet - drop them a support ticket and see the response! But this is the first step down that road by having a controlled platform.
I get these devices either as primary storage or as backup for hideously expensive video storage arrays so it’s worth the cost.
If you’re “Harry Home Owner” best look elsewhere.
I run crap loads of DS models as well and would be rightly pissed if they introduced that requirement on those models.
I hate to defend them, but with the increasing monopolization of the shrinking hard drive market, manufacturers are brazenly pulling anti-customer moves like WD selling their RED drives with SMR tech, which causes huge problems in RAID arrays. Companies putting pressure on hard drive manufacturers, telling them their drives won't end up on the "supported" list if they pull moves like that, is about the only way to stop them misbehaving.
But it is most unusual for a vendor to specify hard disk drives bearing its own firmware as the only way to operate at a certain capacity.
Actually no. In the low-end consumer space it's unusual. In the Enterprise space it's extremely common. You're not putting any old drives in your NetApp SAN. A few years back it was common for servers not to recognize 3rd party drives at all, while now it's more common for them to just warn that your warranty and emit alert about it like your equipment is on fire...
No, but we're not aware of a NetApp NAS that requires NetApp-only drives above a certain capacity. 'Cos that's the situation with Synology.
Yes, certifying drives is a thing in enterprise. But this article is about a very specific move by Synology.
C.
WD has also been selling drives for YEARS with power management misconfiguration causing the drives to idle or spin down too quickly. The final WD set I bought for a RAID had idle spin-down set to 2 SECONDS so I returned them all out of anger rather than spending time reprogramming them.
Some drive makers are so bad that the consumer can't win.
wont by using synology anymore...right to repair.
You won't be affected. This announcement is about their Enterprise products. From your level of outrage, I guess that you haven't used enterprise storage like NetApp, EMC, HPE 3PAR, or Compellent. None of those use off-the-shell drives ordered from Newegg.
As for "right to repair," I've used 8-bay and 12-bay small office Synology devices. They're not bad to work on: remove a screw and pop off the panel to access the DIMM slot, or a few screws and the top cover to get to the PCIe slot. The circuit boards are proprietary shapes to fit the case, that's all.
Once again, Cory Doctorow has a story that fits the shenanigans that companies try to pull. This time with a toaster than will only work with authorized bread. A dishwasher that will only wash licensed dish ware. Even when authors take things to the extreme, big companies will make it seem like they didn't go far enough in their tales by out-absurding them.
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