3 ms·

If this is a problem… Just buy a ready to use box from synology, qnap, western digital, etc… or just use a usb drive.

mschuster91 5y ago
With pre-made boxes, you're viable to run into issues when they graciously decide to force a security update on you. QNAP makes extremely decent boxes but last year's behavior that broke a lot of stuff [1] has all but killed my trust in them. [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/decryptor-released-for-deadbolt-ransomware-affecting-qnap-nas-devices/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/decryptor-released-for-deadbol...
csydas 5y ago
TBH, synology and qnap have awful track records when it comes to data integrity and cause a ton of issues even when using the software the "intended" way. SMB is a chatty protocol in general which makes it hard to troubleshoot, and because of default lack of write-through, you have a non-trivial chance of a situation where the SMB stack returns "this write was a-okay!" but in fact the data never landed on disk and only hit the cache. My team works with a lot of clients for backups and we've had so many silent corruption cases with lousy synology and qnap boxes that we just don't support them when using SMB or NFS anymore; the built-in stack is just too unreliable. iSCSI is a bit better, but iSCSI isn't how a lot of people want their NAS to work, so it's always a tough discussion. General purpose servers with proper endpoints have always been better, but it's a hard sell to clients. Directly-attached USB is marginally better in that you don't deal with network protocols, but a lot of companies cheap out on USB controllers and it's a challenge sometimes to convince clients that the on-board controller is the issue when single (small) file writes work without issue. But long story short, I'd propose a small general purpose server (even Raspberry Pi!) over a QNAP/Synology any day of the week. The latter does everything simply but with excess mediocrity. From my point of view, they hit MVP across a dozen + items, but competency in none.
- adra 5y ago
  People relying on reliable backups building their own storage servers from scratch. Clearly this is universal sage advice that will certainly not end badly for the vast majority of people -_-. I'm on my second Synology, the first was a cheapish 4-bay; now I'm using a much pricier 8-bay. This is for personal use, but the time and effort saved by using this over hand building has saved me factors more money. I do recommend NFS over SMB for the cheaper models as smbd is a lot more CPU heavy and transfers actually became CPU bound pretty quickly. I've never had data corruption issues in my 10ish years of use, but one subjective data point is pretty crap. I don't imagine that there are many personal users who need/want ISCSI or other more raw block I/O protocols. As for businesses, off the shelf solutions in your requirements range are often available, and unless you're looking for very specific optimized workloads, there's probably a bit excessively expensive vendor solution that can meet those requirements.
- aborsy 5y ago
  Qnap has had security problems. But I have never heard of people saying they have lost data due to flaws in synology.
hyperman1 5y ago
You can't just buy backup. You have to think about scenarios and you have to test the restore. As an example, I have an online account and a synology nas. I test my backup every time I move to a new laptop, by doing the data migration trough the restore. Synology, it turns out, had changed its backup solution, and finding the installer for the old tools needed to restore was non trivial. They also wanted me to click on every individual file, with 100+ K files to go. The alternative was to download a zip file, except this actually timed out before it could complete. All the data was there, except not in a decent restorable format. Apart from that, this is not an offline backup. If your house has a fire or whatever, your backup is also gone. A NAS on its own is not enough. I was hoping to use rsync.net as online provider, but they had no way to receive money from a SEPA IBAN. They also store data outside the EU, exposing me to a foreign legislature with markedly lower consumer protection. When looking to the EU, the storage landscape becomes fragmented quickly. There are options, but its not easy.

With pre-made boxes, you're viable to run into issues when they graciously decide to force a security update on you. QNAP makes extremely decent boxes but last year's behavior that broke a lot of stuff [1] has all but killed my trust in them. [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/decryptor-released-for-deadbolt-ransomware-affecting-qnap-nas-devices/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/decryptor-released-for-deadbol...

csydas 5y ago

TBH, synology and qnap have awful track records when it comes to data integrity and cause a ton of issues even when using the software the "intended" way. SMB is a chatty protocol in general which makes it hard to troubleshoot, and because of default lack of write-through, you have a non-trivial chance of a situation where the SMB stack returns "this write was a-okay!" but in fact the data never landed on disk and only hit the cache. My team works with a lot of clients for backups and we've had so many silent corruption cases with lousy synology and qnap boxes that we just don't support them when using SMB or NFS anymore; the built-in stack is just too unreliable. iSCSI is a bit better, but iSCSI isn't how a lot of people want their NAS to work, so it's always a tough discussion. General purpose servers with proper endpoints have always been better, but it's a hard sell to clients. Directly-attached USB is marginally better in that you don't deal with network protocols, but a lot of companies cheap out on USB controllers and it's a challenge sometimes to convince clients that the on-board controller is the issue when single (small) file writes work without issue. But long story short, I'd propose a small general purpose server (even Raspberry Pi!) over a QNAP/Synology any day of the week. The latter does everything simply but with excess mediocrity. From my point of view, they hit MVP across a dozen + items, but competency in none.

adra 5y ago
People relying on reliable backups building their own storage servers from scratch. Clearly this is universal sage advice that will certainly not end badly for the vast majority of people -_-. I'm on my second Synology, the first was a cheapish 4-bay; now I'm using a much pricier 8-bay. This is for personal use, but the time and effort saved by using this over hand building has saved me factors more money. I do recommend NFS over SMB for the cheaper models as smbd is a lot more CPU heavy and transfers actually became CPU bound pretty quickly. I've never had data corruption issues in my 10ish years of use, but one subjective data point is pretty crap. I don't imagine that there are many personal users who need/want ISCSI or other more raw block I/O protocols. As for businesses, off the shelf solutions in your requirements range are often available, and unless you're looking for very specific optimized workloads, there's probably a bit excessively expensive vendor solution that can meet those requirements.
aborsy 5y ago
Qnap has had security problems. But I have never heard of people saying they have lost data due to flaws in synology.

hyperman1 5y ago

You can't just buy backup. You have to think about scenarios and you have to test the restore. As an example, I have an online account and a synology nas. I test my backup every time I move to a new laptop, by doing the data migration trough the restore. Synology, it turns out, had changed its backup solution, and finding the installer for the old tools needed to restore was non trivial. They also wanted me to click on every individual file, with 100+ K files to go. The alternative was to download a zip file, except this actually timed out before it could complete. All the data was there, except not in a decent restorable format. Apart from that, this is not an offline backup. If your house has a fire or whatever, your backup is also gone. A NAS on its own is not enough. I was hoping to use rsync.net as online provider, but they had no way to receive money from a SEPA IBAN. They also store data outside the EU, exposing me to a foreign legislature with markedly lower consumer protection. When looking to the EU, the storage landscape becomes fragmented quickly. There are options, but its not easy.