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What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this

What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs. I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.

reactordev 1y ago
There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…
- deelowe 1y ago
  Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.
  - dangus 1y ago
    500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat. It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity. Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
    - tzs 1y ago
      Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe. I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s. I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
      - dangus 1y ago
        I guess this is a side note personally don’t think any of the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general compute it’s hard to make it make sense. I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.
  - pdimitar 1y ago
    I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
    - oakesm9 1y ago
      For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less. For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured. For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course). For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it. For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
      - pdimitar 1y ago
        Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware. And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly). And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed. For $300 I could get an ITX to run. So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one. The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology. Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    Do you need it to?
- dangus 1y ago
  Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their customers' appetite for alternatives. The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?) Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available. This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own. For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I didn’t want to tinker with the backup system for my family’s data. And when I read about the drive requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really screwed up.
    - caconym_ 1y ago
      Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a trend toward less openness, toward greed (including removing capabilities from units they've already sold) and toward a decline of their business as a result of tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking for in a NAS.
  - sumtechguy 1y ago
    That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot. There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The default external ports are usually 1g and most others have moved to at least 2.5g. I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
- mrob 1y ago
  Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    The RPI CM5…
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - mrob 1y ago
      The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM. [0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?variant=cm5-104032 https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia... [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296449 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspberry_pi_cm5_ecc_memory_details/ https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
      - reactordev 1y ago
        The chip is the memory controller… Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be. Broadcom BCM2712
        mrob 1y ago
        In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?
- izacus 1y ago
  This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync" and equally silly.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? “Why Lamborghini when Honda” is equally as silly yet I’ve seen them race head to head. Honda won.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't think it's silly. But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z. They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions. For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
      - reactordev 1y ago
        In which case enjoy your Synology DRM and don’t complain that an RPi or ITX DIY build isn’t comparable…
    - wat10000 1y ago
      There's nothing silly about building your own. What's silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person with a lot of free time to build their own. If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
  - dgacmu 1y ago
    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 that time is no longer. My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
- pbronez 1y ago
  Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.
  - sylens 1y ago
    I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run as a server.
- nottorp 1y ago
  For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd. For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't. But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    My point is there are alternatives, like you said.
    - Arainach 1y ago
      The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.
      - reactordev 1y ago
        The alternative is anything not Synology that can do NAS with SATA SSD or NVMe storage. That’s it. Anything more than that is in a class of enterprise servers that deserve its own discussion over a simple DS1522+
        Arainach 1y ago
        This is nonsense. Both a horse and a pickup truck can be used to pull a wagon, but no one seriously considers one an alternative to the other. What you are describing is a hobby item for enthusiasts who want to enjoy tinkering, setting something crazy up and constantly debugging it. That is very much NOT the market of people who buy Synology products. Synology is not a JBOD RAID. It is an appliance that does many things (storage, services, web access, etc.) and can automatically keep itself up to date with no additional contact necessary. It can be hooked up to a UPS for resilience. If you have a problem there are support forums and online articles. It can be synced to other Synology devices at other sites. Etc., etc. A pile of RPi is none of that.
- ekianjo 1y ago
  you dont even Pi and sata shields, just buy a SOC that has direct M2 ports...
- j45 1y ago
  Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to maintain and manage. The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.
    - j45 1y ago
      I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be. You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing. If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid. Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR. Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS. Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market. Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
- delfinom 1y ago
  Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured solutions with no need for a computer science degree.
- ArchD 1y ago
  RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.
  - _joel 1y ago
    https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
    - ArchD 1y ago
      This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption. Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption. So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
      - _joel 1y ago
        Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer. It's not required but a good idea. "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error. I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."
- ddtaylor 1y ago
  Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure there are people who do it and create content about it (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for actually running a high availability system that just works with minimal fussing. There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.
cm2187 1y ago
I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2). So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement. It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.
  - fortran77 1y ago
    You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
      - tracker1 1y ago
        When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute, memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s) to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run everything in containers under TruNAS directly. For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.
Aurornis 1y ago
> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated. The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality. I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember. Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology. Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.
- stonemetal12 1y ago
  > a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, .... their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in. You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are planning on turning customer hostile.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    A good habit to practice is to see how far you can go reconciling apparent contradictions with charitable interpretation. I think in this case, I can see "brand loyalty" on a continuum ranging from "feels good about product" to "so completely loyal that lock-in would be redundant". The furthest extreme would produce an effective contradiction, but anything short of that can make sense of the term while leaving space to understand lock in as a rational, or at-least non-contradictory action. I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is staged, and profits flow (for better or worse). The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes, which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines. They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping on.
seanalltogether 1y ago
They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding which seems like a baffling position to take given their audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265 and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology OS because they remove the transcoders.
- Tuna-Fish 1y ago
  You have to pay for the licenses if you intend to ship those, they have decided they'd rather not.
  - thoroughburro 1y ago
    So, they’re at the phase of clawing back customer value to increase their profits. Enshittification is a bold strategy when you have solid competition.
- ddtaylor 1y ago
  This is why I don't use NAS from them. I don't understand why I would want to be limited in these strange ways. I have multiple NAS that I have created myself for myself, my family and my friends. If I want to have h264, h265, AV1, or whatever I just install it. I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.
slowmovintarget 1y ago
I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a happy decision so far. When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Oh, so they are the Apple of NAS products. /s
- mszcz 1y ago
  Same here. I recently started thinking about upgrading my Synology NAS to something newer they offered. When I read about the hard drive restrictions I thought no-one would be _that_ stupid. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be 100% true. I mean, what the fuck? So, I started to look around and landed on Ugreen. They offered a NAS with more RAM (and the ability to upgrade), better connectivity (2.5GbE + 10 GbE), faster CPU, ability to install custom OSes (like TrueNAS), the OS resides on a separate, user-replaceable M.2 NVMe drive. All that for less money. Plus, since I control the OS, there's no way they can push some garbage it's-for-your-own-good-wink-wink update down my throat. Bought it, didn't even start their OS and put TrueNAS Scale on it and I've never been happier. The caveat here is that I use my NAS as a NAS - no apps, no docker, no photos app. All that is on a separate box in the rack. For me to ever trust Synology again I'd have to see some punitive action towards the idiots there that thought that whole HDD restrictions mess was a good idea. Even then, now that I've had a look around what else is available, I'm pretty sure I'll stay clear for a couple of years.
markstos 1y ago
AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet, either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct their course.
- ddtaylor 1y ago
  They probably concluded at this point it wouldn't mean much and they are somewhat right. Every day they fail to address the situation that apology needs to be a lot bigger and it can only get so big.
raintrees 1y ago
I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.
mikepurvis 1y ago
I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago, and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically unusable on the anemic CPU it came with— it would spend multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for a few gigs of digital photos. After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare. I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.
coldtea 1y ago
>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make
ddtaylor 1y ago
> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.
- Blackthorn 1y ago
  Technical leadership is no different than any other leadership. Data is used to justify a decision that's already been made, not make the decision.
edem 1y ago
What are the alternatives that you are considering?
Xss3 1y ago
I was almost ready to pull the trigger on a few grand of their stuff when the bombshell drooped. Am going with Ubiquiti now.

reactordev 1y ago

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

deelowe 1y ago
Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.
- dangus 1y ago
  500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat. It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity. Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
  - tzs 1y ago
    Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe. I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s. I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
    - dangus 1y ago
      I guess this is a side note personally don’t think any of the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general compute it’s hard to make it make sense. I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.
- pdimitar 1y ago
  I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
  - oakesm9 1y ago
    For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less. For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured. For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course). For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it. For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
    - pdimitar 1y ago
      Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware. And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly). And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed. For $300 I could get an ITX to run. So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one. The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology. Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
- procaryote 1y ago
  Do you need it to?
dangus 1y ago
Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their customers' appetite for alternatives. The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?) Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available. This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own. For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I didn’t want to tinker with the backup system for my family’s data. And when I read about the drive requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really screwed up.
  - caconym_ 1y ago
    Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a trend toward less openness, toward greed (including removing capabilities from units they've already sold) and toward a decline of their business as a result of tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking for in a NAS.
- sumtechguy 1y ago
  That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot. There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The default external ports are usually 1g and most others have moved to at least 2.5g. I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
mrob 1y ago
Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.
- reactordev 1y ago
  The RPI CM5…
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrob 1y ago
    The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM. [0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?variant=cm5-104032 https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia... [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296449 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspberry_pi_cm5_ecc_memory_details/ https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
    - reactordev 1y ago
      The chip is the memory controller… Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be. Broadcom BCM2712
      - mrob 1y ago
        In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?
izacus 1y ago
This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync" and equally silly.
- reactordev 1y ago
  What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? “Why Lamborghini when Honda” is equally as silly yet I’ve seen them race head to head. Honda won.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't think it's silly. But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z. They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions. For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      In which case enjoy your Synology DRM and don’t complain that an RPi or ITX DIY build isn’t comparable…
  - wat10000 1y ago
    There's nothing silly about building your own. What's silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person with a lot of free time to build their own. If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
- dgacmu 1y ago
  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 that time is no longer. My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
pbronez 1y ago
Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.
- sylens 1y ago
  I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run as a server.
nottorp 1y ago
For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd. For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't. But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
- reactordev 1y ago
  My point is there are alternatives, like you said.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      The alternative is anything not Synology that can do NAS with SATA SSD or NVMe storage. That’s it. Anything more than that is in a class of enterprise servers that deserve its own discussion over a simple DS1522+
      - Arainach 1y ago
        This is nonsense. Both a horse and a pickup truck can be used to pull a wagon, but no one seriously considers one an alternative to the other. What you are describing is a hobby item for enthusiasts who want to enjoy tinkering, setting something crazy up and constantly debugging it. That is very much NOT the market of people who buy Synology products. Synology is not a JBOD RAID. It is an appliance that does many things (storage, services, web access, etc.) and can automatically keep itself up to date with no additional contact necessary. It can be hooked up to a UPS for resilience. If you have a problem there are support forums and online articles. It can be synced to other Synology devices at other sites. Etc., etc. A pile of RPi is none of that.
ekianjo 1y ago
you dont even Pi and sata shields, just buy a SOC that has direct M2 ports...
j45 1y ago
Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to maintain and manage. The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.
  - j45 1y ago
    I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be. You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing. If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid. Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR. Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS. Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market. Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
delfinom 1y ago
Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured solutions with no need for a computer science degree.
ArchD 1y ago
RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.
- _joel 1y ago
  https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
  - ArchD 1y ago
    This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption. Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption. So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
    - _joel 1y ago
      Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer. It's not required but a good idea. "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error. I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."
ddtaylor 1y ago
Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure there are people who do it and create content about it (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for actually running a high availability system that just works with minimal fussing. There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.

cm2187 1y ago

I don’t know if their brand is that great. I have been using synology NAS for about 15 years. It is very solid and easy to use, but the hardware is expensive, non customizable, the underlying OS is based on an ancient linux kernel. I have now run into the volume size limits (200TB) and disk sizes keep increasing exponentially. And they don’t support enterprise SSDs (SAS/U.2). So in my mind I was already thinking of moving on for my next NAS and go custom hardware, that policy just made it a no brainer. And reading comments on reddit I feel there are many people in a similar state of mind.

mapontosevenths 1y ago
My story is similar. I've been using them for a decade, and was shopping for an upgrade when they made the proprietary drive announcmement. It was the impetus I needed to realize that it only takes an hour to build my own, better, NAS out of junk I mostly already owned and save a ton of money. I won't be going back.
- fortran77 1y ago
  You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute, memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s) to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run everything in containers under TruNAS directly. For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.

Aurornis 1y ago

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated. The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality. I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember. Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology. Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.

stonemetal12 1y ago
> a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, .... their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in. You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are planning on turning customer hostile.
- glenstein 1y ago
  A good habit to practice is to see how far you can go reconciling apparent contradictions with charitable interpretation. I think in this case, I can see "brand loyalty" on a continuum ranging from "feels good about product" to "so completely loyal that lock-in would be redundant". The furthest extreme would produce an effective contradiction, but anything short of that can make sense of the term while leaving space to understand lock in as a rational, or at-least non-contradictory action. I think that can backfire spectacularly, as we're seeing with Synology, but I suspect that a non-trivial amount of the time, it simply happens and works, no revolt is staged, and profits flow (for better or worse). The example coming to my mind right how is Pitney Bowes, which sells big envelope stamping and sealing machines. They sell a proprietary sealing fluid (wtf) that, as far as I can tell, is water with blue food coloring. And a costly proprietary red ink cartridge for stamping. But people sign the contracts and the world keeps on keeping on.

seanalltogether 1y ago

They've also been pretty hostile around video transcoding which seems like a baffling position to take given their audience. I still have an older tv that can't deal with h.265 and I'm refusing to upgrade to the latest version of synology OS because they remove the transcoders.

Tuna-Fish 1y ago
You have to pay for the licenses if you intend to ship those, they have decided they'd rather not.
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  So, they’re at the phase of clawing back customer value to increase their profits. Enshittification is a bold strategy when you have solid competition.
ddtaylor 1y ago
This is why I don't use NAS from them. I don't understand why I would want to be limited in these strange ways. I have multiple NAS that I have created myself for myself, my family and my friends. If I want to have h264, h265, AV1, or whatever I just install it. I have zero respect for software patents and will not be structuring my life differently to respect them.

slowmovintarget 1y ago

I went with a UGreen NAS a couple of months ago specifically because Synology had added this restriction. It's been a happy decision so far. When reading up and watching videos for what I should get, everything pointed at Synology as being the "Apple of NAS products." But everything I looked at showed they were coasting on their status and had actively worsened their products in recent revs.

CharlesW 1y ago
Oh, so they are the Apple of NAS products. /s
mszcz 1y ago
Same here. I recently started thinking about upgrading my Synology NAS to something newer they offered. When I read about the hard drive restrictions I thought no-one would be _that_ stupid. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be 100% true. I mean, what the fuck? So, I started to look around and landed on Ugreen. They offered a NAS with more RAM (and the ability to upgrade), better connectivity (2.5GbE + 10 GbE), faster CPU, ability to install custom OSes (like TrueNAS), the OS resides on a separate, user-replaceable M.2 NVMe drive. All that for less money. Plus, since I control the OS, there's no way they can push some garbage it's-for-your-own-good-wink-wink update down my throat. Bought it, didn't even start their OS and put TrueNAS Scale on it and I've never been happier. The caveat here is that I use my NAS as a NAS - no apps, no docker, no photos app. All that is on a separate box in the rack. For me to ever trust Synology again I'd have to see some punitive action towards the idiots there that thought that whole HDD restrictions mess was a good idea. Even then, now that I've had a look around what else is available, I'm pretty sure I'll stay clear for a couple of years.

markstos 1y ago

AND they haven't publicly admitted they made a mistake yet, either. That would be another missed opportunity to correct their course.

ddtaylor 1y ago
They probably concluded at this point it wouldn't mean much and they are somewhat right. Every day they fail to address the situation that apology needs to be a lot bigger and it can only get so big.

raintrees 1y ago

I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.

mikepurvis 1y ago

I had one of their entry-level consumer products years ago, and it was okay, but the photo management app was basically unusable on the anemic CPU it came with— it would spend multiple days grinding away trying to generate thumbnails for a few gigs of digital photos. After that coloured my feelings a bit, I swung too far the other way and tried to roll my own with regular Ubuntu, which quickly became a maintenance and observability nightmare. I've settled for now on Unraid for my current setup, and I'm pretty happy with that, though some of the technical choices are a little baffling; I think my ideal NAS platform would be something with the ergonomics and features of Unraid but built on a more immutability-first platform like NixOS, CoreOS, Talos, etc.

coldtea 1y ago

>What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical As long as profits enter the picture, the most technical people in the world can turn into greedy bastards making decisions a pointy haired boss would make

ddtaylor 1y ago

> What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical They probably used bad data to make the decision. They probably thought they had accurate and high quality information that led them to believe nobody cared about this. My guess is they had some metric like "Only 0.0001% of customers use custom drives" or similar. They did the cost-benefit analysis of losing all those customers and a little bit of backlash and concluded it was worth it to force huge margins on vendor lock-in drives.

Blackthorn 1y ago
Technical leadership is no different than any other leadership. Data is used to justify a decision that's already been made, not make the decision.

edem 1y ago

What are the alternatives that you are considering?

Xss3 1y ago

I was almost ready to pull the trigger on a few grand of their stuff when the bombshell drooped. Am going with Ubiquiti now.